Kling on Status and Experts
The fundamental issue with status and experts is deeper still
Arnold Kling writes on a subject I have been thinking a lot about for the past three to four years, the question of which experts to listen to, social epistemology. He is there responding to Robin Hanson addressing part of the same problem, the question of whether, or how much, to trust experts; Kling thinks the question isn’t about how much to trust experts (or the knowledge elites) but how we pick who is deemed expert in the first place. We have to trust at least some people’s knowledge because we can’t know everything ourselves, so the trick is figuring out who to trust to know stuff.
Kling certainly isn’t wrong here. Scaled against that which there is to know, your knowledge is indistinguishable from zero. Even scaled against the mere sum of human knowledge, even just the sum of TRUE human knowledge, you don’t know anything. Neither do I, or anyone else. Human’s don’t solve the knowledge problem by learning everything individually. Humans solve the knowledge problem by each knowing a little tiny bit and then relying on other humans to know other little tiny bits for them. Usually this manifests through trade where we exchange the use of our knowledge in e.g. baking for computer manufacturing, but sometimes it is just straight “I am going to read a book/article/blogpost from this guy, and if he says X I am going to take his word for it.”
If this were a tv show, I’d be staring hard into the camera now for a few seconds to let that moment land.
But that isn’t the only way humans solve the knowledge problem. Sometimes, or, I believe, most of the time, we simply ignore the knowledge problem entirely and don’t even bother knowing. Does Jupiter’s moon Europa have life under its surface? Most people won’t even think to ask the question, much less worry about who to trust to provide the answer.
That is important because it highlights that knowledge has to have a purpose, and that purpose determines a great deal of the epistemic problem involved. Knowledge that we simply want to complete our mental stories, something nice to think about and design, that kind of knowledge is very different in function than knowledge that we intend to use to alter the nature of reality, and so different in how we must think of it. The true nature of Tom Bombadil is a very different sort of knowledge from how to build a puddling furnace, simply because the latter might be tested and deemed true or false, while the former… not so much.
The difference is dependent on the knower, however. I am not terribly likely to actually make a puddling furnace myself, so in reality those two bits of knowledge are of a kind to me. Knowledge that could be tested, but never will be, functionally is the same as knowledge that might not even have an answer.
So, how do I pick which expert to listen to on puddling furnaces?
I propose that the optimal answer is “I don’t pick an expert, or even try.” If I don’t intend to make one myself, I shouldn’t even try to pick the expert. If all I care about is the steel produced (itself a bit of a stretch) then the right answer is to focus on the steel and ignore the rest. Let people who care about making steel worry about the furnace.
That is, of course, exactly how markets deal with the problem, and it works. Really well. Shockingly well, when you really get down to how complicated making, distributing and selling all the things we enjoy really is.
The problem is when we move decisions about the best way to make a puddling furnace away from the realm of “let the people who care about that make the decision” into the realm of the political, where we will all be voting on what ways of making a furnace are acceptable, or best, or whatever the regulations require. Now, suddenly, I had better have an opinion on puddling furnaces because I have input into that process, even if that is just voting for an official who promises to appoint the best Puddling Czar.
How do I know he can do that? The politician needs to judge the expertise of the potential puddling primarch, so he needs to be something of an expert. How can I know if the potential puddling primarch picking politician is sufficiently expert? I would need to be something of an expert myself!
Ahh, but wait, we have institutions that certify expertise! How do I know they are good at it? Well… poop.
We keep coming back to the same problem of centralized decision making: someone has to pick who makes the decisions, and doing that well requires expertise on the part of those doing the picking, all the way down. Picking the right person is super important, because their decision is going to go for everyone, so if they screw up, everyone pays.
With decentralized decision making (known as individual choice or “markets” generally) the stakes for society are lower, as if some people screw up at least the people who made a different decision are harmed less, if at all. For the individual, who has to pick between puddling furnace engineering firms say, sure, the decision is still high stakes, but the other individuals making that decision for themselves don’t have to rise or fall with him; they can make their own decisions. The rest of us, we don’t have to know AT ALL. We are not likely to wreck the decisions of others by dint of having to choose politicians to choose experts despite not knowing a thing about the subject at hand, and being entirely unable to judge the politician’s knowledge.
Back to Kling: If you want to reconfigure the game, lowering the stakes of making poor decisions about who is expert by not giving subsets of experts power to make decisions for everyone. You simultaneously then achieve Hanson’s suggestion of trusting experts less, because you don’t need to put so much blind trust in experts.
(This really is something I have been noodling over for years now, but haven’t really written on. This is just one semi-complete post on the matter of expertise, the knowledge problem, epistemology, High Modernism and a host of other related things. In the interest of keeping it short and actually posting the damned thing considering I started it some 30 days ago, I am stopping it here and saving other bits for later. Including engaging more fully with Kling’s ideas that he has been addressing in later posts. I think he and I see the role of institutions and group decision making somewhat differently, but perhaps not.)
"Now, suddenly, I had better have an opinion on puddling furnaces because I have input into that process"
This is really helpful in helping me to crystallize my own obsession with *why the heck do we all now seem to feel some kind of pressure to have an opinion* on everything.
I'm also fascinated by the knowledge problem, but feel ill qualified to work through it myself (although I'm hoping to interview a philosophy prof I know, who writes about it).
But I think your line above helps to answer my question. Disappointingly I think it might just be because the internet gives all of us input into, well, every question, issue, problem under the sun.
Plus something about how we are wired. Because personally deciding that it's ok not to know stuff has thrown up an inner nagging voice reminding me that I *should* know stuff. And that I'd better choose the right experts to know the stuff I haven't time to investigate.
Which itself is a really annoying problem, as you attest.
(Enjoying your writing btw)
Right. This is a standard argument for libertarianism. And the standard problem is when you face externalities, or a tragedy of the commons scenario.
A lot of the policies around COVID passes, masks and lockdowns can be traced back to not to any sort of actual medical reality but rather a desperate attempt to invent externalities and commons, because that's a necessary step to justify centralized state intervention - which for too many people working in public health appears to be an end rather than a means. So we get a-physical arguments like "my mask protects you, your mask protects me", demands for lockdowns when previously they were written off as bad ideas, or policies implying that the unvaccinated are putting the vaccinated at risk.
So what's the solution? Any effort to make progress here should focus on better ways to (a) rigorously and constitutionally encode a method for identifying externalities or commons and (b) promote less centralized ways to manage them when they do arise.
For example, in a world where there was a strong public consensus that governments had no business being involved with healthcare, COVID might have been managed very differently. At the start insurers would have all been looking at rapidly increasing premiums to cover the costs of quickfire training programmes, emergency hospital builds and so on. But they'd have simultaneously been vigorously testing the assumptions in the models to see if they really had to do that, because they'd have an incentive to keep prices low and scoop up customers once the public realized the threat had been over-egged. In fact, the threat probably wouldn't have been over-egged much at all, because the only epidemiologists that'd have jobs would work at insurance firms and be called health actuaries instead, and their employment would be tied to accuracy of their results.
People tend to feel that governments must have a role in healthcare because otherwise bad things would happen. Where's the libertarian argument against that idea? Libertarians mostly ignore politics so I don't see anyone full-throatedly arguing that departments of health shouldn't exist. For as long as nobody is making concrete policy proposals, centralized statists will continue to invent flimsy non-existent externalities like "the unvaccinated are hurting the vaccinated" in order to justify their totalitarian instincts. A rigorous, well put together argument that these externalities don't really exist, coupled with convincingly argued proof that governments should no more be involved in healthcare than they are with (e.g.) food or children's toys, could be powerful.