When It Comes to Expertise, You Can Always Fight a Guerilla War

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You know how conservatives always have those big sign-on letters, listing X number of experts who disagree with evolution, or donโ€™t think global warming is humanย caused?

You know you know what I mean. You know it drives you completelyย crazy.

In this post, I want to tell you why it works. To do so, Iโ€™m going to build on a recent article I did in The American Prospect, explaining how the Democratic Party in the U.S. today has become the chosen party of academics and expertsโ€“but that conservatives have more than enough allied experts of their own to keep itโ€ฆinteresting.

Hereโ€™s one way to describe the basic statistics, which simultaneously reflect both the broad expansion of higher education and also a leftward migration of academia andย expertise:

The Democratic Party has become the chosen party of what you might call โ€œempirical professionalsโ€ and Americans with advanced degrees. According toย researchย [the University of British Columbiaโ€™s Neil] Gross conducted with Ethan Fosse of Harvard University and Jeremy Freese of Northwestern University, nearly 15 percent of U.S. liberals now hold one, more than double the percentage that did in the 1970s. The percentage of moderates and conservatives with advanced degrees has also increased but lags far behind the saturation levels of expertise among liberals. Indeed, conservatives are about where liberals were back in theย 1970s.

Forget for the moment why things are this way. Letโ€™s just ponder theย consequences.

Experts are well educated people. Theyโ€™re confident, they know how to do research, they know how to cite sources and argue. So what happens when you have a politicized gap with more experts on one side than theย other?

First, the experts on both sides argue with each otherโ€”in print, on tv, in their own minds, or whereverโ€”and both sides become more convinced theyโ€™re right. The theory of motivated reasoning predicts that the sophisticated are capable of becoming more extreme and polarized, thanks to both their confidence and also their competence. Theyโ€™re better at reinforcing their ownย views.

Second, for the non-experts out there, whatever side youโ€™re on, itโ€™s easy in this situation to find an expert who supports what you believe. And indeed, for the very same basic psychological reason, youโ€™re not only more likely to find an expert who agrees with you than one that doesnโ€™t (due to confirmation bias), but also to believe that person the person who agrees with you is a real expert, whereas the one who disagrees with you is a fake one. This was shown in a recent, amazing study by Dan Kahan at Yale, in which people with different values tended to discredit the expertise of experts who were depicted as supporting positions that were contrary to theirย values.

Third, when all of this plays out in the mediaโ€“at least insofar as itโ€™s a typical expert-versus-expert on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand showโ€“you can expect the public to leave feeling confused about whoโ€™s right and whatโ€™s true. Again, thereโ€™s research on this. Iโ€™ve blogged about it here. The Ohio State University communications professor Raymond Pingree has shown that โ€œpassiveโ€ media coverage, where reporters donโ€™t take sides on whoโ€™s right about the facts, leaves media consumers less sure that the truth is โ€œout thereโ€ somewhere that they can actually graspย it.

So we have a situation in which our experts get polarized, while everybody else either finds their own convenient expert or just thinks the experts donโ€™t really know anything (or thereโ€™s no real way to find out what they know). The result? Pretty negative, any way you look atย it.

But consider the game theory of all this: Ifย some issue is going against you, and if thereโ€™s a vastness of expertise or expert consensus aligned against you, why not create an expertise war?ย After all, there are plenty of experts around. Some are bound to still agree withย you.

At least you can keep it just aboutย even.

What can we do about this? Well, a complete change in the way the media works would help. Donโ€™t hold yourย breath.

Court cases can sometimes work, too. For evolution, and for same sex parenting, judges have stepped in and affirmed where the expert consensus actuallyย lies.

When all else fails, at least thereโ€™s humor. Let me end with a quotation from my recent article:

For an amusing example of [the] expertise imbalance, consider Project Steve. This is a ploy by the pro-evolution National Center for Science Education to undermine conservative sign-on letters boasting large numbers of โ€œexpertsโ€ who question the theory of evolution. Project Steve goes one betterโ€“it finds scientists named Steve who support evolution. To date, over a thousand Steves have signed onโ€“and, as NCSE boasts, Steves constitute only about 1 percent ofย scientists.

So, yeahโ€“we liberals have lots of high-caliber experts. And a lot of good it is doingย us.

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