"Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments." I will be quoting this (and will try not to be obnoxious when doing so). Thanks Adam!
I have nothing substantive to say other than that I continue to be flabbergasted by how good you are as a writer -- you keep writing these pieces that compel me to share them with friends who don't even care one whit about the scientific establishment (I'm in industry), and they end up reliably amazed and entertained.
I think I was also compelled to comment because a ~decade ago I found myself at a fork in life reminiscent of your description that starts with "Then, couple years ago, I looked around and realized that I didn’t actually admire most of the people I was trying to be. ...", and ended up leaving for industry instead of continuing on to academia. In my case, I was doing a physics degree in my boyhood quest to become a theorist of some sort. (I think it also helped for my decision that I wasn't good enough to get into R1 grad programs.) I think earning well and working on not-too-uninteresting data analytics problems have helped, but I've always wistfully wondered about what could've been; your essays have helped me un-tint that rose-tinted counterfactual.
“I, too, would like to beat the charlatans and the terrorists, which is why I want to do better than, “Don’t trust those guys—they lack the proper accreditation!” If that’s all you got, people shouldn’t trust you. Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments.”
While I love this article and the direction it is going, there is a major issue: if we don't trust academic institutions or titles or journalists, what do we trust? It is just not possible for the common man (even a very smart one) to independently evaluate every writer/scientist/inventor to see if they should trust what they have created.
We have to have _something_ to quickly let us know what to trust, perhaps like the Cochrane Library for medical info.
“usually polite but rarely honorable” exactly describes the people I interacted with in academia. Thank you. They were grasping, self-protective, dishonest, uncreative and shallow, for the most part. And there weren’t that many exceptions.
I sure do love reading your stuff, Adam! I can't wait to share this with friends. I'm a part of a network trying to figure out how to establish trust pain research (https://entrust-pe.org/), and through it read an editorial from 1994 by D.G. Altman on the Scandal of Poor Medical Research (https://www.bmj.com/content/308/6924/283). It could have been written today, with even more damning examples/evidence.
I come to the world of research from a lived experience/patient partner perspective (I have yet to find a good term for this, if you have one please do share!), and my lack of accreditation is often used against me. I never wanted to be in this role of activist/advocate for better pain research and care, as with most of us in these roles I came to it through shitty experiences. And I've had a lot of shitty experiences within academia in this 'outsider' role. It's exhausting to have to continually prove one's worth as a human and fight to be heard.
Thankfully there's lots of good folks within (and without) academia who do want change and they make the fight easier. But there's lots of folks who need to 'tug harder on your tether and pull yourself closer to reality, because you’re embarrassing yourself.' The Scandal paper starts with the line 'We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons' and I think about that all the damn time. I wonder how many folks doing research have ever asked themselves what the right reasons are? And once identified, asked themselves if research is being done for the right reasons?
The problem in the modern world with this approach is that the answer is often complicated, or short term inconvenient and only medium or long term obviously right.
Which in the absence of respect for expertise leaves a lot of people vulnerable to going 'oh, but I don't want to wear a mask' or 'oh, but I like cheap plane rides' or 'chemo makes me feel rubbish and the placebo snake oil makes me feel really good'...
It's easier to sell the wrong answers because they can be as simple, compelling, convenient and cheap as necessary to sell them, whereas the truth is much more constrained.
This seems right: "For centuries, the smartest people on earth had one aspiration: produce some minor improvements on ancient scholars like Aristotle and Galen. Accordingly, that’s all they ever did. To invent a new world, humans first had to stop being so impressed with the old world." But it states a *necessary* condition on improvement, not a *sufficient* condition. What else was required? And: do we have that "what else" right now?
The decline of trust in institutions is the inevitable result of the institutions abusing the trust they were given. Covid sledgehammer policies are one reason why Zeus might be at times a better choice..
The way I see it, decline in major institutions is not a function of their claims to truth per se, but a reaction to an institution that violates, dehumanizes, stigmatizes and dismisses the range of human experience in order to extract profit and reproduce itself. Modern medicine is excellent at treating illness of identifiable material origin and treatment (like broken bones), but it is notoriously poor at responding to softer issues like substance abuse or mental illness, or even nutrition for that matter. In my experience working in a large hospital system, disengagement from the medical establishment is a rational response to the failures of that system rather than getting duped by some crank. Trust is not earned by experts forming watertight arguments, but about increasing people's felt sense of safety. This applies to academia too.
Also, I think it is an error to assume that "looking at goat entrails or consulting the stars or whatever" is essentially meaningless pseudoscience. Ritual practice carries a wide range of meaning and intention, few of which are intended to replace those of science. I see them operating sympathetically more than antithetically.
I'm here to invoke the law of equal and opposite advice. This article is very applicable to anyone who reads Experimental History. That kind of person can learn the see the fuzzy boundaries of expertise while still being smart enough to know 1)the basics facts and 2)the limits of their knowledge.
But I think this piece ignores that the fact that the distrust of expertise is not all organic. Billions of dollars are spent every year to sow doubt among the populace. It's easy. Very easy to manipulate human psychology. My country has been running a drive to vaccinate girls against HPV. An honourable goal that needs a bit of trust in experts. But parents are refusing to give consent because some bad faith politicians have convinced them that the girls are being sterilized. A lil blind faith couldn't hurt them even if they 'dont know what's in the vaccine'.
The Emergency Room is an interesting example. Apparently, there are big staffing problems in Emergency Departments at hospitals across the country. Most of the "physicians and physician extenders" (physicians, nurse practitioners, and others) are treated as independent contractors. In any case, it costs lots of money to staff an emergency department, we all know the costs are outrageous, and the hospitals are apparently still losing money. All of that to make this prediction: People will stop going to the Emergency Room to have a broken bone fixed. They'll go to a clinic that doesn't take insurance and is staffed by a nurse practitioner--of course until some law is passed the prohibits such a business in the interest of "patient safety."
"over the people who form their worldviews by looking at goat entrails or consulting the stars or whatever"
ahh -- you reference the climate scientists that calculate warming to the third significant digit, while many are of their inputs are not known to the first significant digit
I always enjoy your posts, they are engaging and thought provoking and I often agree with your critiques of higher ed. I've also lived in the academic world a long time - my credentials were stamped on a diploma in Y2K. That said, I think you've made a very broad generalization here, that seems to rest on an assumption that all institutions of higher ed are the same. But they aren't. Really it's "the Ivies" /Elites that in are the news with stories about injustice, inappropriate conduct, and questionable practices more often than not, and it's this news that fuels much of the public's mistrust in science / higher ed. However the elites are not actually representative of the masses. I came across another blogger recently who reminded readers that while egregious things happen at places like Harvard, the vast majority of profs and students work and study at places like UC-Stanislaus. The demographics of folks who work in the elite schools compared to folks who work in state colleges and other comprehensive universities are quite different. The entitlements, the entrenchments, these are concentrated in the elites, and more diluted elsewhere. Petty cruel, non-curious faculty members are probably sprinkled throughout the system -- higher ed is a "safe place" for folks who might not make it outside the tower -- but I do not think they make up the majority. I've gotten my fair share of snubs at conferences over the years when someone looks at my name tag and finds the status it conveys wanting, but I also always find there are many lovely, well meaning, and curious academics out there too who want nothing more than to work towards improving the science in all the right ways.
What we need to clamor for is respect for open source publishing and other public-facing scholarship that invites the public in rather than shuts them out, and we need to move beyond the 19th and 20th century entrenchments that are holding our science back. We need to call out "famous" folks who are actually terrible scientists and/or terrible humans. But all this can happen without a complete system failure. I do not think we should be advocating for a crash and rebuild scenario. In such a scenario the re-set would be tragic: The elites that have overflowing coffers will rebuild. The rest though - the institutions with small endowments and limited funds? -- they will just be gone.
And that's the heart of the problem, as I see it. We have "two worlds" in academia: We have the elite legacy stemming from the olden days where the aristocracy needed something to do so they became scholars. But then changes to societies happened and regular folk got involved in higher ed too. The classist issues in higher ed today perpetuate and we don't talk about that nearly enough.
1) There are 3 "de novo" writing systems that we know and understand - one in Central America, one in Sumer (today's Iraq), and one in China. The origins of the Central American system are lost to us due to the effectiveness of Spanish cultural genocide. Sumer's was invented as a method of accounting. But China? It was invented as a way to record and analyze "throwing lots" (actually, the cracks appearing in bones placed in a fire that revealed the decisions of the gods) and is the direct ancestor of the I Ching, et al.
2) *cough cough* It certainly wasn't the WHOLE world lionizing Aristotle and Galen for centuries *cough cough* as I think you'll find there were several totally different concurrent systems ongoing in Asia (namely India and China) during this period.
3) As you correctly noted, Western "accredited expert" medicine is self-evidently great at fixing broken bones. In fact, here's my short list of what there is no/little doubt about from any corner:
a) Emergency, acute trauma (aka fall out of a tree and break your leg)
b) Physical therapy/rehabilitation
c) Eliminating parasites
d) Plastic surgery (not just nose jobs but also stuff like cleft palates)
You'll note that there are next to no (or no) "alternative" medical treatments or "traditional" practitioners for the above. As for the rest of the ailments and illnesses people suffer from? Western medicine will f----ing KILL YOU more often than not. And don't even get me started on what a horrific concept hospitals are and how detrimental to your health they are, right down to the "food" served to patients.
4) Instead of d---king around with theories of coin flipping and new frameworks, etc, a POW during WW2 had the time and patience to actually flip a real coin tens of thousands of times and recorded the results. It's a fascinating insight into REAL randomness (not the theory of randomness), and it'll drive you into the abyss of insanity of you examine it for too long :)
"Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments." I will be quoting this (and will try not to be obnoxious when doing so). Thanks Adam!
I have nothing substantive to say other than that I continue to be flabbergasted by how good you are as a writer -- you keep writing these pieces that compel me to share them with friends who don't even care one whit about the scientific establishment (I'm in industry), and they end up reliably amazed and entertained.
I think I was also compelled to comment because a ~decade ago I found myself at a fork in life reminiscent of your description that starts with "Then, couple years ago, I looked around and realized that I didn’t actually admire most of the people I was trying to be. ...", and ended up leaving for industry instead of continuing on to academia. In my case, I was doing a physics degree in my boyhood quest to become a theorist of some sort. (I think it also helped for my decision that I wasn't good enough to get into R1 grad programs.) I think earning well and working on not-too-uninteresting data analytics problems have helped, but I've always wistfully wondered about what could've been; your essays have helped me un-tint that rose-tinted counterfactual.
Standing up from my seat cheering loudly
“I, too, would like to beat the charlatans and the terrorists, which is why I want to do better than, “Don’t trust those guys—they lack the proper accreditation!” If that’s all you got, people shouldn’t trust you. Instead of arguing from expertise, you should use your expertise to make better arguments.”
While I love this article and the direction it is going, there is a major issue: if we don't trust academic institutions or titles or journalists, what do we trust? It is just not possible for the common man (even a very smart one) to independently evaluate every writer/scientist/inventor to see if they should trust what they have created.
We have to have _something_ to quickly let us know what to trust, perhaps like the Cochrane Library for medical info.
“usually polite but rarely honorable” exactly describes the people I interacted with in academia. Thank you. They were grasping, self-protective, dishonest, uncreative and shallow, for the most part. And there weren’t that many exceptions.
I sure do love reading your stuff, Adam! I can't wait to share this with friends. I'm a part of a network trying to figure out how to establish trust pain research (https://entrust-pe.org/), and through it read an editorial from 1994 by D.G. Altman on the Scandal of Poor Medical Research (https://www.bmj.com/content/308/6924/283). It could have been written today, with even more damning examples/evidence.
I come to the world of research from a lived experience/patient partner perspective (I have yet to find a good term for this, if you have one please do share!), and my lack of accreditation is often used against me. I never wanted to be in this role of activist/advocate for better pain research and care, as with most of us in these roles I came to it through shitty experiences. And I've had a lot of shitty experiences within academia in this 'outsider' role. It's exhausting to have to continually prove one's worth as a human and fight to be heard.
Thankfully there's lots of good folks within (and without) academia who do want change and they make the fight easier. But there's lots of folks who need to 'tug harder on your tether and pull yourself closer to reality, because you’re embarrassing yourself.' The Scandal paper starts with the line 'We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons' and I think about that all the damn time. I wonder how many folks doing research have ever asked themselves what the right reasons are? And once identified, asked themselves if research is being done for the right reasons?
Thanks again.
The problem in the modern world with this approach is that the answer is often complicated, or short term inconvenient and only medium or long term obviously right.
Which in the absence of respect for expertise leaves a lot of people vulnerable to going 'oh, but I don't want to wear a mask' or 'oh, but I like cheap plane rides' or 'chemo makes me feel rubbish and the placebo snake oil makes me feel really good'...
It's easier to sell the wrong answers because they can be as simple, compelling, convenient and cheap as necessary to sell them, whereas the truth is much more constrained.
This seems right: "For centuries, the smartest people on earth had one aspiration: produce some minor improvements on ancient scholars like Aristotle and Galen. Accordingly, that’s all they ever did. To invent a new world, humans first had to stop being so impressed with the old world." But it states a *necessary* condition on improvement, not a *sufficient* condition. What else was required? And: do we have that "what else" right now?
The decline of trust in institutions is the inevitable result of the institutions abusing the trust they were given. Covid sledgehammer policies are one reason why Zeus might be at times a better choice..
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/one-by-one-the-lockdown-myths-are-crumbling/ar-BB1hwLGC?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=DCTS&cvid=c1edd3edf8a5442a8495a93feb7e9149&ei=140
The way I see it, decline in major institutions is not a function of their claims to truth per se, but a reaction to an institution that violates, dehumanizes, stigmatizes and dismisses the range of human experience in order to extract profit and reproduce itself. Modern medicine is excellent at treating illness of identifiable material origin and treatment (like broken bones), but it is notoriously poor at responding to softer issues like substance abuse or mental illness, or even nutrition for that matter. In my experience working in a large hospital system, disengagement from the medical establishment is a rational response to the failures of that system rather than getting duped by some crank. Trust is not earned by experts forming watertight arguments, but about increasing people's felt sense of safety. This applies to academia too.
Also, I think it is an error to assume that "looking at goat entrails or consulting the stars or whatever" is essentially meaningless pseudoscience. Ritual practice carries a wide range of meaning and intention, few of which are intended to replace those of science. I see them operating sympathetically more than antithetically.
I'm here to invoke the law of equal and opposite advice. This article is very applicable to anyone who reads Experimental History. That kind of person can learn the see the fuzzy boundaries of expertise while still being smart enough to know 1)the basics facts and 2)the limits of their knowledge.
But I think this piece ignores that the fact that the distrust of expertise is not all organic. Billions of dollars are spent every year to sow doubt among the populace. It's easy. Very easy to manipulate human psychology. My country has been running a drive to vaccinate girls against HPV. An honourable goal that needs a bit of trust in experts. But parents are refusing to give consent because some bad faith politicians have convinced them that the girls are being sterilized. A lil blind faith couldn't hurt them even if they 'dont know what's in the vaccine'.
The Emergency Room is an interesting example. Apparently, there are big staffing problems in Emergency Departments at hospitals across the country. Most of the "physicians and physician extenders" (physicians, nurse practitioners, and others) are treated as independent contractors. In any case, it costs lots of money to staff an emergency department, we all know the costs are outrageous, and the hospitals are apparently still losing money. All of that to make this prediction: People will stop going to the Emergency Room to have a broken bone fixed. They'll go to a clinic that doesn't take insurance and is staffed by a nurse practitioner--of course until some law is passed the prohibits such a business in the interest of "patient safety."
"over the people who form their worldviews by looking at goat entrails or consulting the stars or whatever"
ahh -- you reference the climate scientists that calculate warming to the third significant digit, while many are of their inputs are not known to the first significant digit
I always enjoy your posts, they are engaging and thought provoking and I often agree with your critiques of higher ed. I've also lived in the academic world a long time - my credentials were stamped on a diploma in Y2K. That said, I think you've made a very broad generalization here, that seems to rest on an assumption that all institutions of higher ed are the same. But they aren't. Really it's "the Ivies" /Elites that in are the news with stories about injustice, inappropriate conduct, and questionable practices more often than not, and it's this news that fuels much of the public's mistrust in science / higher ed. However the elites are not actually representative of the masses. I came across another blogger recently who reminded readers that while egregious things happen at places like Harvard, the vast majority of profs and students work and study at places like UC-Stanislaus. The demographics of folks who work in the elite schools compared to folks who work in state colleges and other comprehensive universities are quite different. The entitlements, the entrenchments, these are concentrated in the elites, and more diluted elsewhere. Petty cruel, non-curious faculty members are probably sprinkled throughout the system -- higher ed is a "safe place" for folks who might not make it outside the tower -- but I do not think they make up the majority. I've gotten my fair share of snubs at conferences over the years when someone looks at my name tag and finds the status it conveys wanting, but I also always find there are many lovely, well meaning, and curious academics out there too who want nothing more than to work towards improving the science in all the right ways.
What we need to clamor for is respect for open source publishing and other public-facing scholarship that invites the public in rather than shuts them out, and we need to move beyond the 19th and 20th century entrenchments that are holding our science back. We need to call out "famous" folks who are actually terrible scientists and/or terrible humans. But all this can happen without a complete system failure. I do not think we should be advocating for a crash and rebuild scenario. In such a scenario the re-set would be tragic: The elites that have overflowing coffers will rebuild. The rest though - the institutions with small endowments and limited funds? -- they will just be gone.
And that's the heart of the problem, as I see it. We have "two worlds" in academia: We have the elite legacy stemming from the olden days where the aristocracy needed something to do so they became scholars. But then changes to societies happened and regular folk got involved in higher ed too. The classist issues in higher ed today perpetuate and we don't talk about that nearly enough.
I feel far more sane after reading this, the academic world is rough.
Another great article! Thank you.
A couple of notes:
1) There are 3 "de novo" writing systems that we know and understand - one in Central America, one in Sumer (today's Iraq), and one in China. The origins of the Central American system are lost to us due to the effectiveness of Spanish cultural genocide. Sumer's was invented as a method of accounting. But China? It was invented as a way to record and analyze "throwing lots" (actually, the cracks appearing in bones placed in a fire that revealed the decisions of the gods) and is the direct ancestor of the I Ching, et al.
2) *cough cough* It certainly wasn't the WHOLE world lionizing Aristotle and Galen for centuries *cough cough* as I think you'll find there were several totally different concurrent systems ongoing in Asia (namely India and China) during this period.
3) As you correctly noted, Western "accredited expert" medicine is self-evidently great at fixing broken bones. In fact, here's my short list of what there is no/little doubt about from any corner:
a) Emergency, acute trauma (aka fall out of a tree and break your leg)
b) Physical therapy/rehabilitation
c) Eliminating parasites
d) Plastic surgery (not just nose jobs but also stuff like cleft palates)
You'll note that there are next to no (or no) "alternative" medical treatments or "traditional" practitioners for the above. As for the rest of the ailments and illnesses people suffer from? Western medicine will f----ing KILL YOU more often than not. And don't even get me started on what a horrific concept hospitals are and how detrimental to your health they are, right down to the "food" served to patients.
4) Instead of d---king around with theories of coin flipping and new frameworks, etc, a POW during WW2 had the time and patience to actually flip a real coin tens of thousands of times and recorded the results. It's a fascinating insight into REAL randomness (not the theory of randomness), and it'll drive you into the abyss of insanity of you examine it for too long :)