I have become wary of experts. I doubt their claims more and more.

I don’t exactly fit the bill here. I’ve spent the last seven years of my life in higher education and am currently in the last stretch of my PhD: a person simply doesn’t waste that many years trying to gain “expert knowledge” without caring about it in some way. If I were an outside observer and had to make a bet, I’d be all in on me being the kind of person who goes around talking about how people should trust experts more, and how the anti-intellectual atmosphere of our society is worrying, but here we are. Coincidentally, I’ve also become wary of those kinds people too.

To make one thing clear before going any further, this post is not about climate change. My wariness is mostly about experts in the social sciences (especially my own academic fields of cognitive science and psychology) and in medicine and nutrition – the usual suspects for those who’ve followed any news on the reliability of science in the last decade or so. That said, the main reason I’m mostly excluding “harder” sciences is because I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the fields, not because I think they’re immune.

The issue with experts is that they (or we) are nerds.

As the famous comic summarized, the difference between a nerd and a geek is that nerds are interested in studying things academically, whereas geeks are simply very passionate about their hobbies, and the kinds of people who care about this distinction are called “dorks”. I propose a second distinction: nerds (academics) often focus on knowledge of facts, whereas geeks (engineer types) focus on know-how. Nerds care about specific tidbits of info, geeks care about the mechanisms. Nerds tell stories and then remind you that everything is complicated, geeks try and build models.

Nerds too can get very passionate about the things they study. When you know so much about something, you want to correct other people’s mistakes about it whenever you see them. I’ve done this myself more times than I’d like to admit even when it’s not particularly relevant to the discussion. Luckily, me being annoying at parties is not that detrimental to humanity as a whole. Where it gets tricky is when people are nerds about things that actually matter in terms of our understanding of the world.

Some time ago I was trying to figure out how much I should trust Steven Pinker’s thesis of the world having gotten consistently better and being in better shape on several different measures than before. It seemed that many people who knew much more about history than I do weren’t too thrilled about the idea, and pointed out several issues with Pinker’s handling of historical data. The criticisms seemed valid enough when it came to singular facts. What bothered me was that it wasn’t clear to me whether these factual mistakes actually mattered that much in terms of the main thesis. I got the feeling that I might just be witnessing people flexing their trivia muscles. When you’re not an expert in the area yourself, it becomes harder and harder to figure out which of the arguments are actually relevant to debunking a model, and which are just angrily expressed anecdotes. From a non-nerd point of view, it can be next to impossible to even gauge how strong the disagreement truly is.

(Coincidentally, I get the feeling that most of the really detailed “climate skeptic” arguments are just bundles of angrily expressed anecdotes. Anti-establishment types are the worst nerds of all.)

The point that laymen often can’t make informed judgments about who’s right or wrong in a scientific debate (or a “debate” between an expert and an eager amateur) gets repeated year after year. But this is said with the implication that if only they had some mythical property that the scientists have, they wouldn’t have such issues. You hear claims like “we need more education and outreach”. But how much would we have to educate people to know better in some of these situations? I happened to know more than the average Joe about the issues at hand in the whole Pinker debate AND had an academic background, but I still wasn’t 100% sure what to make of it. I would basically have had to read every article and book each side of the debate had ever read to really know who was right. Since I couldn’t be bothered, the only thing I could say is that one side seems to be pointing out to many interesting tidbits the other side gets wrong but doesn’t necessarily refute the general argument.

Getting stuck at expert-level irrelevancies seems pretty common to me. The existence of rare chromosomal or hormonal abnormalities is used as an argument in favor of a spectrum of biological sex in humans, even though it’s questionable how these abnormalities refute binary sex any more than birth defects refute a standard layout of the body. Or the fact that computers can’t be programmed to have drives or needs is used to argue against the very idea of an AI turning against us, even though we live in a world where algorithms that clearly don’t have drives or needs are already causing unexpected and unwanted things. If there’s a risk the experts themselves are grasping at irrelevant factoids, how much can we really blame the poor uneducated masses when they do the same with vaccine side-effects or whatever macronutrient we’ve collectively decided to hate this Thursday?

I don’t want to speak too negatively of nerds, especially given I’m one myself. Knowing when your expertise in an area is actually relevant to a model or an application (or a half-drunken discussion at 3am) is hard. It’s not exactly taught in schools – I’m not even sure we could teach it if we wanted to. Learning a lot about something and seeing for yourself how complicated things are can be humbling (there’s so much we don’t know!), but it can also lead to a false sense of seeing everything as so complex that we can’t even talk of any general trends. Nerds become too zoomed in.

This isn’t my only reason to distrust experts, though. The more I learn, the more I notice that experts are often just really, really wrong.

I read popular articles where big name psychologists engage in amazingly shoddy reasoning with such confidence it makes me question whether it was me or them who misunderstood everything they were taught from freshman year onwards. I see all kinds of cultural experts analyzing subcultures I’ve been a part of and completely miss the mark. Or I end up in a Twitter discussion with a professor who claims that the fact that 95% of workplace deaths are working-class men is clearly only caused by them being working class, and has nothing to do with them being male. I spot these things because I either happen to know about the subject matter or have the necessary mathematical skills to notice errors – and neither my level of knowledge nor math skills are exactly top notch. Again, what about areas where I’m not that knowledgeable?

When you top this all with replication crises in basically every field where someone has bothered to look for one and the glacial pace of change in the matter, I think it would be completely fair to actively tell everyone to remain skeptical of every new finding for a couple of decades until the scientists have sorted their shit out.

All of this puts me in a weird spot. It grates me when someone announces with the confidence and philosophical nuance of a seventeen-year-old internet atheist that psychology is just pseudoscience – but I doubt much of psychology myself. I hate the tinfoilery of people who reject anything coming from official medical science because of “Big Pharma” – but I have really low priors on the replication of any medical finding. And it’s just abysmal to look at the misinformed mess of people who reject the mainstream views in nutrition – but… for the most part I do that exact thing myself, to be honest.

Sure, I might reject expert opinions for better reasons than those people. My views might be more nuanced and informed. Or they might just be generally the same thing, expressed in a more nerdy way and flourished with interesting tidbits and angrily expressed anecdotes. I still find noisy anti-experts idiotic, but I can’t help sympathizing with them a bit.