“You want me to treat your child? That will be 100k in Bitcoin”
“You’ll treat him, and do it for free”
“Or else what?”
“Or else I’ll leak your medical degree to Vox.”
“Noooo!”
Conversation
Whoever first thought “expert opinion” was a good thing to dump into public discourses in like 1884, outside of the context of practice, has no idea of the shitshow they brewed up for 2021. Either that, or best long troll ever.
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“Your honor, prosecution will show that the accused has been posing as a high-school dropout self-taught hacker for years, duping the good citizens of this community, while possessing a degree in computer science all along. We will be seeking the maximum sentence for fraud.”
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Thing about expertise is it’s a show-over-tell trait, and is mainly visible in how long you can resourcefully stay in the game in pursuit of a truth/solution/fact etc without running out of ideas or options. It doesn’t snapshot well. Media is all snapshots.
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An expert mental state is a bit like a clock that doesn’t stop. The “time” is operating beliefs knowing what you know at the time. A media expert-opinion sound bite is a bit like a photograph of a clock. “Hah! You said it’s 11 PM but we now know it’s 2 AM.”
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The system is almost guaranteed to force anyone who knows anything into telling what looks like noble lies when forced to opine in public.
No easy solution. The best hard solution is to go full backroom in how you act.
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Probably an interesting measure of the actual expert content of a field is if a practicing professional gets disbarred for whatever reason, wherever they are able to find underground employment.
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- Disbarred doctors who run illegal clinics
- Accountants who find work with the mob after being indicted for fraud
- Chemistry teachers who can cook meth
- Telecom engineers kidnapped by Mexican cartels to build cell networks
Yeah all that is real expertise.
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A good question to probe whether you have any real expertise is: what would the criminal version of you do?
Like: Art history gets made fun of, but you could probably work as an international art smuggler/fence?
A good writer can probably learn to craft solid clickbait copy
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I’m not arguing a case for rehabilitating respect for expertise. I’m speculating about the the consequences of its fall. That ship has sailed. To the extent expertise is a real phenomenon beneath the map of signifiers (credentials, titles) real fallout can be expected.
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Whether you attribute it to abuse of public trust, noble lying, self-certain public stupidity, rise of crackpottery that is occasionally right, regulatory capture, institutional sclerosis,... it doesn’t matter.
It’s done. Expertise is down for the count. What next?
Replying to
The fun thing is there’s a gap between actual and revealed distrust of expertise. A lot of people seem to fall into the pattern of ranting online about how doctors don’t know anything, but still turning to them when they need treatment.
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Of course there is. You screw up big enough you won’t find another job ans will have no references. It’s not about measurement or formal disbarring actions. It’s whether there is real trust in competence that can be lost through *expert* ways of failing.
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Replying to @vgr
hmm so is there no measurable expertise in software because there's no way to be disbarred?
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The shallow reason I can’t be disbarred from surgery is I am not a surgeon.
The deep reason is, I don’t know enough to fail at it in expert ways. If someone died because I cut into them I’d be tried for murder with a knife, not medical malpractice.
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There’s really no way to police moral hazard is there 🤔
Principal-agent problems are sort of a bedrock condition. If they go south on you, you can only punish, not prevent.
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Replying to
Expertise has largely been replaced with success, hasn't it? Those who are successful get to have opinions that people listen to.


