Expertise is Dead. Long Live Expertise.

Professor Tom Nichols tells a story about a lecture given by renowned astrophysicist Professor Robert Jastrow, Head of NASA’s theoretical division. An undergraduate disagreed on a technical point, Jastow held his ground and a heated debate followed. After some time the undergraduate finally shrugged and gave up, saying “Well, your guess is as good as mine.” Jastrow stopped the man short: “No, no, no” he said “My guesses are much, much better than yours.”

It’s interesting to observe one’s reaction to this tale. To me this raw assertion of expertise is rather amusing perhaps because it’s somewhat transgressive in some quarters these days. It could be as much the bluntness of the delivery of the statement as it is the content – because claiming expertise in this way is a little jarring to my ears. But why should this be? That an expert with decades in a field is likely to be able to make a better assessment than a newcomer should be uncontroversial. Asserting this nevertheless seems odd today, and in his book The Death of Expertise Nichols explores exactly why this might be.

Nichols acknowledges that of course experts do make mistakes and furthermore, that experts can be as corrupt and self-serving as anyone else. Expertise does not equate to perfection; people are human, and debates are difficult to resolve – that is simply the way of things. And distrust of experts is hardly a new phenomenon; we can find similar ideas from long ago: “You should never trust experts” the 19th-century British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury famously wrote. “If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”

It is nevertheless true that expertise counts for a lot. It should be blindingly obvious from our everyday lives – as most of us cannot even explain how a clock works, why a building does not collapse, how a toilet u-bend functions or even how a shirt is made, let alone how a streaming service works, a power station generates power, how food gets from farm to table or why our drinking water is safe to drink. I would not and should not fancy my chances against a grandmaster in chess, offer a midwife advice on labour, or try to fly a plane. Expertise matters for issues of any complexity, and it should only take a moment to understand that any person, organisation or country that places personal preference or whim above expertise is headed in a very dangerous direction. Nichols notes with regard to the Russian famines of the 1930s in which 6 – 9 million people died that “no matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died”. And he addresses the vaccine issue directly: “Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough. Modern societies cannot function without experts in every field.”

All that said, the notion of expertise seems to be in trouble, and I don’t just mean from unscrupulous politicians who are doing what they can to avoid being held to account or even contradicted. Author Robert Greene notes “increasing numbers of people.. have little or no respect for authority or experts of any kind, no matter the experts’ level of training and experience… ‘Why should their opinion be any more valid than my own?’ they might tell themselves. ‘Nobody’s really that great; people with power are just more privileged.’”

To be fair, we all know that distributions of opportunity and power are unfair (equally talented children born in Singapore and Somalia will likely have very different life trajectories), and any desire to tip the scales towards equality is surely a valid and laudable impulse. But desiring equality should not preclude recognising talent or difference; as George Bernard Shaw put it: “You and I will both sit at a table each with a pile of paper and a pencil. Now we both have an equal opportunity to write a play.” This takes us back to my point about playing chess against a grandmaster. So where does this misguided notion of equality come from? Nichols argues that it’s not just a reaction to privilege and power, but a cultural outgrowth of our political system; that we have slipped from our morally correct conception of people as equal before the law, with everyone’s vote being equal, to a factually incorrect conception of people as equal in all respects.

So when should we trust the experts?  The broad answer is the simple one – when they are providing guidance that falls within their area of expertise; and if experts disagree, as they will do from time to time, then after due process to reach the most plausible conclusion.

But sometimes issues arise because experts themselves do not always make it clear when they are outside their areas of expertise, and even offer advice outside it, undermining public confidence. My respect for science and scientists is immense, but I’ve always rather bristled with governments who say they will ‘follow the science’ when developing complex public policy matters. It’s not that we should ignore science, but governance is about a lot more than just science, because science can tell us what is and what might happen, but it can’t tell us what matters, or what we should care about. Those are value judgements, often ethical ones, which fall outside the domain of scientific expertise. Science can and did, for example, measure and project mortality rates under Covid; it could also assess the damages to wellbeing and the economy over lockdowns and border closings. What science alone could never do, however, is make tradeoffs between these things, because that’s a political, not a scientific question. Should schools have been closed? Well, it depends on the trade off that you are willing to make between many good things – health (which differs between the young, adults, the elderly, the sick), education, the economy, and the differential effects of lockdown on people of various degrees of wealth. And of course, if we have to be realistic, we should also point out that politicians will think about their chance of reelection and the views of their bases. These are not amenable to scientific answers.

However, some professionals entered the political fray; Nichols described the way medical professionals advocated for strict lockdowns during the pandemic, but despite that then went on to support the mass non-lockdowned George Floyd protests.  He argues this was “a completely self-inflicted wound on the cause of expertise. To [support the protests] while people couldn’t go to church, get married, or bury their dead inflamed a lot of people… Many doctors, who had argued that their advice was apolitical, made a nakedly political decision.” The point here is not whether or not protest during a pandemic were justified (reasonable people can differ on this); it was the fact that weighing up health risks with other social concerns is not the job of the medical profession. It’s the job of public servants and politicians. So any endorsement of expertise needs to come with a caveat: Experts can only offer alternatives. They cannot make decisions about public values because they are the servants and not the masters of a democratic society. So while we want expertise in our citizens, we also need to build in this fundamental distinction.  For schools, this means three things:

• Within a field, there is no substitute for deep, subject expertise. While we must embrace the firm foundation of knowledge and skills that are the foundations of disciplinary expertise, we need to acknowledge that expertise is about the quality of judgements we can make on the basis of these foundations. So because knowing things is not the same as understanding them, and having the skills to do things is not the same thing as choosing when and how to apply those skills , we need to use knowledge and skills as the basis for a conceptual approach that is at the root of true expertise.
• As well as developing their own expertise in chosen areas, we also also need students to learn and appreciate the richness of expertise in areas outside their own. In that way, when they encounter messy, real-world problems that do not fall into one disciplinary area, they’re able to appreciate the insights from other experts, not see them as somehow subordinate to their own area, and see the value of interdisciplinarity, which in schools can manifest as a course, or as an element within a course. This requires an appreciation of Systems Thinking, and also underlines the need to allow students to grapple with problems that have no simple, easily measured and objectively assessed answer.
• We also want our students to develop an understanding not just of the nature and methodologies, but also the limitations of the various domains of knowledge.This means looking at the similarities and differences between nuanced terms like belief and opinion; between fact and value; logic and insight; truth and approximation. These are subtle matters that we can address in age appropriate ways across our curriculum – in the most concrete and implicit way for younger students but absolutely explicitly for our older students (we have a mandatory Theory of Knowledge course to precisely that end).

These three items will help us develop students who are appropriately respectful and skeptical of expertise. That’s the direction we are headed in.

If we get it right, we will develop students with an appreciation for a diversity of ways of thinking, who do not fall into ideological traps, and who are able to engage as critical, informed citizens in a world that desperately needs this. Journalist David Goodhart quotes the American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah on the need to respect expertise right across the range of human endeavour: The goal is not to eradicate hierarchy and turn every mountain into a salt flat; we live in a plenitude of incommensurable hierarchies, and the circulation of social esteem will always benefit the better novelist, the more important mathematician, the savvier businessman, the faster runner, the more effective social entrepreneur. There is, therefore, also a moral case that in focusing on expertise we will help every individual have the opportunity to flourish into their most capable selves; able to contribute in whatever way they can to a more exuberant, abundant, peaceful and sustainable world.