How Much Should I Trust Experts?

In a world flooded with conflicting advice and so-called "experts," how do we know who to trust? This episode dives into the philosophy of expertise, exploring the ancient Greek concept of techne, the role of democracy, and the dangers of technocracy. We’ll break down when deference to experts is wise, when skepticism is warranted, and how to navigate the modern landscape of authority and misinformation. If you've ever wondered whether experts really know best, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

Remember Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's leading expert on infectious diseases. He stood before the press delivering public health guidance during much of the COVID-19 pandemic. For millions, Fauci became the voice of reason and medicine, translating complex science into actionable advice. But not everyone trusts him. Some see him as an overreaching expert whose advice clashes with personal freedom or local policies, or as a shill for big pharma. And yet for others, his advice didn't go far enough in protecting the vulnerable. The debate around Fauci sparked a broader distrust in medicine and fanned the embers of the ever-present American anti-intellectualism. Our questions are, how much and in what ways should we trust experts? Because at the end of the day, specializations in education and the division of labor require all of us to rely on other people's expertise. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. In this episode, we're tackling the big question: when and to what extent should I trust experts? I want to break down what makes someone an expert and why we're drawn to their advice, and how to recognize when expert opinions might actually lead us astray. Let's start with that idea of who's an expert anyway. Expertise has been around for millennia. Plato, like his teacher Socrates, was often skeptical of the so-called expertise of the sophists of ancient Athens. In fact, the Greek roots for our modern conversation about trusting experts focuses on the ancient Greek concept of techne. Now, techne is a term that translates roughly to craftsmanship or skill. You probably recognize it in words like technical and technology. It's not just about having specialized knowledge, though. It's also about being able to put that knowledge into action skillfully and reliably. Think of a skilled artisan, like a potter who knows just how to shape the clay, but also understands the nuances of their craft from the right temperature for firing the mud to the best types of clay to use for different purposes. even the final look of different kinds of glazes. That blend of knowledge and skill is what techne captures. And it was highly valued in ancient Greece, just like it is today. Most high-paid jobs in the U.S. revolve around some sort of highly advanced technical skill. Everything from hairdressing to automotive engineering to artificial intelligence software design, even business acquisition management. We expect, we even require a certain level of expertise in the people we rely on to handle certain kinds of activities. The problem is that techne is often in conflict with democracy. Ancient Greek democracy was all about participation. Citizens who were free, natural-born, and male, had a voice in decision-making, even if they weren't experts. So you've got everyday citizens debating issues in the public square, making decisions on matters that could impact the entire city-state. All of this without really any idea what the hell they're talking about. That shouldn't be too hard to picture. That sort of philosophical tension still resonates with us today. How can regular folks make important decisions when they may not have the expertise they need to understand the complexity of the issues that they have to decide on? This tension caught the notice of Socrates, who was known for his relentless questioning and skepticism about expertise. He often pointed out that many people claim to know things when, in fact, only really a few people do. He believed that true wisdom comes from recognizing the limits of one's knowledge. So when it comes to trusting experts, Socratic skepticism invites us to consider are these so-called experts genuinely knowledgeable. Or are they just good at appearing so? Of course, Socrates was no defender of democratic wisdom either. In fact, one of the things that got him in trouble in ancient Athens was his criticism of democracies. Let me give you an example. The Greek navy consisted of ships called triremes, which had three rows of oarsmen. When a ship sank, hundreds of sailors ultimately went into the water. So after a big naval battle where dozens of ships would be lost, you can imagine thousands of sailors treading water, waiting to be rescued. In fact, it was customary for the winning side of a battle to rescue all the men in the water, not just their own side. After one battle off the coast of modern-day Turkey, the Athenian commanders made the decision to leave the men in the water because a storm was rolling in, threatening to dash the entire fleet to pieces on the rocks of the nearby coast. The ships sailed out to deeper waters, and the men were left to drown in the storm. This was a technical decision. It was made by military experts about military matters. But in a democracy, those sailors have families, and those families vote. And those families and relatives decided to prosecute those Navy commanders. And they succeeded, having many of them put to death. Socrates was horrified by this. He complained that these men did the right thing by protecting the fleet. That was exactly the kind of military decision-making that they had been hired to make. These generals were winning battles and protecting the fleet. Soldiers die in war. And sometimes it's because protecting the bulk of the force requires abandoning those soldiers. But in a democracy, technical expertise can be overshadowed by popular sentiment. And we end up attacking the very people for doing their jobs and doing them well. Again, recall Dr. Fauci, and you get my meaning. To put this into a more personal context, who would you rather have deciding how to, let's say, fix your car? Would it be an auto mechanic or the population of your state? Or how about your next surgery? Would you rather take the advice of maybe two or three surgeons or 5 million registered voters? I think you might get my point then. We don't always want the general public making our decisions, and sometimes it is best to leave it to the experts. This interplay, then, between techne, democracy, and skepticism, sets the stage for our modern dialogue about expertise. If we value participation in decision-making, how do we balance that with a need for specialized knowledge? And how do we navigate the complexities of trusting those experts when history has shown us that expertise can be challenged and is sometimes wrong? It might be helpful here to compare a technocracy with a democracy. When we talk about a technocracy, what we're referring to is a political system where decision-making power is held by a set of experts, those who possess the specialized knowledge and skills and their specific fields. This isn't about technology or the gadgets. It's about who we trust to lead us and make our decisions, especially critical decisions. Is it the collective public or those who have dedicated their lives to mastering particular areas of knowledge? And of course, expertise in one area doesn't entail expertise in another, meaning we'll have to deal with the question of what kind of expertise is best for political decision-making if we're going to live in a technocracy. We can see the tension between democratic ideals and technocracy playing out in issues like climate change or economic policy. In climate science, for instance, the new nuances of the climate data and the models used to predict future trends can be incredibly complex. While the general public can certainly engage in discussions about climate policy, many of the underlying scientific principles require a level of specialized knowledge that most of us just don't have. We didn't study to be scientists. And we certainly didn't study to be scientists in climate. So the challenge arises. How do we ensure that decisions about our planet's future are guided by the best available information? Does that information come from science, or does it come from public opinion? Now, chances are you have a ready answer already in mind to that question, but let's slow down a second and ponder the idea that different questions might sometimes lead to different answers. What I mean is that sometimes the opinions of experts are not going to be as valuable as the opinions of the population as a whole. Whereas at other times, like those I just mentioned, we might prefer to ignore the popular opinion and place our trust in technical expertise. Here's an example. Let's say we let economists run the economy. Okay, but how are they to run it? What do we want from our economy? Do we want cheap goods and services? Do we want stability? Do we want high returns on our investments? Do we want strong wages? Depending on how the system is set up, some of our goals might be in conflict with other goals. Should these technical experts be the ones picking our goals for us? Or should they just be managing the system after the population as a whole has decided on what those goals should be? We might then not want technical experts deciding everything, even every aspect of their own specialized field. But what if there is a way to get the best of both worlds here? That might be worth considering. Let's return to Plato for a second, who, as I mentioned before, had a complex relationship with democracy. He was skeptical of the idea that everyday citizens should have the power to make decisions, especially on matters requiring deep expertise. In his view, many people lack the necessary knowledge to make informed choices of about governance. To Plato, the ideal rulers were philosophers, what he called philosopher-kings. He believed that philosophers, with their understanding of the true forms of knowledge and their ability to grasp the essence of justice, would be best suited to rule. This belief was rooted in the notion that they possess a special kind of techne, one that combines a deep desire for the truth with the ethical consideration of wanting to avoid any sort of wrongdoing. This allowed them to govern both widely and justly. In our modern-day example, this would mean picking leaders who genuinely want to know how much human activity affects the climate and what would be the best overall plan to minimize damage while protecting our other interests as well. What our democracy does instead is pick leaders with plans already in mind. Do you want the guy with the clean energy bill in mind or the climate change denier who will drill baby drill? This is our version of letting the ignorant population decide on how to deal with climate change and what, if anything, ought to be done about it. Nowhere is there a candidate arguing, I don't know what the right answer is, but if elected, I'm damn sure to find out. So let's say for a moment that Plato's right, and we want experts to run our political system. But if so, we have to grapple with these really important questions. Who gets to decide who is an expert in the first place? How can we balance the need for specialized knowledge with a general good? And in a world where misinformation can spread so quickly, how do we ensure that the voices of dissent are not silenced because they may not have the same level of expertise? In the end, it seems like even philosopher kings and queens may not be big picture expert enough to really replace the role of the populace in decision-making. By now, you should have a pretty thorough idea of what the underlying problem here really is. So what I want to do now is turn to some philosophical approaches that offer different perspectives on how expertise and how we as a society might engage with it. John Dewey was one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th century. He had a profound belief in the importance of public engagement with complex issues. For Dewey, democracy wasn't just about voting every couple of years. It was about active participation in the ongoing decisions that affect our lives. He argued that in a democratic society, citizens should be educated and encouraged to take part in discussions about complex topics, even ones that require specialized knowledge. Dewey didn't think that everyone had to become an expert, but he did believe that everyone should be able to engage with experts and to have access to the tools that they needed to understand these issues. In short, you could say that while Plato believed society should be ruled by philosophers, do we believe that the entire public should be educated as philosophers? So while you could have some technical specialization, you should be generally educated enough to point out where you could engage with any specialization enough to make a good public decision. In his view, the process of inquiry itself should be democratic. Experts and laypeople alike should be able to contribute to the conversation, always with the aim of finding some sort of objective truth. This was especially true for topics like science, ethics, and policy, where expert knowledge can guide decisions, but the public has a stake in the outcomes. Dewey's call was for a public that was not passive, but rather active participants in the ongoing process of knowledge creation. This meant that experts should not work in isolation or assume authority by default. Instead, they should help educate and involve the public in the decision-making process, and that all of us have a stake in the education and development of everyone else who shares our society. Dewey's ideas resonate today as we navigate complex issues like climate change or public health, where expert knowledge is crucial, but needs to be communicated effectively to the public. How do we make sure that citizens aren't just passive receivers of expert opinions, but are also actively engaged in the conversation that affects their lives? You know, I often hear that we shouldn't really worry about other people's educations, you know, we should be focused on our own children's educations. But what Dewey sort of suggesting here is that you have to live with other people in this society. Therefore, you do have an individual self-interest in making sure that they are all educated and well taken care of. If not, those ills will come back to be revisited on you and on the people you care about. Another philosopher we should take a look at is Carl Popper, the famous British philosopher of Science, who argued that knowledge should always remain open to criticism. Popper's most famous contribution to philosophy was his concept of falsifiability, the idea that for theory to be scientific, it must be able to be proven wrong. Pauper believed that this openness to falsification was what gave scientific knowledge its strength. But Pauper's ideas go further than just the realm of science. He argued that this principle of openness should apply to society as a whole. In his view, a free society should be one where experts and authorities are always subject to critique, and where no one holds absolute power or unquestionable expertise. He believed that the best way for society to move forward was for the claims of expertise to be continually challenged, debated, and tested. What does this mean for the way that we view experts? Well, Popper's ideas suggest that expertise is not something set in stone, and that experts should never be considered beyond reproach. If we did that, we would just be stuck in the skeptical hell of choosing between either unanswered questions or unquestionable answers. Instead, Popper suggests a robust democracy depends on constant questioning, of even the most established, traditional knowledge. This doesn't mean we shouldn't trust experts. But it does mean that expert claims should always be open to scrutiny and further evaluation. But neither do we doubt a claim without good reason to do so. Just as we should strive for reasons and our beliefs, we should also do the same with our doubts. If a theory or policy sounds dubious to us, we should not condemn it, but seek out the flaw in either the reasoning or in our own reasoning. The error, as Popper points out, could lie in either direction. Take the example of public health experts during the pandemic. We trust these experts to guide us, but at the same time, we should ask questions about the basis of their recommendations and be open to adjusting policies as new data comes in. Health experts do get it wrong sometimes, like the FDA approval of Viaox or the semi-willful creation of the opioid epidemic. But more often, they get it right. We just need to be a little savvy about which case we're doing dealing with. In a poppean sense, the best expert is one who welcomes challenges to their ideas, but not one who demands unquestioning obedience. Finally, I want to talk about Michel Foucault, whose work offers us a fresh perspective on their relationship between knowledge and power. Foucault famously said that knowledge is power. And this simple notion challenges our traditional view of knowledge as a neutral, objective thing that exists independently of the other forces, like politics, at play in society. Like, we don't believe that science should bend to the will of industry or political ideology. But Foucault is suggesting that at some does. He argued that the way knowledge is produced, validated, and accepted in society is never itself neutral. It's always shaped by power dynamics. Scientists don't exist in a vacuum. Their opinions influence and are influenced by other people. Experts, in his view, are not simply objective truth tellers, but they are embedded in power structures that influence what is considered valid knowledge. Another way to put this is that not having knowledge in the hands of experts is never just descriptive. It's also prescriptive, meaning that when someone we see as an authority in their field tells us the way things are, it suggests to us that this is the way things ought to be, that this is the right way to see the situation. Vot's perspective forces us to think critically about how expertise is used and who gets to be considered an expert in the first place. For example, consider the role of experts in the areas like mental health or criminal justice. Historically, certain groups of people, often those in positions of power, have had more control over what is considered legitimate knowledge. In the case of mental health, the labels and diagnoses used by psychologists and psychiatrists are shaped by cultural norms and societal power structures. For example, homosexuality was seen as a mental disorder in early versions of the diagnostic manual produced by the American Psychiatric Association rather than a legitimate sexual orientation, a person just might have. Similarly, experts in the criminal justice system may have their views influenced by political agendas or biases. Fouult's point is that we should always be aware of the ways in which power can shape what we know and think we know and how we think we know it. So when we think about trusting experts, Fukocia challenges us to ask, who benefits from the knowledge that experts provide? What power structures are behind their authority? And how can we ensure that the knowledge we're getting is as unbiased and representative as possible? Asking these sorts of questions can help us avoid putting undue trust in an expert, even one that earnestly holds our best interests at heart. But for reasons of power or position or privilege or prestige, might be apt to give us bad advice. And this is to say nothing of cult leaders or people who would willfully abuse their position of expert or their position of authority in order to gain more power over other people. So the next time you're in need of someone else's opinion or experience or expertise, try to reflect on how you should decide whom to trust. Many people reach out to others they already know and trust and ask them for recommendations. Or they look for rating agencies or reviews. And when it comes to politics, keep an open mind about the opinions of experts, both those that you disagree with and those that you agree with. You should consider learning more about the topics where you commonly rely on expert opinions. This can develop greater trust in the opinions, which sound right and which sound far-fetched. Without knowing yourself, you will ultimately struggle to tell the difference between these two. So to recap, we heard from John Dewey today, who emphasized the importance of public engagement with experts, and from Carl Popper, who argued that expertise should always be open to scrutiny, and from Michelle Foucault, who wanted to warn us about the ways in which power influences what we know and think we know. These ideas challenge us to think about how we come to trust experts and how we engage with their knowledge. It's not just about whether or not experts are trustworthy. It's about how we, as a society, navigate the complex relationships between expertise, power, and democracy. When it comes to expert knowledge, it's clear that we can't just take it at face value. We need to think critically about it. Question it when necessary, and ensure that we're not blindly deferring to some form of authority. But we also need to recognize that when used responsibly, expertise can be a powerful tool for making better decisions and improving their lives. The key is finding that balance. One further thing that we should really think about before we quit this subject is the role of authority. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it, but the idea here is that there are two types of authority that we could be looking at. There are people who are given a position of authority in society because they have a technical degree. They have some kind of recognized expertise, you know, a doctor who goes to medical school and then completes their residency is given a certain level of authority and medicine. But there's also a sense of authority and simply, I trust this person enough to let them make my decisions for me. An agency sort of relationship with this person. This, we might call authoritas in the original Latin. You know, the authoritas of a person is how much you can come to trust them as an individual so that you really will let them make your decisions for you. You trust their advice. You trust their perspective. You trust their expertise. Generally, we want these two things to overlap, but it's not always true that they do. And so understanding our relationship to authority can also help us navigate this world of expertise. Thanks for listening to American Socrates. If you found today's episode interesting, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone you think might also love a little wisdom in their life. Join us next week as we explore the world of knowledge by examining the question, Why read?