Everybody's an Expert

This from Bryce Barras:

Has there ever been a time in the world’s history when people were more sure of their opinions?” asks Jim Ferrell of the Arbinger Institute.

Ferrell observes, "We become set in our opinions precisely because we have lost sight of the fact that they are merely opinions…our culture is suffering from what one might call ‘opinion creep’—the elevation of unsupported thoughts to the status of opinions and opinions to convictions.”

We don’t know how to have civil disagreements anymore. We fail to recognize that having a thought doesn’t make our thinking the truth. Ferrell writes, "We tend to have convictions about many things and to have opinions about almost everything else. We blind ourselves to the enormity of our ignorance.”

Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach in their book The Knowledge Illusion, put it this way: "In general we don’t appreciate how little we know; the tiniest bit of knowledge makes us feel like experts. Once we feel like an expert we start talking like an exert.”

Tim adds:

I suspect that ties in with our modern educational system and how we elevated feelings and beliefs and the inane ramblings of students as unassailable.

And further, it goes to this idea of subjective truths "my truth" so who is anyone to dare challenge someone's personal truth? That is grounds for fighting as it is no longer a rejection of a person's logic or facts (something objectively verifiable) but a rejection of the person himself. We let these post-modernist radicals implement all of this and the result is a confederation of arrogant dunces, a society ruled b y passion and not rationality.

I would add that Thomas Sowell once wrote a book about the differences between Liberal and Conservative. The hallmark of the Liberal, Sowell argued, is the elevation of the expert as the final word, while Conservatives tend to view individuals who have gained (fairly or not) repute as just one opinion among a variety and the wisdom of the crowd refines these opinions and discards the bad. As Progressivism/Liberalism has triumphed in our Western World we are increasingly run by a cabal of self-appointed experts and this can be seen as a side effect of that leadership. In it's dich otomous way modern Liberals both elevate the opinions of individuals to a deified state and simultaneously worship the expert. The result is what we see now, I suspect.

The more power the "experts" acquire the stronger the opinion of those who are not experts become.

When experts are put on a pedestal and every man is on his own pedestal every person is thus an expert, if only in his or her own reality.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 01:31 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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