Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, for example, can fairly be seen as a rejection of expertise in all its forms. And long before the Trump phenomenon, critics in the U.S. were gleefully attacking the expert consensus on everything from climate change to vaccinations.
.. 1. Experts are wrong a lot. This seems especially true lately when it comes to predicting election results (cases in point: Brexit and the U.S. Republican primaries). But there have been other recent examples, including the collapse of the scientific consensus that fat and cholesterol are really bad for you. The inability of most macroeconomists to admit the possibility of a global financial crisis before one struck in 2008 has to count as a big expert fail as well.
.. 2. Experts are elitist.
.. People who feel more distant from experts may find it harder to trust them, even when they’re right. But it also probably affects experts’ judgment.
.. 3. Nonexperts can be pretty susceptible to nonsense.
.. Most people don’t have time to develop that sort of informed skepticism — which is one reason why experts are so essential.
Ben Carson Is Struggling to Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say
Faced with increasing scrutiny about whether Mr. Carson, who leads in some Republican presidential polls, was capable of leading American foreign policy, two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect.
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”
.. What is unusual is the candor of those who are tutoring him about his struggle to master the subject.
.. Mr. Williams, one of Mr. Carson’s closest friends, who does not have an official role in the campaign, also lamented the Fox News interview. “He’s been briefed on it so many times,” he said. “I guess he just froze.”
.. There’s a reason doctors tend to kill themselves in airplanes: they assume because they’re smart enought to be doctors, they therefore are experts in everything else. This exactly what I see in Carson: he truly believes that his prowess as a surgeon translates to everything else.
.. Carson is not only struggling with foreign affairs, but also economics (flat tax & blow up the deficit), health policy (Obamacare is worse than slavery), history (the Holocaust), archeology (the pyramids as grain silos), science (climate change & the age of the Earth), guns (reasonable gun controls are worse than bullet-riddled bodies) and the vetting process (the nasty “gotcha” question media). This doesn’t leave much as to why this man thinks he should be president of the United States.
.. The problem is that this lack of knowledge is not going to have any negative impact on the voters who already support him. Most voters are not looking for facts and many see sophisticated knowledge of policy as a negative – which is one of the reasons why Al Gore did not become President.
For most voters, alignment with ones views is all it takes to garner support. The facts or the ability to implement those views is not relevant.