What to do about this? You point out that solving the problem is hard, but I would argue that it is framed as "impossible" because the axioms that define the system are in conflict. The interplay of expertise, politicians, and mass media, at least in Western societies, rules out the possibility of division of labor proposed by Kitcher - your descriptive evidence of this phenomena demonstrates it well. If we want his divisions to work, I might look at whether other systems manage to apply it with fewer contradictions.
I think looking at Eastern cultures suggests the problem is rooted in these system beliefs. In South Korea they routinely showed experts front-loading uncertainties (e.g. "this information could change within days") while retaining majority trust during COVID (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7952821/). Not perfect! But indicative that people have varying tolerances for uncertain experts.
Social identity theory seems to suggest that when we face major crises, group solidarities intensify, and that should have measurable effects on the behavior of their society. It also strips away a lot of complication, because tons of people are uniformly focused on a single threat - there are less confounding variables to consider.
This leaves me thinking of two directions of solution:
- Attempt to inject some Eastern collectivist behaviors into our culture (I'm not sure which ones might be causal or most compatible with Kitcher, it would take deeper deduction)
- Lean into the spiral of conviction, and experience a shock so severe that we realize our society cannot continue behaving this way, and we clean up from the rubble (kind of like your "I suspect we are fucked" point).
Great commend! I agree with you and tend towards pessimism, at least with regard to western democracies (well, most of them) for these reasons. I’m not sure you need such a philosophical shift though, as from individualism to collectivism. You need high levels of social trust and strong enough social ties, which many of the same countries had in the not too distant past despite the fact that they were in many ways no less individualistic than we are now.
Ah, I hadn't considered trust breakdown as something that ties a lot of this together, that makes a lot of sense! I'm interested in learning more - any recommendations for where I could look?
I found all of this illuminating, except that I’m confused about the mental health example. If not the psychologist, who is actually the expert on mental health?
Pretty sure he's referencing Jon Haidt and his new book. Haidt is a moral psychologist who's recently started writing about youth mental health issues and social media. Because of his significant platform, he has sway in the policy realm, but he's been criticized by leading developmental psychologists like Candice Odgers who have been doing this work for decades longer than him.
Yeah, with just enough plausible deniability that I don’t need to defend this reading of Haidt when challenged… (I’m default sceptical about claims like his because it just can’t be as simple as that)
If politicians were to take responsibility, then wouldn't they be accused of "epistemic trespassing"? It seems that you've put them in a no-win situation.
Yeah I assume the reason politicians don’t take responsibility has something to do with our broader media and political culture. Not sure the fear is being accused of *epistemic trespassing*. It’s more that they don’t think their personal brands can take the hit. And they may be right which is another dimension of the problem.
I'm not sure about the influence of the media and political culture. While I don't follow national or regional politics in any detail, I'm super knowledgeable about what goes on in my tiny New England town, which would pretty much be a news desert if not for my other Substack, the "Nottingham Blog" covering town government. I regularly see politicians try to push responsibility off to experts. My observation of this process has led me to the opinion that these politicians think they're doing the right thing. They assume rather unquestioningly that the experts know what they're doing. While I don't think the politicians fear being accused of "epistemic trespassing," they fear being wrong. They lack confidence in their own judgment and they lack skill in questioning the experts.
For example, there was a case in which some citizens petitioned the town to accept a 200ft section of dirt road that was supposed to have been completed in the 1960s but wasn't completed until just recently. In the 1960s they just ran a bulldozer through and called it a "road." The new section was done to a much higher standard.
One Selectman first refused to approve it until the Highway Director said it should be done. He said he wasn't an engineer, so the town should pay for an engineer to do that. So the Selectman refused until the engineering firm said it was good. The engineering firm produced a document describing the road and the fact that it was the Selectmen's decision as to whether to accept the road. The Selectman continued to refuse because the engineering report didn't affirmatively say what the Selectmen should do.
I was thinking more of prominent national political figures (well, one in particular, the UK PM during Covid, who has made a career out of avoiding responsibility for anything). That sounds to me like a case of individuals not wanting to be accountable for what may well be understandable reasons, perhaps legal ones? I agree that’s an issue, though quite different from the ones I was trying to highlight here.
How much of this capture of experts is a result of electoral politics? The very human need to put everyone on a team is amplified during elections and simmers at a low boil between cycles.
Sortition provides a mechanism for expert input that isn’t necessarily politicized. It has shown some promise in solving identitarian issues by decoupling the voter from the larger political identities we all carry around.
Hubris is a much larger problem than "epistemic trespassing." Scientists, as a rule, know much less about their specific fields than they typically let on. Epidemiologist are in the right domain to influence public health policy, they just do not seem to know enough regarding their own specialty to properly inform policy makers. I don't mind a certain amount of "epistemic trespassing" if it leads to wise and informed decisions, something certainly lacking during the COVID pandemic.
Maybe hubris and trespassing can mean the same thing. However, through my previous occupation, I see "epistemic trespassing" as potentially positive when part of interdisciplinary collaboration. I think what you are saying is problems occur when an expert on one field, such as epidemiology, feels qualified to make policy decisions, decisions that should also involve experts in sociology, political science, and who knows what other fields. But in an interdisciplinary setting, there is nothing wrong with a political scientist asking an epidemiologist very difficult questions, to "trespass" on another expertise in order to come up with a solution satisfying for all.
I think it’s easy to lose sight of what trespassing is meant to be, and what people who call attention to it are objecting to. The point is not to make people stay in their lane. It is to prevent them from burnishing their credentials to give their opinions added weight, the weight that comes with authority. I see it as an anti-credentialist position. So of course people should offer their ideas, views and opinions and they should be assessed in accordance with how good they are.
I think what you're describing on the part of various experts as "epistemic trespassing" is really just their expressing an opinion. After all, THEY ARE NOT THE ONES MAKING THE LAWS!
So I think it’s really really important to distinguish between the claim that I’m attacking—your status as an expert bestows special weight on your pronouncements on things not directly in your area of expertise—and the claim I’d want to defend, which is that within certain limits that are hard to state, people should be able to say whatever the hell they want.
Hopefully elected leaders in govt. are smart enough to know when
a given expert is espousing things that reach beyond his area of expertise. And hopefully experts are smart enough to know when they overstep, and that they fail in their function here by overstepping . . . . But experts are experts, and there are good reasons to listen to them, even if there's the possibility this or that one may have difficulty not showing a political or policy bias. Also: they are not who is going to DECIDE on policy.
“Media, politicians and policymakers often don't want careful, qualified advice that acknowledges uncertainty; they want definitive recommendations that can justify their decisions and provide political cover.”
Another reason might be that it’s easier (time-wise) to compile a shorter list of expert contacts rather than a longer list; if your list of contacts includes epistemic trespassers, it can be shorter.
Yeah sounds right. It’s not that this *cant* work well and in some sense it’s unavoidable given the systems we have in place. But if you, like many, think these systems aren’t working that well then it’s important or identify this as the problem rather than the moralistic thing I’m implicitly critiquing in the piece.
I suspect part of the issue is that politicians are from relatively homogenous intellectual backgrounds (if they’re from intellectual backgrounds at all).
Roughly 40% of congress (to use an easy example) went to law school.
Somewhere around 30% have a background in business either as entrepreneurs or consultants.
Around 1% are engineers, and about 4% are doctors or nurses.
That is a high degree of cognitive concentration.
My suspicion is that congressional staffers are less diverse, with a lot of people with backgrounds on policy.
My half baked idea about how to improve our politics is to compel more cognitive diversity in electoral politics, and have more axes of representation than geography.
I would love to see representation by age cohort as well as representation by profession.
What to do about this? You point out that solving the problem is hard, but I would argue that it is framed as "impossible" because the axioms that define the system are in conflict. The interplay of expertise, politicians, and mass media, at least in Western societies, rules out the possibility of division of labor proposed by Kitcher - your descriptive evidence of this phenomena demonstrates it well. If we want his divisions to work, I might look at whether other systems manage to apply it with fewer contradictions.
I think looking at Eastern cultures suggests the problem is rooted in these system beliefs. In South Korea they routinely showed experts front-loading uncertainties (e.g. "this information could change within days") while retaining majority trust during COVID (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7952821/). Not perfect! But indicative that people have varying tolerances for uncertain experts.
Social identity theory seems to suggest that when we face major crises, group solidarities intensify, and that should have measurable effects on the behavior of their society. It also strips away a lot of complication, because tons of people are uniformly focused on a single threat - there are less confounding variables to consider.
This leaves me thinking of two directions of solution:
- Attempt to inject some Eastern collectivist behaviors into our culture (I'm not sure which ones might be causal or most compatible with Kitcher, it would take deeper deduction)
- Lean into the spiral of conviction, and experience a shock so severe that we realize our society cannot continue behaving this way, and we clean up from the rubble (kind of like your "I suspect we are fucked" point).
Great commend! I agree with you and tend towards pessimism, at least with regard to western democracies (well, most of them) for these reasons. I’m not sure you need such a philosophical shift though, as from individualism to collectivism. You need high levels of social trust and strong enough social ties, which many of the same countries had in the not too distant past despite the fact that they were in many ways no less individualistic than we are now.
Ah, I hadn't considered trust breakdown as something that ties a lot of this together, that makes a lot of sense! I'm interested in learning more - any recommendations for where I could look?
This is a prominent line in writing about vaccine hesitancy. Maya Goldenberg’s book, I think called Vaccine Hesitancy, is very good on this.
I found all of this illuminating, except that I’m confused about the mental health example. If not the psychologist, who is actually the expert on mental health?
Pretty sure he's referencing Jon Haidt and his new book. Haidt is a moral psychologist who's recently started writing about youth mental health issues and social media. Because of his significant platform, he has sway in the policy realm, but he's been criticized by leading developmental psychologists like Candice Odgers who have been doing this work for decades longer than him.
Yeah, with just enough plausible deniability that I don’t need to defend this reading of Haidt when challenged… (I’m default sceptical about claims like his because it just can’t be as simple as that)
Mmm… I get what you’re saying, but it does make the article pretty confusing. Someone like Emily Oster might have been a better example.
If politicians were to take responsibility, then wouldn't they be accused of "epistemic trespassing"? It seems that you've put them in a no-win situation.
Yeah I assume the reason politicians don’t take responsibility has something to do with our broader media and political culture. Not sure the fear is being accused of *epistemic trespassing*. It’s more that they don’t think their personal brands can take the hit. And they may be right which is another dimension of the problem.
I'm not sure about the influence of the media and political culture. While I don't follow national or regional politics in any detail, I'm super knowledgeable about what goes on in my tiny New England town, which would pretty much be a news desert if not for my other Substack, the "Nottingham Blog" covering town government. I regularly see politicians try to push responsibility off to experts. My observation of this process has led me to the opinion that these politicians think they're doing the right thing. They assume rather unquestioningly that the experts know what they're doing. While I don't think the politicians fear being accused of "epistemic trespassing," they fear being wrong. They lack confidence in their own judgment and they lack skill in questioning the experts.
For example, there was a case in which some citizens petitioned the town to accept a 200ft section of dirt road that was supposed to have been completed in the 1960s but wasn't completed until just recently. In the 1960s they just ran a bulldozer through and called it a "road." The new section was done to a much higher standard.
One Selectman first refused to approve it until the Highway Director said it should be done. He said he wasn't an engineer, so the town should pay for an engineer to do that. So the Selectman refused until the engineering firm said it was good. The engineering firm produced a document describing the road and the fact that it was the Selectmen's decision as to whether to accept the road. The Selectman continued to refuse because the engineering report didn't affirmatively say what the Selectmen should do.
I was thinking more of prominent national political figures (well, one in particular, the UK PM during Covid, who has made a career out of avoiding responsibility for anything). That sounds to me like a case of individuals not wanting to be accountable for what may well be understandable reasons, perhaps legal ones? I agree that’s an issue, though quite different from the ones I was trying to highlight here.
How much of this capture of experts is a result of electoral politics? The very human need to put everyone on a team is amplified during elections and simmers at a low boil between cycles.
Sortition provides a mechanism for expert input that isn’t necessarily politicized. It has shown some promise in solving identitarian issues by decoupling the voter from the larger political identities we all carry around.
I tend to dislike mad schemes for reforming our basic political structures (the Burkean part of me) but I have a lot of time for sortition.
Hubris is a much larger problem than "epistemic trespassing." Scientists, as a rule, know much less about their specific fields than they typically let on. Epidemiologist are in the right domain to influence public health policy, they just do not seem to know enough regarding their own specialty to properly inform policy makers. I don't mind a certain amount of "epistemic trespassing" if it leads to wise and informed decisions, something certainly lacking during the COVID pandemic.
I’d see hubris as closely connected to trespassing, and is perhaps an equally good word for what I mean here.
Maybe hubris and trespassing can mean the same thing. However, through my previous occupation, I see "epistemic trespassing" as potentially positive when part of interdisciplinary collaboration. I think what you are saying is problems occur when an expert on one field, such as epidemiology, feels qualified to make policy decisions, decisions that should also involve experts in sociology, political science, and who knows what other fields. But in an interdisciplinary setting, there is nothing wrong with a political scientist asking an epidemiologist very difficult questions, to "trespass" on another expertise in order to come up with a solution satisfying for all.
I think it’s easy to lose sight of what trespassing is meant to be, and what people who call attention to it are objecting to. The point is not to make people stay in their lane. It is to prevent them from burnishing their credentials to give their opinions added weight, the weight that comes with authority. I see it as an anti-credentialist position. So of course people should offer their ideas, views and opinions and they should be assessed in accordance with how good they are.
I think what you're describing on the part of various experts as "epistemic trespassing" is really just their expressing an opinion. After all, THEY ARE NOT THE ONES MAKING THE LAWS!
So I think it’s really really important to distinguish between the claim that I’m attacking—your status as an expert bestows special weight on your pronouncements on things not directly in your area of expertise—and the claim I’d want to defend, which is that within certain limits that are hard to state, people should be able to say whatever the hell they want.
Hopefully elected leaders in govt. are smart enough to know when
a given expert is espousing things that reach beyond his area of expertise. And hopefully experts are smart enough to know when they overstep, and that they fail in their function here by overstepping . . . . But experts are experts, and there are good reasons to listen to them, even if there's the possibility this or that one may have difficulty not showing a political or policy bias. Also: they are not who is going to DECIDE on policy.
“Media, politicians and policymakers often don't want careful, qualified advice that acknowledges uncertainty; they want definitive recommendations that can justify their decisions and provide political cover.”
Another reason might be that it’s easier (time-wise) to compile a shorter list of expert contacts rather than a longer list; if your list of contacts includes epistemic trespassers, it can be shorter.
Yeah sounds right. It’s not that this *cant* work well and in some sense it’s unavoidable given the systems we have in place. But if you, like many, think these systems aren’t working that well then it’s important or identify this as the problem rather than the moralistic thing I’m implicitly critiquing in the piece.
I suspect part of the issue is that politicians are from relatively homogenous intellectual backgrounds (if they’re from intellectual backgrounds at all).
Roughly 40% of congress (to use an easy example) went to law school.
Somewhere around 30% have a background in business either as entrepreneurs or consultants.
Around 1% are engineers, and about 4% are doctors or nurses.
That is a high degree of cognitive concentration.
My suspicion is that congressional staffers are less diverse, with a lot of people with backgrounds on policy.
My half baked idea about how to improve our politics is to compel more cognitive diversity in electoral politics, and have more axes of representation than geography.
I would love to see representation by age cohort as well as representation by profession.