If you think it’s important that people defer to “experts”, then it should also make sense that people should decide which people are “experts” by deferring to “expert experts”.
There are many groups that claim to be the “experts”, and ask that the public only listens to them on broad areas they claim expertise over. But groups like this also have a long history of underperforming other clever groups out there.
The US government has a long history of claiming “good reasons based on classified intel” for military interventions, where later this turns out to basically be phony. Many academic and business interests are regularly disrupted by small external innovators who essentially have a better sense of what’s really needed. Recently, the CDC and the WHO had some profound problems (see The Premonition or Lesswrong for more on this).
So really, groups claiming to have epistemic authority over large areas, should have to be evaluated by meta-experts to verify they are actually as good as they pronounce. Hypothetically there should be several clusters of meta-experts who all evaluate each other in some network.
For one, there’s a common mistake to assume that those who have spent the most time on a subject have the best judgements around everything near to that subject. There are so many subjects out there that we should expect many to just have fairly mediocre people or intellectual cultures, often ones so bad that clever outsiders could outperform them when needed. Also, of course people who self-selected into an area have all sorts of bias about it. (See Expert Political Judgement for more information here)
It’s pretty astounding to me how clear it is we could use more advanced evaluation for these claimed experts, how many times these groups have over claimed their bounds to detrimental effect, and how little is done about it. More a policy of, “I’m going to read a few books about this one particular case, and be a bit more clever if this one group of experts fails me next time.” Such a policy can easily overshoot, even. This has been going on for literally thousands of years now.
If you think it’s important that people defer to “experts”, then it should also make sense that people should decide which people are “experts” by deferring to “expert experts”.
There are many groups that claim to be the “experts”, and ask that the public only listens to them on broad areas they claim expertise over. But groups like this also have a long history of underperforming other clever groups out there.
The US government has a long history of claiming “good reasons based on classified intel” for military interventions, where later this turns out to basically be phony. Many academic and business interests are regularly disrupted by small external innovators who essentially have a better sense of what’s really needed. Recently, the CDC and the WHO had some profound problems (see The Premonition or Lesswrong for more on this).
So really, groups claiming to have epistemic authority over large areas, should have to be evaluated by meta-experts to verify they are actually as good as they pronounce. Hypothetically there should be several clusters of meta-experts who all evaluate each other in some network.
For one, there’s a common mistake to assume that those who have spent the most time on a subject have the best judgements around everything near to that subject. There are so many subjects out there that we should expect many to just have fairly mediocre people or intellectual cultures, often ones so bad that clever outsiders could outperform them when needed. Also, of course people who self-selected into an area have all sorts of bias about it. (See Expert Political Judgement for more information here)
It’s pretty astounding to me how clear it is we could use more advanced evaluation for these claimed experts, how many times these groups have over claimed their bounds to detrimental effect, and how little is done about it. More a policy of, “I’m going to read a few books about this one particular case, and be a bit more clever if this one group of experts fails me next time.” Such a policy can easily overshoot, even. This has been going on for literally thousands of years now.