{"id":454,"date":"2007-08-14T09:40:28","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T13:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=454"},"modified":"2007-08-14T09:40:28","modified_gmt":"2007-08-14T13:40:28","slug":"special-relation-to-the-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"Special relation to the facts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a comment on yesterday’s post about expertise<\/a>, frequent commenter Matt K observes:<\/p>\n

>If I need my car fixed I go to an automotive mechanic and not a plumber. When I need to get a good handle on some set of facts, say the historical\/cultural circumstances of Iraq, I seek the knowledge of academics who are experts in that area. Politicians and their lackeys (aka pundits) are NOT the relevant experts on almost any matter. I don\u2019t understand why a large bulk of the American public finds this hard to believe.<\/p>\n

>We live in a society where we put a lot of trust into experts. Experts are people who we believe not only have more knowledge than we of certain subjects, but also who we believe are qualified to form solid well-informed opinions on those subjects, opinions that we can use to make good decisions. Pundits are certainly not experts, so we should trust there opinions no more than we would trust the opinion of any other non-expert. So we need to focus closely on their arguments since they have no special relation to the facts.<\/strong> And, when actual experts come to conclusions that differ from pundits we should cast a very critical eye toward the pundit\u2019s arguments.<\/p>\n

>So my point is that it is a very good thing to evaluate arguments found in op\/ed pieces, but if we want to show the wider public the biggest weakness behind such foolish argumentation we need to help them understand the difference between experts and non-experts. Experts can make foolish arguments too, even in their area of expertise. But, the argument of the expert should begin at a different status than the argument of a non-expert. And, perhaps if Goldberg understood that then he wouldn\u2019t say such foolish things.<\/p>\n

He makes I think a number of important points about our impoverished public discourse. At the risk of generalization, public discourse (and by that I mean stuff that you’ll find on an op-ed page, or other similar public forum) is largely run by invested advocates. These are (1) pundits, people whose sole function consists in partisan advocacy of some variety (and there are many varieties–more on that another time), (2) members of ideologically defined “think tanks” whose sole function is, wait for it, advocacy (on special issues such as the economy, foreign policy, “family values” and so on) or (3) actual partisan political operatives (members of congress, or the administration) whose function again is to, you guessed it, advocate for their position. Don’t bother pointing out exceptions to the rule. They are few (Paul Krugman is a real economist at an Ivy League institution, but, at times unfortunately, he’s also a general pundit of everything).<\/p>\n

It’s fairly rare that anyone other than these three classes of people finds her or his way onto an op-ed page. And now a number of rather famous bloggers types have simply replicated the kind of generalized a priori pontificating proper to the print pundit. You can probably guess who I mean. This is really unfortunate. The neat thing about blogging (not ours of course) is that it gives you greater access to people who know things. It’s too bad that some have chosen to replicate all of the defects of the op-ed page. <\/p>\n

Back to the point. Among those who fall outside of these classes are academic (as well as other) experts. For the reasons Matt states above–the car mechanic reasons–you’d think we’d hear more from people with the kind of basic knowledge of the sundry areas of human knowledge. I think I can speak for a lot of people when I say that I don’t know much about anything, really. I’m especially ignorant of Middle Eastern cultures, history, economics, military strategy, to give a few recent and relevant examples. When called upon to think about these matters, I follow the advice of Gene Hackman in Heist: I think of someone who knows more than I do and I ask: what would she do? <\/p>\n

After all, so many questions of vital public interest differ very little from the kinds of questions that interest me on a daily basis: how do I make crispy French fries? Start by asking Alton Brown. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a comment on yesterday’s post about expertise, frequent commenter Matt K observes: >If I need my car fixed I go to an automotive mechanic and not a plumber. When I need to get a good handle on some set of facts, say the historical\/cultural circumstances of Iraq, I seek the knowledge of academics who … Continue reading Special relation to the facts<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}