How We Killed Expertise
(And why we need it back.)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/how-we-killed-expertise-215531
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From Todd Pierce: Pardon me for this lengthy response but this article is just one more self-serving attack upon the American victims of about 25 years of US destructive policies, reaching and maintaining a crescendo with 911 and the military rampage we’ve been on ever since. Not surprisingly, it comes from a member in good standing of the Military Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about.
This article should stand as amongst the best evidence of how America has been dumbed down and/or duped by so-called experts, beginning with those employed by our Military Industrial Complex, as the author of this piece is (and as was I as a now retired Army JAG Offficer). Furthermore, it is a textbook example of logical fallacies which are too numerous to list here, but it relies heavily upon "False dilemma (false dichotomy, fallacy of bifurcation, black-or-white fallacy) – two alternative statements are held to be the only possible options, when in reality there are more.” That is, by invoking Trump and Bannon, both deservedly held in contempt by any thinking person, we, with American’s limited binary way of thinking, are to believe that the “experts” who oppose them should in fact be once again elevated to that pedestal they resided on for so long. That would especially include those “experts” esconsed near Dupont Circle and doing business as AEI, the 21st Century minted warmongers at Brookings, JHU, etc., all of whom have promoted and perpetuated perpetual war at the expense of the U.S. and the world, with no accountability.
But the author of this fallacious piece has his own intellectual limitations it appears with the false facts and contradictions he cites to “prove” his point. As a disclaimer, I write not to defend Trump, Bannon, or the many radicalized Americans whom they have attracted. But those non-radicalized, the ordinary voters, I would argue, are more the product of the inherent radicalization psychological effect that a purported perpetual war with its incessant propaganda against “an” enemy has on a society; with that psychological effect driven by prominent neoconservatives, many of whom hold “expert” positions in high prestige institutions, with virtually no one anymore in disagreement, except over the priorities of who we should attack next.
So here are his main points:
> Since then, globalization and technological advances have created a gulf between people with enough knowledge and education to cope with these changes, and people who feel threatened and left behind in the new world of the 21st century.
> College administrators ponder dropping algebra from the curriculum because students keep failing it.
What are college administrators but professional educators who have achieved “expert” status within the educational field? As a parent in the 1980s - 1990s, the primary obstacle to my children being educated well was the unwillingness of the “experts” to challenge them educationally, with too many examples to cite here. But failing to teach math began as soon as they entered school with handing out calculators under the “theory” that children didn’t need knowledge anymore, or learn to think; we had digital machines to do that for them now. That wasn’t an idea driven from the bottom-up by parents, it was handed down by decree from the education "experts.” And now we lag behind some of the most economically backward countries in the world for math education.
> A significant number of laypeople now believe, for no reason but self-affirmation, that they know better than experts in almost every field.
While that is true, depending on how “significant” is defined, and is certainly true of those who have traded one set of experts for another set, such as Rush Limbaugh and those at Fox News, but after about 60 years of experience for those of us who are older, our own authentic experience has taught us skepticism of “experts,” because of experts themselves. Eat margarine, not butter, no wait, do the opposite, being the most obvious and simplest example. It isn’t necessarily that people believe their own ignorance stands in or is equal to expert knowledge but that expert knowledge has become like the weather. As in; "if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute and it will change."
> 'What have experts done for us lately?'" one USA Today columnist recently wrote, without irony. Somehow, such critics missed the successful conclusion of the Cold War, the abundance of food to the point that we subsidize farmers, the creation of medicines that have extended human life, automobiles that are safer and more efficient than ever, and even the expert-driven victories of the previously hopeless Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. Experts, in this distorted telling, have managed only to impoverish and exploit ordinary Americans; anything that has benefited others apparently happened only by mere chance.
>
The successful conclusion of the Cold War? One might expect such a claim from the military mindset of someone working at the Naval War College but it was a bit more complex than that and included near death crises such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had that been left in the hand of the military “experts,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, none of us might be here today with the US a nuclear wasteland. It was the non-expert, Kennedy, who was willing to go against and overule his “expert advisors” and probably saved us fron nuclear annihilation.
But to expert Nichols, with his other examples, it is a “distorted telling.” In the small town I’m originally from, it is indisputable that government policy with tax incentives encouraged the local factories to move either to Mexico and then China in the 1990s. How do I know that? The owners told me. But while that was taking place, American society was being sold the bill of goods by experts (from Wall Street and the WSJ, most prominently) that "we didn’t need no stinkin factories,” to paraphrase Cheech and Chong. We were a “service economy” now. Then Wall Street, with derivatives and other fraudulent financial products proceeded to destroy national economies in Europe (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, etc.) and do irreparable damage to the American economy and households. And Americans are to maintain unlimited faith in these experts? With their Golden Calves (and Tablets from some mountain, the mountain of debt we have, perhaps?)
> The experts, voters were told, waged wars they didn't know how to win, signed trade deals that depopulated America's towns and unleashed a plague of terrorism. Trump adviser Steve Bannon even required new White House staff to read The Best and the Brightest, the landmark study of the origins of the Vietnam War, as a cautionary tale about intellectual pinheads who rammed the United States into a ditch in Southeast Asia. But Bannon, like so many others, misunderstood the book's message, which was not about the domination of experts, but rather about what happens when experts are ignored. Before and during the debacle in Vietnam, actual experts on Asia and other subjects were pushed aside, often by people who thought their own intelligence and professional success in other endeavors (running a car company, for example) made them more capable.
This is really a good one. It’s self-evident to anyone but a professor at the Naval War College and other fanatical US militarists of the sort identical to those Germans who believed Germany would have won WW I if they hadn’t been “stabbed in the back.” Those fanatics have perpetrated a similar lie for the US and and its many wars, such as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. If we would only send more troops whenever the Generals ask for them, we are assured victory the so-called experts tell us, when the ordinary person on the street knows better and knows as well the costs are not worth even trying for the chimera of “victory.” But the Generals always call for more troops when their policies of random killing inevitably creates even more hostile enemies, and inevitable defeat.
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