Expertise Matters
Some signs of hope and of deep concern due to Trump appointees.
I will admit to a deep bias in favor of expertise. I once thought that holding such a view was not so much a specific point of view, but rather simply the proper way to understand the pathway to good and proper outcomes. If you want a nice piece of furniture built, for example, you hire a carpenter. Further, there is a strong correlation between the skills, knowledge, and experience (you know, the ingredients of expertise) and the quality of the product produced.
I will confess to being the kind of weirdo who thinks that humanity’s achievements, including the fact that I have all my teeth, I can trust the general safety of my food and water, and I am typing this out on a device the size of a notebook and that you are reading it in some far-flung place that isn’t standing over my shoulder in my home office to all be the results of expertise.
But, you know, what do I know? I’m not the President of the United States, who seems more than a bit unfazed by the need for genuine expertise. After all, who needs experts when so many people are saying so many things?
Take, for example, as per Lisa Needham at Public Notice, Lindsey Halligan’s bad bad week. The whole piece is worth reading in full. The short version is that Halligan, a former insurance lawyer appointed to be a US Attorney because the real ones wouldn’t pursue the Comey indictment (see here), is making a hash of the case. The linked piece details several rather important ways in which she botched the grand jury process and probably has done irrevocable harm to the prosecution.
Now, given that it is clearly the case that Trump is going after Comey for revenge and not justice, the fact that Halligan doesn’t know what she is doing is good news. Moreover, I take some solace in this particular bit of incompetence as a more competent authoritarian-wannabe would have appointed a more competent person to be the prosecutor and would have found a better way to attack his enemies. Trump, who is definitely engaging in an authoritarian abuse of power by ordering the prosecution of his enemies, thankfully does not understand how best to accomplish his goals.
So while I find his intentions and goals to be excrable, I find some level of hope in his utter incompetence in achieving them, since his lack of respect for expertise is working to democracy’s and justice’s advantage in his case.
Unfortunately, giving power to the inexpert, if not the simply delusional, has real negative consequences. To wit, via Reuters: US CDC adopts Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views on recast website.
The U.S. public health agency’s website was changed to say, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
This is, of course, mumbo-jumbo. As a former CDC official noted this morning on NPR, studies haven’t ruled out that umbrellas cause cancer either.
Scientists took issue with statements on the website that studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism, arguing that it is “exploiting a quirk of logic.”
“You can’t prove something never happens,” Jake Scott, a professor at Stanford Medical School, wrote on Substack. “Scientists can’t prove vaccines never cause autism because proving a universal negative is logically impossible.”
But I guess magic is at play, since no one seems to know how the website was changed.
The website change happened without the consultation of CDC staff who were studying autism, said one CDC scientist who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for HHS, defended the change and did not address questions on who had ordered it.
Kennedy cleared the way for CDC policy changes in August, when he fired Director Susan Monarez over vaccine policy. The agency is now led by acting director and deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill, who is not a scientist.
I mean, why would you want a scientist in charge of the CDC? The gut knows what the gut knows, amiright?
Here we have a cause in which appointing someone without expertise is going to have long-term damage to the country. Kennedy is actively destroying the actual capacities of the HHS and is utterly undermining public trust. More people are going to forgo vaccinating their children because of all of this. This will literally lead to unnecessary deaths.
So while I sincerely take some solace from the utter incompetence (to the point of farce) of people like Halligan and what it says about the capacity of Trump to engage in a real authoritarian deepening, I mourn the destruction of state capacity represented by people like RFK, Jr.
This ties into something I’ve been thinking about over the past few days, which is why Trump’s absurd attempts to deny food prices are high aren’t landing. Denying reality is nothing new for Trump, but it’s hard to think of him claiming something so obviously false to so many people.
Health and medicine have always been much easier to fool people about, which is why Trump’s attempts to minimize Covid in 2020 did convince large segments of the populace, and it’s why the anti-vax movement can exist at all. A single trip to the grocery is enough to realize Trump’s claims about prices are false, but there is no individual experience that can tell us anything about broad medical questions like the impact of vaccines. Even if an anti-vaxxer’s kid contracts measles, that in itself doesn’t prove anything. The only legitimate reason to accept that vaccines work, and that there’s no evidence they’re responsible for rises in autism rates let alone deaths, is because it’s been verified through clinical trials. Even reading about all the problems in Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 paper requires, at some point, putting one’s trust in experts. It’s not something you can “feel” at the individual level like you can feel the impact of the grocery bill. And the war against expertise appeals deeply to people’s narcissistic need to be privy to secret truths all the hoity-toity experts with their advanced degrees want us not to know about just because they think they’re smarter than us and trying to control the sheeple.
@Kylopod:
It’s not just about Trump’s denial of the truth. This “secret truths” is the basis of Fox News’ entire business model. “We’re telling you these secrets that the elites and the Deep State don’t want you to know.” It is remarkably immune to debunking, because if you buy the underling premise, any debunking by an expert is simply a part of the secret keeping.
Problem is, Fox News and Trump apparatchiks can’t follow you around the grocery store reassuring you that the prices you are paying aren’t real.
@Scott F.: I have come to think intuition plays major role in the world. Intuition not only provides a ready answer, it conveys belief in that answer. Most people have no real understanding of history, science, economics, what have you. But they have intuition, which tells them some things are true, which is largely believing things that make them feel good. Or often make them feel outraged. And most people, us here included, make the error of assuming other people are like us. They, and especially Trump, believe what they believe because they believe it. And they don’t realize that real expertise works in a completely different way.
@gVOR10: Ye olde “common sense.”
There’s an even crueler twist here: Among the things “they” don’t want you to know is how addictive oxycontin is. And “they” includes the Sackler family. The list goes on, because the corporate world – and it includes some scientists – have breached faith and have tried to control the sheeple.
The problem is that they guy purporting to rescue you is one of Them. The rescue is a scam.
I am torn between two possibilities:
1) All these non experts are there because they are the ones who will perpetrate a scam.
2) Trump is a giant poster-boy for Dunning-Krueger.
Given the critical value of “confidence” in Trump’s way of doing things, and in perpetrating scams, it maybe could be both.
@Scott F.:
I agree. But it’s worth noting that this is also part of the GOP’s increasing capture of crackpot beliefs that used to exist, at least partially, on the left. RFK himself, let’s not forget, spent decades identifying as a left-leaning Dem–one who promoted not only anti-vax beliefs but other conspiratorial thinking that had some currency on the left. (I remember reading an article by him in 2008 in which he suggested the Republicans were about to steal the election just like they did in 2004 with the Diebold voting machines.) I’ve talked about this before, but I think the pandemic was a pivotal moment that pushed certain types of Dem-leaning voters toward the GOP due to backlash against the scientific agencies’ Covid response as well as the preponderance of online election-related conspiracy theories that year that are part of what led to Jan. 6. (Certainly Fox played a strong role in that among voters who were already Republican, but it did include some formerly Democratic voters. I remember reading about one of the Jan. 6ers who was once an Obama canvasser.) Then there was the backlash against the Covid vaccines themselves, which ended up bolstering the much older movement opposing vaccines in general.
Of course scientific and medical crackpottery has been in the GOP for a long time, from creationism to global warming denial, but I think since 2020 it’s become more intense and central than ever before.
I know somebody who lost their mind due to being pro-Israel. They can no longer handle normal society–museums, books, movies, medicine and vaccinations, the news. Society is out to get them, trick them, force others to believe the untruths. They’ve said once or twice to me that the world is like a simulation/video game because it doesn’t make any sense why Israel is being blamed for killing Palestinians in Gaza or why the doctors/medical professionals think Trump and RFK Jr are wrong.
It’s like the difference between having conspiratorial beliefs about the JFK assassination and thinking that the CIA is out to silence YOU in 2025 because of your work on their role in killing JFK. Two different beliefs, really. And it’s the latter which seems to be captured by the internet and channeled by Trump and MAGA.
@Modulo Myself: Being pro-Israel is one thing. Having relatives or acquaintances that were murdered or kidnapped on Oct 7 is quite another.
The latter is something I can’t quite imagine. I don’t really know anybody that lives in Israel. However, I do know people who have family there, and go to visit sometimes. It’s a big stressor for them. Some people can handle it, but some don’t do so well.
Sometimes I get pinged by things that activate old wounds, and it takes some time and some work to get me back to neutral and more-or-less rational.
Witkoff is the other prime example of Trump rejecting expertise, with disastrous consequences. Instead of sending the Secretary of State or at least a seasoned senior diplomat to discuss a possible end to the Ukraine War, accompanied by a team of experts on the history of the conflict, Trump sent a New York real estate buddy to talk directly to Putin. “Oh and Steve, do Gaza while you’re over there, will you? And see if you can stitch up a deal with Iran. No no, no need to take a bunch of public servants with you. You’ve got common sense, you’ll do better working solo.”
The result is the idiotic “plan” that Trump has now given Ukraine four days to accept.
Expertise used to matter. When it comes to our managing our heathcare and disease control systems it seems to me that … RFK Jr. his staff and adherents are definitely in the Dunning-Kruger and Freddie Krueger zones.