The lesson of the times
I think if there is one overarching lesson that we can learn from the last 10 years of American culture, it's this: someone who is an industry leading expert in any particular field is no more authoritative in any other domain than any other average person.
We are seeing our culture dominated by people who become rich, or become standard bearers, or leading-edge thinkers in a specific field of study, who are then elevated by their accomplishments as authorities and some other field of study, and we all fall for it.
You can think of a lot of examples of people like this period. Just because someone became rich through manufacturing doesn’t mean they should be listened to about crypto. Just because someone is a neuroscientist doesn’t qualify them to speak on security profiling. Just because someone invented a new technology doesn't qualify them to speak with expertise on, for example, saving the lives of people caught in a cave under water in Thailand.
Specifically I was thinking about this today because I was reading yet another “open letter” complaining about “wokeness”, in this case about MIT. But you don’t need to know the individual details of this letter, and I refuse to link to it, because you've seen this kind of open letter many times before. And it really is saying nothing new. In the end, mostly what these writers ( who are overwhelmingly cis white men) want is to get us all back to the basics of individual merit free of our identities, free of systemic biases, free of labels. (You know, I think really none of us have a problem with this vision as a final utopia that we can all live in. However, most of us only get between 50 and 90 years of life. And I think it's safe to say that we could forecast that this perfect world of meritocracy will not be arriving anytime within our lifetimes. So we all have to wrestle with how to live in an imperfect world with systemic prejudices baked in, and whether to fight against them, or game them, or some other alternative.)
I wish that when people would criticize stuff like wokeness they were more intellectually rigorous about how they approach it. I actually think there are probably some legitimate criticisms against the most enthusiastic activists for woke sensibility. I think it potentially causes a lot of problems, especially if you fold in consequences of how wokeness can be misapplied in real world circumstances. But the screed I was reading today wasn’t even understanding basic terminology like “diversity” and “intersectionality” correctly. If your sense of the base definitions of a subject are more distorted and less accurate than your average high school student, maybe you should put down the pen and read up a bit.
In all today, through reading yet another cranky blatherstorm, I was smacked with a triple banger of three white men who individually were experts in computer science, robotics, and molecular biology speaking about socialology, racism, and misogyny, and how the discourse around these subjects are pernicious antithoughts that will eventually devour the flesh of our great academic institutions. Just absolute drivel.1
Which brings me back to my first and main point: just because someone is an expert at one thing does not make them an authority in a different thing2. Kanye West is a genius at making music and a genius at pretty much nothing else. Aaron Rodgers is a genius at throwing the football and nothing else.
Sam Harris.
Dave Chapelle.
Elon Musk.
You can be Albert Einstein and still wake up on a Sunday morning, go out on your porch and yell at clouds and maybe a few more people will listen to you, because you published the theory of special relativity.
But you’re still just an old man.
And they’re still just clouds.
Postscript: Of course the exceptions are brilliant generalists who make the very idea of synthesizing concepts and reaching greater understanding their domain of expertise, like me, which is why you should take my comments above as authoritative, and also I’m good at improv.
There’s a parallel essay out there for me to write, which is that all of this is medium-smart person’s version of the “death of expertise”.
This is true even at extremely granular levels: you can be an expert at rugby union and terrible at rugby league. You can be a genius at stand-up comedy and awful at sketch. You can be a world-class scholar of Constitutional law and not be able to argue your way out of a parking ticket.