Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Just Showed Us What Contempt for Expertise Looks Like" (NYT).
Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong? Obviously, autocrats have their "experts" too, and respecting them has done great harm. I think first of Josef Mengele, who earned a cum laude doctorate in medicine from the University of Frankfurt for a thesis dealing with genetics and who conducted genetic research at Auschwitz. That doesn't make genetics a "pseudoscience," but it does show that we'd be fools to think there's a binary choice between deference to experts and marginalizing them.
Here's the Wikipedia article about the Soviets' banning of genetics. I can see that those who did the banning regarded themselves as experts:
Some Marxists... perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the "struggle for survival" in Marxism applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), the struggle for survival in Darwinism is decided by individual random mutations. This was deemed a liberal doctrine, against the Marxist framework of "immutable laws of history" and the spirit of collectivism. In contrast, Lamarckism proposed that an organism can somehow pass on characteristics that it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring, implying that changing the body can affect the genetic material in the germ line. To these Marxists, a "neo-Lamarckism" was deemed more compatible with Marxism....
Ideology and political will distort science and the perception of science, even — or especially — among the highly educated. One must assume that this distortion is always going on, and we need the courage and morality to look for this distortion — especially when we like the results. That's where we make our worst mistakes.
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Based on education and experience I am an expert in molecular biology and in patent law. However, my experience with my own failings and the failings of other experts I have worked with, including Nobel prize winners, makes me distrust experts and their opinions. I don’t understand liberals blind faith in experts. Experts are human and have biases and faults.
Gessen's contempt for the expertise of the Cass report isn't autocratic at all.
“It won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized....”
Ah, the cri de cour of a small government conservative. I can only assume M Gessen is a far right Trump supporter who is eagerly looking forward to seeing what DOGE can do.
Snark aside, Gessen’s rhetoric strongly implies a belief in a noocracy or a technocracy.
Any trial lawyer knows you can get an expert to say anything. In every med mal case in this country, there are at least two expert doctors and they disagree.
This guy is a fucking idiot. And he failed to mention that the lock down and mask experts were totally wrong.
Why did Gessen write "genuine expertise" if not to admit that experts can go wrong?
No true genuine expert Scotsman.
Slippery slope argument.
A Hitler comparison would be a bit trite at this point. Second choice is Stalin.
If the “experts” don’t stop endorsing and practicing the chemical castration and mutilation of kids, they had best prepare themselves for vigilante justice. Which they will deserve.
This week, I went to a lecture in Burt County by an expert from the University of Nebraska. He wore red. I wore blue.
He was an expert on solar and wind. I asked him why carbon dioxide is considered pollution. He danced around but didn’t know the answer. I, of course, did. The reason is a 5-4 SCOTUS decision.
The CAGW scam would have been strangled in the crib if JP Stevens had switched his vote. One vote!
I should add that Kennedy and Souter were in the majority. They could have switched too. Stevens wrote the majority opinion so I blame him.
Because they had ignorant clerks co 2 is essential
Gessen, please tell us if it is the right or the left that claims genetics does not determine sex, but rather the whims of the individual and pseudoscience saying a person can change their gender at any time, which can also change their sex.
I think the past five years has shown us the folly of trusting experts.
Lawnerd wrote: "I don’t understand liberals blind faith in experts. Experts are human and have biases and faults."
I think it's less a matter of (nearly) blind faith in experts than it is blind faith in credentials, especially credentials from the right places.
PS. I have a similar background to Lawnerd's, I've traveled in similar circles, and I have reached similar conclusions. Even genuinely competent experts are subject to the same foibles and failings as the rest of us. Their greater powers, however they may be defined, often include greater powers of self-delusion.
1970
Lefty: Question Authority!!!!!!
Me: Definitely question authority, and do it smartly and with an open mind. Be prepared for the possibility that Authority is correct.
Lefty: You mindless Fascist!!!
Now
Lefty: Question Authority ??????
Me: Definitely question authority, and do it smartly and with an open mind. Be prepared for the possibility that Authority is wrong.
Lefty: You MAGA Fascist!!!
"Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions."
Like beating your child. Or raping your child. Or pimping out your child. Or cutting off your child's genitals. Which of those doesn't belong on the list?
Side note:
Wikipedia shares that M. Gessen uses "they/them" pronouns in English and "she/her" pronouns in Russian. Politics aside, I think that's interesting.
As a kid learning French, I had the sense that I really did think differently in it, especially as I became more competent in it. Metaphorically, my perceptions of people and ideas seemed more vividly hued in French than in English, where I saw more shades and pastels. "Florid in French," I might say. Perhaps counterintuitively, those perceptions made me more aware than ever of how incomplete my "expertise" in anything might actually be.
I also studied German. For reasons of time, I didn't reach the same level of proficiency. Nonetheless, I sensed a different character of thinking there, too. Let's just say I came away feeling that the French and the Germans seemed to me to be destined to be perpetual antagonists when using their native tongues.
I wonder how much of the relative peace in Europe over the past eighty or so years is due to the French and Germans increasingly communicating with each other (and us) in English.
Of course, the US 2nd Cavalry has something to do with it, too.
You don't have to be a doctor to know that women cannot become men, or vice versa. We have a Hippocratic Oath so very smart doctors won't push the boundaries of science by castrating children, or giving them cancer.
Claiming superiority to other human beings is another mark of autocracy.
"I'm an expert" = "I'm superior to you"
Autocrats might wreck the elites, but what they're really known for is all the damage they do to ordinary people.
Autocrats are also known for ideologies that hide or mask reality.
Why do we always go to Nazi Germany in search of doctors who twisted medicine to do all sorts of horrible experiments on people.
Our own government did the Tuskegee Experiments. They injected live syphilis into black guys. Then gave them fake treatments. They wanted to see what would happen as the disease progressed into later and later stages.
That experiment went on for 40 years. Not a single doctor - medical "experts" all - objected to it or its methods.
We are the Nazi's and we need to never forget that.
We are the baddies.
Don't believe me? After World War II, German experts who survived the war had to find work after having participated in the murder of 6 million Jews. There's only one place they could find it: The US government.
After our experience at the hands of "experts" during COVID, these people have a lot nerve attempting to lecture us now. They want to play God, and if objecting makes me a heretic, so be it. Screw them.
Hes a knave not a fool that much is clear.
Not true. The also worked for the Soviet government.
“Six feet apart,” said the ‘experts.’ There’s a distrust of self-proclaimed ‘experts’ for good reason, as their recent track record has been dubious at best. M. Gessen’s appeal to authority deserves to be laughed down scornfully.
No true knave could be such a fool.
Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions.
The sanctity of private family decisions isn't the issue. So-called experts are fine with meddling when it suits them. In a majority of states the experts have decreed that it's fine to ban conversion theory, thereby meddling in the family's private decision to obtain such counseling for an adolescent child. I'm guessin' that Gessen would have no objection to such meddling, since there are experts who support it.
Gays Against Groomers.
One would expect that, no? Does this make us NOT the baddies?
The left want to normalize 2 year olds being destroyed by the Trans-medical industry.
"Masks work" say the experts. It's bullshit, designed to create conditions where Democrats could wear masks while they do their crimes. This was illegal before.
Was this person in a coma during the Covid years?
The left want to normalize having sex conversations with 2 year olds, alone, in their rooms with them.
If, due to religious beliefs, parents choose to withhold medical care from a sick child, should that be their right as a private family decision ?
Only good smart leftists torture children in the name of science.
I will just point out that if you let your son walk one mile to school, the child protective services will come and have you arrested.
But it's OK to cut his weiner off. They won't arrest you for that.
Posit this: A child is raised in a family of zealous Christians. The child proclaims himself a true believer and wants to demonstrate his true belief to the world. He just knows that's who he is, and he wants to proclaim it. Somewhere along the way he gets the idea that it would be cool to have a large tattoo of a cross put on his forehead.. He's only ten years old but he knows that Jesus is the light and the way and he knows that a large cross on his forehead will help him keep on the right path. Every time he looks in a mirror he will be reminded of his faith and that cross on his forehead will help his mind think Christian thoughts. He believe this.......Should the parents encourage him in this belief? Does the state have any right to say he can't do this? After all, this isn't the same as female mutilation surgery or transgender surgery, right?.
Well...if I have the correct person, M. Gessen is an 'expert' on LGBTQ rights. FWIW. And she prefers to be known by 'they'.
I would start by asking anyone to define 'expert'. And I ask that because it seems our 'expert' class has gone the way of our institutions. That is, people don't trust or look to our 'expert' class like they once did. And it's no coincidence that both the institutions and the expert class are subject to more scrutiny than they used to be. They've earned that scrutiny. Nothing is as clean cut as they'd like to make it.
There are obviously people well schooled in certain subjects. Others have accrued more actual hands-on wisdom on certain subjects. And this applies to any and all areas of study ranging from physics to foreign policy, football to political theory. Personally, I prefer those who have both studied and worked in the field to those who have done one or the other, but not both.
Anyway, the idea of expertise took a great hit when we removed standards to get into schools, replaced those standards with a quest for checking off gender and color boxes. Removed serious curricula with social justice curricula. And handed out degrees for simply showing up the requisite number of years (or dollars paid). Once you have a few decades of graduates under these terms, the idea of expert becomes less...firm. And once the cracks appear in, let's say an expert on climate change, then we start seeing cracks in experts all over. We can't stop seeing the cracks.
Expertise isn't what it used to be. We can gain it back again, and I think it's important that we do. But it starts with standards. We currently have shifting ones at best.
Progressives like experts that confirm their biases and hatreds.
let's get the "genuine experts" to publish the studies they did on suicide rates for transitioned teens!
You know?
The studies ALREADY done, showing gender affirming treatments have NO affect on suicide rates.
The studies that they WON'T publish, because "People might take them the wrong way"
Many gays are not happy with the progress they made - being throw away by the radical trans-they-them-gender/child abuse crowd.
…yet another boring demand to accept our political policies without question. To be distracted with a discussion of science is to miss the point and further their goals. Reject that…
behind a pay wall:
Ideology in Medical Schools Threatens Everyone’s Health
Dr. Travis J. Morrell.
It is rumored Ms G has the complete works of Trofim Lysenko hidden in her home.
Medical schools have embraced radicalism
"I have witnessed CU Medicine’s educational and moral decline firsthand. In March, I filed a resolution with the Colorado Medical Society opposing transgender medical treatments for children. When my resolution came up for a vote in June, a strong majority of participating physicians supported it. That makes sense: We take an oath to “do no harm,” yet providing irreversible hormone treatments and surgeries to boys and girls is the definition of harm.
But at the 11th hour, my resolution suddenly and surprisingly lost. Why? Because a professor at CU Medicine emailed the student body and asked them to vote against it. More than 150 students did, sending my resolution to defeat and giving the impression that Colorado physicians support harming children so long as it happens in the name of transgenderism.
The professor’s email alone was disturbing. Professors shouldn’t harangue their students into taking political stands. That’s an abuse of their authority and antithetical to education. Medical educators should focus on doing their jobs, which last I checked, is teaching medicine."
More:
"The email made me wonder: Just how deep does the ideological rot go at CU Medicine?
I found the answer after the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, of which I’m a member, submitted a Colorado Open Records Act request. The findings, which I’m making public for the first time, show that radical ideology is rampant at CU Medicine.
To start, we found that students are afraid to speak out against the extremism. After the political professor sent his email to the student body, a faculty sponsor of the Catholic Medical Student Association responded, saying multiple students had privately expressed concerns with his hyper-divisive email. The faculty sponsor noted that students “struggle in an environment that sadly would punish them for openly speaking in the opposite direction.”
In other words, CU Medicine is so overrun with radicalism that students censor themselves so they don’t get punished for not toeing the party line."
The left ARE the modern day Nazis.
Experts, the people who brought us the food pyramid and told us saturated fats were evil.
Medical schools have embraced radicalism
Google erasing my posts again.
“Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of experts”
Friedrich August Von Hayek
My personal favorite were the "one way" arrows on the floor at the supermarkets.
It must be simply marvelous when genuine experts confirm all your beliefs and everyone who disagrees with you is malevolent, ignorant or both.
The label 'Genuine Expert' doesn't help us much.
Genuine experts often disagree. They are also subject to every human foible just like the rest of us. They lie. They are motivated by greed and ambition, by lust and the desire to have status, to be admired and to think well of themselves.
Genuine experts are political because political people control access to the resources experts need to do their work. Experts can be defunded, replaced, their reputations can be destroyed, they can be cancelled. New experts can be designated as required.
Which expert on experts should we turn to?
"Our own government did the Tuskegee Experiments. They injected live syphilis into black guys."
This is wrong. The infected patients got syphilis on their own but we're left uninformed and interested. A bit of a difference there
The struggle for survival is mostly confined within classes. The net result is that class structures reduce social conflict at the large scale. Marx got that completely wrong.
At the time of Lysenko, the split in biology was between Mendelians and Darwinists, a split that was resolved in the 1930's when the two were merged into the modern theory. Lysenko regarded himself as a Darwinist, but not a Mendelian. If you accept the Marxian view as universal, Lysenko wasn't wrong, the problem was that his hypothesis did not prove out in experiments. Scientific fraud to the rescue, a scenario we have seen play out several times since.
Must Read:
Medical schools have embraced radicalism
In today's politicized world, an "expert" can be self-proclaimed. Many of our "experts" are journalists and attorneys relying on progressive-liberal subjective opinions, with those opinions not objective fact, and often even contradicted by objective fact. Many professional "experts" are no more than indoctrinated master degree graduates with little experience or expertise.
I've witnessed many "experts" in my field who I wouldn't trust to provide competent counsel to clients relying on our profession skills. It's caused me to carefully consider "expert" advice received from other credentialed professionals, including doctors and lawyers, to obtain more information and 2nd opinion advice. I've run into lawyers who aren't competent, doctors who seem merely shills for Big Pharma, etc.
Transgender advocates as "experts" think it's not relevant to think about long-term consequence of medical interventions to "affirm" transgender children. They offer no consideration for permanence of gender-affirming medical care, hormonal therapies, and prescribed off-label medications for children. Those transgender "advocate-experts" are indulging in magical-thinking, refusing to acknowledge medical studies, other nations rejection of transgender medical interventions for children, lawsuits filed by transgender-intervention harmed young adults.
M. Gessen is Masha Geesen and she is a trans activist first and journalist second. And after 2020 she has picked the wrong hill to die on, and for all the wrong reasons. She writes that “Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions. In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly. Quackery will continue its ascent; expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized....” This is precisely the point that her opponents are arguing. When governmental authorities claim the right to take a minor child away from his or her family to perform irreversible surgeries on that child without informed consent, is this not meddling in “what should be private, family decisions”?
And the word “consensus” never belongs with words likd “science” and “expert.”
"It won’t stop with trans care. Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions."
They said the same thing about abortion and then various school districts and states did what they could to allow parents to be cut out of the decision entirely. They will do the same with this issue as well. Already have in a lot of cases, at least in terms of identity if not medical procedures.
Interesting that this "activist" journalist seems to think that bringing up the studies that challenge the groupthink among the "experts" who profit from juvenile transition surgery is "contempt for expertise". It is on the contrary a sign of respect to expect experts to be able to confront countering expertise. Instead we get temper tantrums by academics who have not developed regulation of emotions.
Purges are the necessary consequences of the philosophical foundation of Marxian socialism. If you cannot discuss philosophical differences of opinion in the same way you discuss other problems, you must find another solution—through violence and power. This refers not only to dissent concerning policies, economic problems, sociology, law, and so on. It refers also to problems of the natural sciences. The Webbs, Lord and Lady Passfield, were shocked to learn that Russian magazines and papers dealt even with problems of the natural sciences from the point of view of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. For instance, if there is a difference of opinion with regard to science or genetics, it must be decided by the "leader."
This is the necessary unavoidable consequence of the fact that, according to Marxist doctrine, you do not consider the possibility of dissent among honest people; either you think as I do, or you are a traitor and must be liquidated.
von Mises, Ludwig (1952). Marxism Unmasked
If a person thinks themself enough of an "expert" to dismiss any and all counterfactual evidence, that person is an ideologue, not an "expert"
"what should be private, family decisions". But of course, as in the case of abortion, though conveniently ignored in that case as well, trans "care" for children also involves medical professionals, whose work is always regulated. Plus, to belabor the obvious, we don't normally treat genital mutilation of minors as "private."
There is no science behind any of this,
It may be a bit of retconning Lysenko but it didn't hurt that the theory of learned behavior being heritable fit very well with the program of creating the New Soviet Man
Ann refers to the phrase "genuine consensus-." Equally worth thinking about is the phrase "expert consensus." Obviously, the truly settled parts of any science result in an expert consensus. In the newer, or cutting edge less settled parts of any science, "consensus" is the enemy of science. Just ask Galileo in the 1630s. The New York Times and writers like Gessen are in fact arguing for a priesthood, not any actual respect for science. The issues around trans and the medical interventions for trans people are anything but settled science, as the research now coming out of Europe makes crystal clear. That our own medical establishments seek to impose their fake "consensus" on us shows how little, not how much, they respect science, experts, or us.
In the very last post before this one, Dixcus managed to misquote Google's famous motto, getting two out of three words wrong: it's "Don't Be Evil", not "Do No Evil".
And here he is posting obvious mistruths again. Goldenpause corrects one, and he pretends that his lie makes no difference. Here's another: "They injected live syphilis into black guys." No, they didn't. The men already had syphilis, and they pretended to treat it, while providing placebos and observing the progress of the disease. That's bad enough, a horrible crime, but Dixcus adds an even worse accusation that is simply false.
Why does Dixcus feel entitled to tell lies? They're obviously not just clumsy mistakes, because any honest man would write an apology and correction when called on them. Dixcus just doubles down or ignores the correction, like the filthy liar he is.
On trans issues, the appeal to "expertise" is specious in any case. Even the Cass report relies on limited research. Evidence is modest at best. Long-term effects of trans "care" remain to be studied.
Nor can evidence get around the fundamental problem of kid trans treatment, namely the impossibility of informed consent--kids cannot judge the harm to future sexuality (and fertility) without any experience of such sexuality (or adult appreciation of fertility).
Transing kids is socially acceptable conversion therapy because it involves drugs and surgery like "real" medicine, not a Freudian talking cure.
Did I just write "mistruths" for "untruths"? How the Hell did that happen? Apparently lefty propaganda is so thick in the air - like a Shiba Inu duststorm - that it polluted my language, at least momentarily.
This comment raises an interesting point. Who gets to decide who is a “genuine” expert and who is an expert that is not “genuine”? (I phrased it that way for a reason.). Is this a government function? I note that Scott Atlas, Jay Battacharya, and Battacharya’s coauthors on the Great Barrington Declaration, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, were 100% right. The government-anointed experts who succeeded in suppressing them were wrong. And out in the real world it does not matter what the consensus is — Antony Fauci demonstrated how easy it is to whip ups false “consensus” using grant money and threats to withhold grant money. Expertise has little to do with credentials when so many well credentialed individuals show themselves so ready to prostitute their credentials for grant money and/or notoriety. It absolutely has everything to do with being right. Experts are expected to be right.
Puberty isn't just about sex - it's about brain development - and the unique hormones that aide the process.
How can anyone take someone as young as 2 - and abuse them with chemicals and other government approved Soviet-torture methods?
The gay man who started "gays against groomers'- is often harassed and lied about by the local democrat NBC(D) media. Other gay men use homophobic slurs against him.
Why? Because Radical Democratic Leftism is a Cruel Soviet Toxic Cancer.
They-Them is incorrect grammar. Also- it's a good way to spot an idiot.
An expert says, follow the curated science regardless of observation. A realist (Richard Feynman) says, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
"The only moments of obvious moral searching came when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she was dismayed by the similarities between the case before the court and Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case in which the court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage...."
This pedestal-setting moment made my bulls*t detector blow up. Is this the same justice that put her sharp intellect on display when asked to define what a woman is? "Not a biologist" Everybody else is either guffawing or gobsmacked, but not out peripatetic intrepid journalista.
It’s pretty obvious that Covid caused a sea change in terms of the public’s attitude towards “experts”.
Now do Climate Change.
The term 'expert' should be taken with a grain of salt. You can have degrees piled higher than the Sphinx and still be dumb as a post. You could be MENSA and have a zillion PhDs and if your outlook is warped by politics you would just be a charlatan!
No one person knows ANY subject 100% just cause we never have fully understood anything that well. There are still gaps in our knowledge.
Way to many 'experts' have their own agenda folks and one should beware of why they are pushing their shtick.
Biology is destiny. Gender dysphoria is a mental condition. How best to treat it in children? If your answer is to humor the patient's delusion and mutilate and poison his or her body, you are fool or a knave.
Remember when frontal lobotomies were considered by experts to be legit? The last one was performed in the US in 1967.
No syphilis was injected, To say that there was is a lie. The experiment gave placebos to some of those who ALREADY HAD syphilis. Get the story straight.
Goetz
The damage statements like this do to real expertise and science is horrendous.
Some things are definitely true and we know that. Other things are new and debateable. Transgender therapy is clearly one of those things. Nobody knows the right way to treat it. (Surgery and hormone therapies for children are probably not it!).
Leftist scientists care much more about leftist ideals than Truth. This has led many people to not believe any science anymore. Now we have charlatans convincing people that vaccines are bad and crackpots who thinks rapeseed oil is making them fat.
Experts change their positions all the time. For over 100 years, ulcers were thought to be caused by acidic food and stress. About 40 years ago, doctors in Australia found the presence of bacteria. Marshall and Warren studied biopsies from 100 patients with stomach ulcers, gastric inflammation, or duodenal ulcers. They found the bacteria in almost all of the patients. They could not convince the medical establishment even after publishing in 1984. Marshall drank a culture of the bacteria to prove it was the cause of ulcers. He developed gastritis, nausea, and vomiting, and cultures from his stomach grew the same bacteria. After 30 years, it became standard practice to treat ulcers with anti-biotics. They won the Nobel prize in 2005
After reading this and all the comments I think it's safe to say that this whole trans movement is modern day Lysenkoism. It's either genetics or trans you can't have both. Ketanji-Brown, publicly prostrating herself before the 'current thing', said she couldn't define woman because she wasn't a biologist. Biologists can define woman, it has to do with XX chromosomes.
Yes. The transgender "experts" are even worse. Many of them grabbed an opportunity to call themselves "experts" when the transgender ideology gained political clout and started taking off. The guy who wrote the policy on transitioning children for the American Academy of Pediatrics was a third year psychiatry resident when he wrote the guidelines. A guy in training, and a psychiatrist, not a pediatrician or an endocrinologist. A third year resident isn't any sort of expert in anything medical. He's only the most prominent example, the field is awash with self proclaimed experts.
Both eugenics and lobotomies were supported by experts. Now the mutilation of “transgender” children and gain of function research are supported by experts. What does this tell us about experts?
Whatever the phrase "what should be private, family decisions" is grounded in, it isn't expertise.
The left considers Paul Krugman an "expert" in economics. The accolades yesterday in response to his retiring from the NYTs were amusing. It matters not that Krugman has been incorrect in every major economic prediction over the past 40+ years . He wears his "Nobel Prize winner" certificate pasted to his forehead as if it gives him special powers and that's all the media sees or hears when listening to him speak. The certificate designates him as an expert and that is all that matters.
The "experts" in the early 20th century were in favor of eugenics. It's only in retrospect that the lines between science and pseudoscience are clear. We are still sorting that out when it comes to Freudianism. It's folly to think that climate change, let alone gender transition, is settled science.
The "Death of Expertise" (Tom Nichols) versus the "Suicide of Expertise" (Glenn Reynolds) has been a big controversy over the last 8 years or so. You can find some quotes from Nichols's book collected by a fan here. The fan is too easily impressed. I try plugging what's happening between Ukraine and Russia or Israel and the Palestinians into Nichols's paradigm and I find that the experts not only have different opinions -- but they also have different facts. There hasn't been a rejection of expertise or of reason or science, but rather a recognition that where real-world interests are involved, expert opinions (and expert "facts") will differ.
Even in situations where the fate of nations, peoples and the world aren't at stake, arrogance, vanity, envy and battles over funding shape expert opinion. As Henry Kissinger (or somebody else) said, academic politics are so vicious precisely, because so little is at stake. People have become rightfully skeptical about the experts, but for Nichols it's all about authorized science and expertise versus the rule of QAnon shamans.
If SNL brought back the "Pat" character, "M. Guessin'" would be a great name for Pat's boyfriend/girlfriend.
When you're a journalism professor preaching respect for expertise, it might be a cool idea to defer to the Supreme Court on questions of law.
Chopping off body parts and mutilating children is not heathcare. Deliberately poisoning children with pharmaceuticals and permanently sterilizing them is not healthcare either. Unfortunately the professional class has been polluted by credentialed idiots whose sole accomplishment is checking the right boxes and providing theses written to show the " correct" conclusions and supporting "data" without regard to the repeatability accuracy of the calculations. Such experts are no more than the typical deposits found in an unflushed toilet and just as foul. These experts and their supporting Institutions and medical facilities should be sued into bankruptcy and collapse. What vile, evil creatures they are.
The NYT is a polemicist for evil and ignorance. The trans issue is not about persecution of trannies. It is about protection of women and children from trans activists. The "expertise" favoring mutilating children and bullying women is financial and political.
They already committed to "Chris."
I find all the expertise about expertise I need right here at Althouse.
This is an awkward time for expertisists. We just went through a time when much, if not most, of what the experts told us about COVID-19, ModRNA vaccines, etc, turned out to be wrong, and often fatally wrong. So, pardon us, when we don’t believe, on faith, everything your personally selected “experts” say as they highly curate their definition of science. Curate, of course, meaning that someone, most often with an axe to grind, has gone through the “science” and determined what to accept and what to reject, to arrive at their preconceived conclusions.
FJB’s Solicitor General(-ette) went on and on about the settled “science”. No doubt the same “science” that this author is bemoaning was ignored. Their problem is that properly conducted litigation is an adversarial process, and the SC majority had before them contrary, probably more compelling, evidence. So, their real complaint is not that the majority isn’t listening to expertise, but rather that they are listening to expertise that they don’t agree with.
I think "experts" ,genuine experts, in any field are few and far between. In any field. While being a professor of constitutional law I think Althouse would be slow to admit she's an expert on constitutional law. There are simply too many aspects to be a complete expert.
This has been a bad couple of years for experts. Experts know a lot about their chosen subject, but they don't know everything. They should announce their findings and recommendations with a little more humility......It wasn't just decades but rather centuries and even a millennium where the Galen system of purges was the recommended treatment for various illnesses. Serendipity has been responsible for many advances in human development. Too great a reliance on expertise and dogma keeps people from thinking outside the box or recognizing a serendipitous discovery........The world's next great leap forward after the Industrial Revolution was the Computer Age. The experts all thought nuclear energy was going to change the world, and Turing's Machine was put in a box for decades.
From what I understand, this case isn't so much about expertise as it is about age-appropriateness. No matter how much children think that they want something, there are things that they need to wait on until they are adults. Children can't get tattoos, buy alcohol, drive cars, have consensual sex or go to war. And I'm sure that if you shopped around long enough, you'd find an "expert" who will maintain that little Johnny will be scarred for life if he can't get his exploding skull tattoo by his 13th birthday. When it comes to gender reassignment, the negative risks of doing it to an underage child outweigh any possible benefit.
But like I keep saying, we have developed a society that, instead of encouraging children to work through their problems and deal with some unpleasant things, encourages adults to give into children's problems to avoid hurting their feelings.
The government is already trying to meddle in these kinds of decisions. In California, the legislature passed a bill where parents can have their children taken away by the state if the parent's don't "affirm" the child's chosen gender identity. Luckily, Newsome vetoed it.
Here is some of the text:
3011. (a) In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following:
(1) (A) The health, safety, and welfare of the child.
(B) As used in this paragraph, the health, safety, and welfare of the child includes, among other comprehensive factors, a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression. Affirmation includes a range of actions and will be unique for each child, but in every case must promote the child’s overall health and well-being.
It's very sad to see what's become of Masha Gessen. She wrote a very good history of the Soviet Union's attempt to set up a province for the USSR's ethnic Jews, the Jewish Autonomous Homeland, in Eastern Siberia. Needless to say, it's not a topic much discussed anywhere else in English, so it was a welcome addition to Soviet history.
Unfortunately, she's gone around the bend since. Here's the book, which I do recommend.
Is wife beating a 'private family decision'? How about Sutee? How about corporal punishment for a child? I suspect that the same people who are horrified by unruly kids getting swatted at school are just fine with kids have their perfectly normal, functioning bodies mutilated. And all for the sake of keeping up with the Latest Thing. Cocktail party: "What? You mean your kid isn't trans? My little Bobbie has been trans since he was four. Yes, we're as proud as we can be! Can you believe those evil, knuckle-dragging bumpkins would make him go through life in the wrong body?!!"
I am an attorney and have been one for 28 years. I deal with public utility law. I defer all other questions, saying "Find an attorney in that area, the last time I dealt with (questions) was law school." You must know the limitations of your expertise, and eschew the ego trip. Too many do not.
Is this coming from the side rejecting X Y sex determination? In Soviet America the science pseudos you!
It is a sure way to determine if their expertise is "genuine"
Read about Rosemary Kennedy. It is a heartbreaking story. Not unlike many of the stories of trans children.
"Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns."
Because of course she is.
Contempt for expertise is not the only autocratic force at work in the case of S.B.1 [the Tennessee law banning puberty blockers and hormones for transgender children]
Bzzt, bullshit.
The Tenn Legislature had access to actual expertise, like the Case report.
They also had access to the lying whores who push chemical and surgical castration of children because they make big bucks off of it.
Happily, they ignored the whores.
I expect the court to uphold the Tennessee law
As it should, because there's NOTHING in the US Constitution that prohibits States from outlawing mutilating children.
Governments at different levels will be emboldened to meddle in what should be private, family decisions.
So, you want to get rid of teh FDA? you want to end the concept of "prescription drugs", and just let people inject, snort, etc whatever they want?
No?
Then you need to STFU with your shining, which comes to nothing more than "whah, those people won't suck my dick and pretend I'm a God!!11!"
In and out of government, people who know what they are talking about will be supplanted by people who perform their loyalty most loudly
No, that's what happened with the "Trans standards of care". Tenn is fighting to reverse that. Good for them.
Quackery will continue its ascent;
The quacks are the ones claiming, without a shred of scientific evidence, that chemically and surgically castrating children while addicting them to drugs for the rest of their lives qualifies as "heath care".
expert consensus, not only in medicine but in all the disciplines that enable us to know and navigate the world, will be marginalized...."
And that is properly so, because in everything from finance to public health, the "expert class" has shown they are nothing more than political whores
And the word “consensus” never belongs with words likd “science” and “expert.”
This. 1000x this
My theory is that the greater the stupidity, the greater the intelligence behind it.
A thousand years from now, when quackery, deference to authority, and medical ethics are discussed in whatever replaces the textbook, Dr. Mengele and the perpetrators of frontal lobotomies and the Tuskegee experiments will still be well remembered and held up as exemplars of evil, perverted science gone mad.
And the doctors who, over the past ten years or so, have mutilated and sterilized mentally ill children, and deprived them of any capacity for sexual pleasure, and ensured that they would live lonely, unhappy lives on the fringes of society, will be prominently portrayed alongside them.
I see Feynman was mentioned above. His entire commencement address at Caltech is relevant here:
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."
Of course, many of the expert evildoers included Fauci, Birx, and Walensky completely fail the Conventional Honesty test too.
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