Unfortunately, so many of our experts have gone way outside their field of expertise or come to their stated opinion due to the ideological assumptions, financial conflicts of interest, or desire for social status. In a very complex world, subject matter expertise really matters, but I am afraid the above factors often trump real expertise in the social arena.
It’s a useful conceptual distinction. I would note that these categories can be quite blurry. Technocrats like Fauci might be considered hybrid experts/elites. There are also qualitatively different kinds of elites. On Rob’s definition, Britney Spears is elite (she is judged by “wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel”), and so are Francesca Gino, Donald Trump…
The true lesson of Covid is surely one of the establishment using a crisis in order to grow its wealth prestige and power. I’d suggest that is more significant than some clowns getting things technically wrong on podcasts. Also, I’m highly sceptical of the assertion that the vaccine adds meaningfully if at all to natural immunity and don’t need to look this up to know it is probably more true than not. In much the same way as we did not need science to tells that masking and mask mandates were self evidently bull shit. It was this over reach which made people sceptical of things they ought to have believed eg no one over 50 should have declined the vaccine
Well, this is one of Rob's shallowest posts. It covers a subject in which he has no personal expertise - no more than any of us can observe. Like many who gain recognition for a single, profound insight like "luxury beliefs," he seems to feel entitled to continue offering insights with an air of expertise. Some are decent, though often already widely known, while others, like the post mentioned here, fall flat... But then again, same can be said of Nathan's post here - minus any profound insights by the author.
While I have quibbles with a few of the specifics (eg I’m not nearly as confident in lab leak as you are), this is by and large a fantastic essay about a topic most err one way or the other on. Nicely done.
Regarding the last few paragraphs were Musk is mentioned, that seemed like a cheap shot. Twitter was never a profitable venture, only kept afloat by a never ending stream of politically motivated advertising revenue. With that gone, Musk has taken a huge personal hit. Sloppy fiction is annoying, but also a marker he isn't beholden to the same institutional forces that have persecuted others like yourself all these years.
That is the extent of my objection, otherwise good piece. Gave me lots to ponder on.
"The floodgates really opened in 2022 when Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it a 'free speech' platform with almost no attempt to enforce any standard of accuracy or ethics." - What is the cheap shot? I'm just reporting the facts.
I was glad when Musk ended the censorship regime. It turned out to have consequences that I didn't anticipate.
And if not for musk taking over X, BlueSky would never have been invented. It's a good counterpoint. Better to have both than just one. If you prefer the old Twitter experience, go there.
A partial solution for fixing alt-media could be to create more YouTube response videos to counter misinformation and explain why it's wrong. They're basically peer-review, but for YouTube videos.
Nah, you'd be surprised. They do help to change people's minds. If nothing else, they tend to be educational, even for people who don't already buy into the misinformation.
I have no doubt that such people exist, but how do you prevent the effort from devolving into the type of reaction slop that already plagues YouTube? Even if you show your work, at some point the exercise becomes so esoteric that the viewer is still just deciding based on vibes.
Stated another way, the ideal is Common Sense Skeptic, but it's much easier to be Thunderf00t.
That already happens, and all it does is generate endless ad revenue for both sides. Without actual stakes, and a willingness to admit when you are wrong, there is no reason to sincerely participate.
Many years ago I was a supporter of Candice Owens. It's hard to wrap my mind around what could have caused her descent into a demonic, raving lunatic. Rogan, on the other hand, has always seemed to have a screw loose somewhere, with a penchant for conspiracies.
People forget this fact. She wrote some insanely woke articles in college, then did a 180 in like under a week. Never seen such a rapid turnaround in my life.
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
There might be some truth to this but Christianity has done more harm and spread its tentacles further than any religion on this planet, perhaps only rivaled by Islam.
Ah yeah, and it also was the dominant religion and metaphysical basis during the period of western Europe's greatest scientific and artistic advancements. But just ignore that bit, I guess.
Great article. I had come to the conclusion (with the help of Ian Leslie) that both Harris/Murray and Rogan/Smith were partially wrong, though how and by how much wasn't clear to me. Leslie's final take was, roughly, that as non-experts, trusting the experts is probably our best bet, without really taking account of the vested interests, political bias and moral imperfection of experts. You teased the whole thing apart in much more detail and did it so well that I now feel I can put it to rest and think about something else.
I really enjoyed your post. I do think it reduces to individual responsibility—to fact check and not be quick to judge or abandon what they think they knew for something different because some “authority” has made a proclamation of “fact” or claim to “knowledge”.
The most telling thing is how any expert responds to: “Why do you say that?”; “What evidence supports your position?”.
But sadly, and this is a historical constant (an oft used example is Nazi Germany and the Holocaust):
“many people are not going to “figure it out.””
Here I urge restraint. Because it this exact excuse that leads to tyranny.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a sneaking suspicion this was going to become a problem when the COVID era's deranging effects started to become clear a few months in and became motivated to go back to school and get an actual degree in history (instead of just doing my own podcast on it, which I'd been doing for a few years). All very well said.
—X and adjacent spaces are not a “marketplace of ideas” that simply emerged from a vacuum—it is the result of free speech being implemented after decades of left-wing orthodoxy, including some years of very tangible censorship immediately preceding the release of this pressure valve. The reason that anti-Semitism and other WWII “conspiracy theories” are able to gain such broad acceptance now is that their opposites were worshiped as false idols for nearly a century, making a backlash of this sort inevitable. Had we just now emerged from a similar period of right-wing ascendancy and orthodoxy, then you would see a similar effect in the opposite direction, with a “free speech” platform overrun by left-aligned idiocy. This is apparent because the left laid claim to “freeze peach” as one of its preferred values within living memory, all the way up until it realized that it had actually won its war for the culture some time ago. Anti-vaxxing, a favored example of how stupid the right is, was primarily a belief of left-wingers up until COVID.
Stupidity is a human constant. It doesn’t have an ideology. Its relationship with free speech is unclear at best—in the broader scope of human societies across time and space, it still seems likely that societies which are relatively more “free” tend to produce the better ideas overall. Mass online free speech is still in its infancy, if even that. It may be too early to draw accurate conclusions about where it will take us over the longer term.
—Following on from the above, you can observe the left-wing counterpart of X by going on Bluesky. The microscope is currently on X for good reason, because its particular brand of derangement has ahold of power, for now. This is unlikely to remain the case over the long term. Only a few short years ago, it seemed impossible to imagine a future in which left-wing gender orthodoxy, for example, were ever pushed back in any meaningful way. Likewise, there will be and already is a backlash to the stupidity of the Trump administration. In ten years right wingers will not still be defending Trump’s tariff policy like they are now. There is always the tendency of those who are particularly intelligent and disagreeable to simply be right about things “too early.” We saw this with everything from COVID to BLM to transgender insanity. The normies take longer to catch on, but they do catch on eventually.
—This is the primary reason that I have been so critical of Donald Trump and even moreso Elon Musk since the inauguration. While yes, some of these policies are very bad, and bad policy is worth criticizing for its own sake, I am actually even more concerned about the second-order consequence of discrediting the right in general for the foreseeable future. As I wrote previously, it has now been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that political capital is not infinite. Just as the left-wing “experts” beclowned themselves and set their goodwill with the public on fire during COVID, Donald Trump is also doing so with his insane clown world ideas on tariffs.
And when the current crop of looney toons go, there is no guarantee that they will be replaced by some mythical group of actual smart and responsible “elites.” What will come after them, if the left returns to power, will probably resemble Bluesky. When that happens, I will repeat what I have said here: Stupidity is a human constant, with no consistent ideology. All of that said, it is nice to see that people like Cofnas are agreeing with my argument that unrestrained, full-suffrage democracy appears to be a mistake. But it is entirely unclear how one could possibly put that cat back in the bag from where we are now. The problem is bigger than just X and very online rightoids. To a large extent it’s a problem that is simply inherent to human nature, like the persistence of high levels of economic inequality.
"All of that said, it is nice to see that people like Cofnas are agreeing with my argument that unrestrained, full-suffrage democracy appears to be a mistake."
You do realize that "democracy is a mistake" is going to look like Europe banning right wing parties and arresting people for Facebook posts, right? You're going to be on the chopping block.
I just want to quibble on one thing: the founding generation generally used 'republic' and 'democracy' as synonyms. It is true that Madison distinguishes between them in Federalist No. 10, but the definitions and distinction he makes there are novel and not widely-acknowledged at the time. In fact, I recommend looking at the speech he made at the Philadelphia Convention where he first publicly made the main points he argues in Federalist No. 10 - but unlike in his later article, in the speech he uses 'democracy' and 'republic' interchangeably.
Great article! I think part of the problem is that intellectuals assume that once they've gained some clout in particular area or even a few different areas - they can then start weighing in authoritatively on any area. Now, I'm not against people weighing in on everything - having an opinion and staying at least somewhat informed is a net good but the problem is that it then becomes hard for followers of these individuals to distinguish between areas that they can genuinely be trusted vs areas where they might largely be found wanting. In an open society with free speech, any such paternalistic instinct of attempt to police opinions will generally be misconstrued and lead to even more crackpot theories taking root elsewhere.... I think this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve in a society where trust in most authorities is basically dead and people get their news from incredibly silo-ed sources that may not have any links to reality. Or even if they do, the connection is so vague that it might as well be an alternative reality anyway
So on the Hunter laptop thing, the intelligence officials didn't actually claim that the laptop was fake, rather that it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. And my understanding is that the origins of the laptop are pretty murky and there is a good chance the Russians were involved.
Notably Rudy Giuliani refused to give his copy of the hard drive (he never had the actual laptop) to major news organizations. And the WSJ and Fox News both declined to run the story because it had lots of problems. Even the writer of the NY Post article refused to out his name on it. The byline was a woman who had never written for the NY Post but has worked for Breitbart.
About four months later the Washington Post was able to get a copy and do forensic analysis. They found that many of the emails were authentic, but also that there were a lot of files added by someone else after it was copied.
There's a good chance you have diseases from being close to internet pornographers and prostitutes. It may be making your brain murky. Get checked out, Dickie.
Great essay. Edit needed: “They explained: “the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to *protesters* demands in the name of public health…”
An excellent essay.
Unfortunately, so many of our experts have gone way outside their field of expertise or come to their stated opinion due to the ideological assumptions, financial conflicts of interest, or desire for social status. In a very complex world, subject matter expertise really matters, but I am afraid the above factors often trump real expertise in the social arena.
I don’t know how we reassemble Humpty Dumpty.
Nathan,
I wonder how you would reply to a recent article by Rob Henderson on the subject that distinguishes “experts” from “elites.”
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/experts-and-elites-play-fundamentally
It’s a useful conceptual distinction. I would note that these categories can be quite blurry. Technocrats like Fauci might be considered hybrid experts/elites. There are also qualitatively different kinds of elites. On Rob’s definition, Britney Spears is elite (she is judged by “wealth, looks, taste, social fluency, connections, charisma, and cultural feel”), and so are Francesca Gino, Donald Trump…
The true lesson of Covid is surely one of the establishment using a crisis in order to grow its wealth prestige and power. I’d suggest that is more significant than some clowns getting things technically wrong on podcasts. Also, I’m highly sceptical of the assertion that the vaccine adds meaningfully if at all to natural immunity and don’t need to look this up to know it is probably more true than not. In much the same way as we did not need science to tells that masking and mask mandates were self evidently bull shit. It was this over reach which made people sceptical of things they ought to have believed eg no one over 50 should have declined the vaccine
One problem with that article is that it tends to conflate two different meanings of "expert":
1) Those differed to by others as "experts".
2) Those who actually understand the topic in question.
You will have to ask Rob Henderson, but I think that is exactly the distinction that he is arguing for. At least, that is what I got from it.
Well, this is one of Rob's shallowest posts. It covers a subject in which he has no personal expertise - no more than any of us can observe. Like many who gain recognition for a single, profound insight like "luxury beliefs," he seems to feel entitled to continue offering insights with an air of expertise. Some are decent, though often already widely known, while others, like the post mentioned here, fall flat... But then again, same can be said of Nathan's post here - minus any profound insights by the author.
Superb essay. This is why I subscribe to this SubStack.
While I have quibbles with a few of the specifics (eg I’m not nearly as confident in lab leak as you are), this is by and large a fantastic essay about a topic most err one way or the other on. Nicely done.
Agreed, superb article, but unless I missed a lot of things, the confidence in the lab leak hypothesis is perplexing
Regarding the last few paragraphs were Musk is mentioned, that seemed like a cheap shot. Twitter was never a profitable venture, only kept afloat by a never ending stream of politically motivated advertising revenue. With that gone, Musk has taken a huge personal hit. Sloppy fiction is annoying, but also a marker he isn't beholden to the same institutional forces that have persecuted others like yourself all these years.
That is the extent of my objection, otherwise good piece. Gave me lots to ponder on.
"The floodgates really opened in 2022 when Elon Musk bought Twitter and made it a 'free speech' platform with almost no attempt to enforce any standard of accuracy or ethics." - What is the cheap shot? I'm just reporting the facts.
I was glad when Musk ended the censorship regime. It turned out to have consequences that I didn't anticipate.
Community Notes isn't an attempt to control for misinformation?
Right.
And if not for musk taking over X, BlueSky would never have been invented. It's a good counterpoint. Better to have both than just one. If you prefer the old Twitter experience, go there.
Musk has been censoring on behalf of China and the Turkish government for a couple of years. Buy, hey, it’s easier to say the N word
His justification for that is he is required by law to comply with that censorship.
That’s the definition of censorship, no ?
No, censorship can occur for many reasons. Governments are not the only entities that censor.
A partial solution for fixing alt-media could be to create more YouTube response videos to counter misinformation and explain why it's wrong. They're basically peer-review, but for YouTube videos.
A don't think a gang of "fact check bros" is going to improve the situation.
Nah, you'd be surprised. They do help to change people's minds. If nothing else, they tend to be educational, even for people who don't already buy into the misinformation.
I have no doubt that such people exist, but how do you prevent the effort from devolving into the type of reaction slop that already plagues YouTube? Even if you show your work, at some point the exercise becomes so esoteric that the viewer is still just deciding based on vibes.
Stated another way, the ideal is Common Sense Skeptic, but it's much easier to be Thunderf00t.
That already happens, and all it does is generate endless ad revenue for both sides. Without actual stakes, and a willingness to admit when you are wrong, there is no reason to sincerely participate.
Nah, I've seen videos like that too, but there frankly isn't enough of them.
Many years ago I was a supporter of Candice Owens. It's hard to wrap my mind around what could have caused her descent into a demonic, raving lunatic. Rogan, on the other hand, has always seemed to have a screw loose somewhere, with a penchant for conspiracies.
Candice was always a hack and grifter. Remember she started out as a standard Black race hustler.
People forget this fact. She wrote some insanely woke articles in college, then did a 180 in like under a week. Never seen such a rapid turnaround in my life.
"As a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity with a fairly wide set of historical books under my belt, it troubles me to see some hierarchs and channels following the world's narrative about "anti-Semitism" and all the things that have been done to "combat anti-Semitism." I'll tell you directly, as a 100% pure blooded Ashkenazi man, how to fix "anti-Semitism:" Anti-Semitism will end when faithless Jews leave other groups of people alone and stop trying to transform their nations and cultures in ways that invariably harm the populations in question. It is really not that complicated.”
– Brother Augustine (Michael Witcoff)
There might be some truth to this but Christianity has done more harm and spread its tentacles further than any religion on this planet, perhaps only rivaled by Islam.
Ah yeah, and it also was the dominant religion and metaphysical basis during the period of western Europe's greatest scientific and artistic advancements. But just ignore that bit, I guess.
lol, I’m not sure how worshiping a Jewish zombie accomplished all of that . Google antiquity.
Great article. I had come to the conclusion (with the help of Ian Leslie) that both Harris/Murray and Rogan/Smith were partially wrong, though how and by how much wasn't clear to me. Leslie's final take was, roughly, that as non-experts, trusting the experts is probably our best bet, without really taking account of the vested interests, political bias and moral imperfection of experts. You teased the whole thing apart in much more detail and did it so well that I now feel I can put it to rest and think about something else.
I really enjoyed your post. I do think it reduces to individual responsibility—to fact check and not be quick to judge or abandon what they think they knew for something different because some “authority” has made a proclamation of “fact” or claim to “knowledge”.
The most telling thing is how any expert responds to: “Why do you say that?”; “What evidence supports your position?”.
But sadly, and this is a historical constant (an oft used example is Nazi Germany and the Holocaust):
“many people are not going to “figure it out.””
Here I urge restraint. Because it this exact excuse that leads to tyranny.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a sneaking suspicion this was going to become a problem when the COVID era's deranging effects started to become clear a few months in and became motivated to go back to school and get an actual degree in history (instead of just doing my own podcast on it, which I'd been doing for a few years). All very well said.
—X and adjacent spaces are not a “marketplace of ideas” that simply emerged from a vacuum—it is the result of free speech being implemented after decades of left-wing orthodoxy, including some years of very tangible censorship immediately preceding the release of this pressure valve. The reason that anti-Semitism and other WWII “conspiracy theories” are able to gain such broad acceptance now is that their opposites were worshiped as false idols for nearly a century, making a backlash of this sort inevitable. Had we just now emerged from a similar period of right-wing ascendancy and orthodoxy, then you would see a similar effect in the opposite direction, with a “free speech” platform overrun by left-aligned idiocy. This is apparent because the left laid claim to “freeze peach” as one of its preferred values within living memory, all the way up until it realized that it had actually won its war for the culture some time ago. Anti-vaxxing, a favored example of how stupid the right is, was primarily a belief of left-wingers up until COVID.
Stupidity is a human constant. It doesn’t have an ideology. Its relationship with free speech is unclear at best—in the broader scope of human societies across time and space, it still seems likely that societies which are relatively more “free” tend to produce the better ideas overall. Mass online free speech is still in its infancy, if even that. It may be too early to draw accurate conclusions about where it will take us over the longer term.
—Following on from the above, you can observe the left-wing counterpart of X by going on Bluesky. The microscope is currently on X for good reason, because its particular brand of derangement has ahold of power, for now. This is unlikely to remain the case over the long term. Only a few short years ago, it seemed impossible to imagine a future in which left-wing gender orthodoxy, for example, were ever pushed back in any meaningful way. Likewise, there will be and already is a backlash to the stupidity of the Trump administration. In ten years right wingers will not still be defending Trump’s tariff policy like they are now. There is always the tendency of those who are particularly intelligent and disagreeable to simply be right about things “too early.” We saw this with everything from COVID to BLM to transgender insanity. The normies take longer to catch on, but they do catch on eventually.
—This is the primary reason that I have been so critical of Donald Trump and even moreso Elon Musk since the inauguration. While yes, some of these policies are very bad, and bad policy is worth criticizing for its own sake, I am actually even more concerned about the second-order consequence of discrediting the right in general for the foreseeable future. As I wrote previously, it has now been proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that political capital is not infinite. Just as the left-wing “experts” beclowned themselves and set their goodwill with the public on fire during COVID, Donald Trump is also doing so with his insane clown world ideas on tariffs.
And when the current crop of looney toons go, there is no guarantee that they will be replaced by some mythical group of actual smart and responsible “elites.” What will come after them, if the left returns to power, will probably resemble Bluesky. When that happens, I will repeat what I have said here: Stupidity is a human constant, with no consistent ideology. All of that said, it is nice to see that people like Cofnas are agreeing with my argument that unrestrained, full-suffrage democracy appears to be a mistake. But it is entirely unclear how one could possibly put that cat back in the bag from where we are now. The problem is bigger than just X and very online rightoids. To a large extent it’s a problem that is simply inherent to human nature, like the persistence of high levels of economic inequality.
"All of that said, it is nice to see that people like Cofnas are agreeing with my argument that unrestrained, full-suffrage democracy appears to be a mistake."
You do realize that "democracy is a mistake" is going to look like Europe banning right wing parties and arresting people for Facebook posts, right? You're going to be on the chopping block.
Great essay, thank you. I thought this case provides a great visual illustration of your point, should you want one: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/botched-restoration-of-jesus-fresco-miraculously-saves-spanish-town-197057
I just want to quibble on one thing: the founding generation generally used 'republic' and 'democracy' as synonyms. It is true that Madison distinguishes between them in Federalist No. 10, but the definitions and distinction he makes there are novel and not widely-acknowledged at the time. In fact, I recommend looking at the speech he made at the Philadelphia Convention where he first publicly made the main points he argues in Federalist No. 10 - but unlike in his later article, in the speech he uses 'democracy' and 'republic' interchangeably.
Great article! I think part of the problem is that intellectuals assume that once they've gained some clout in particular area or even a few different areas - they can then start weighing in authoritatively on any area. Now, I'm not against people weighing in on everything - having an opinion and staying at least somewhat informed is a net good but the problem is that it then becomes hard for followers of these individuals to distinguish between areas that they can genuinely be trusted vs areas where they might largely be found wanting. In an open society with free speech, any such paternalistic instinct of attempt to police opinions will generally be misconstrued and lead to even more crackpot theories taking root elsewhere.... I think this is a fundamentally hard problem to solve in a society where trust in most authorities is basically dead and people get their news from incredibly silo-ed sources that may not have any links to reality. Or even if they do, the connection is so vague that it might as well be an alternative reality anyway
So on the Hunter laptop thing, the intelligence officials didn't actually claim that the laptop was fake, rather that it was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. And my understanding is that the origins of the laptop are pretty murky and there is a good chance the Russians were involved.
Notably Rudy Giuliani refused to give his copy of the hard drive (he never had the actual laptop) to major news organizations. And the WSJ and Fox News both declined to run the story because it had lots of problems. Even the writer of the NY Post article refused to out his name on it. The byline was a woman who had never written for the NY Post but has worked for Breitbart.
About four months later the Washington Post was able to get a copy and do forensic analysis. They found that many of the emails were authentic, but also that there were a lot of files added by someone else after it was copied.
There's a good chance you have diseases from being close to internet pornographers and prostitutes. It may be making your brain murky. Get checked out, Dickie.
Great. Thank you.
I’m enjoying the essay so far, but there’s one typo that threw me off, perhaps because it’s early where I am and I haven’t had my coffee yet.
“On May 16, 2001 after the Covid vaccine became available”
You mean 2021 right? Feel free to delete this comment.
Great essay. Edit needed: “They explained: “the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to *protesters* demands in the name of public health…”