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<\/p>\nThis neatly follows up from yesterday’s comments about ideologies. The issue is, why don’t Americans trust experts?. And to cut to the chase, Lewis sees the problems as: people drawing conclusions about the world (including ideologies!) based on anecdotes (personal or on the web); people misunderstanding of statistics and probabilities; and people not interacting with people different from themselves, which might be solved through some kind of encouraged government service for a year at 18 or so. Also: not everyone has a right to an opinion about everything — because most opinions are uninformed. (And yet Americans, in particular, resent being ‘schooled’ by anyone who presumes to know more than they do.)<\/p>\n
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Vox, Sean Illing, 24 Apr 2022<\/strong>: Michael Lewis on why Americans don\u2019t trust experts<\/a>, subtitled, “How a society that is so good at creating knowledge can be so bad at applying it.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Michael Lewis<\/a> is the author of many books, notably The Big Short<\/b>, Moneyball<\/b>, and The Premonition<\/b>. Sean Illing begins:<\/p>\n Lewis is as good a storyteller as we have, and he takes a close look at what\u2019s happened to our trust in experts and expertise. The problem, he says, isn\u2019t that we lack experts; in fact, we have lots of experts and some of them have likely saved your life before. The issue is that we don\u2019t value expertise and are therefore really bad at recognizing it when we see it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Sean Illing<\/strong><\/p>\n We live in a society that is very good at creating knowledge and very bad at applying it. Why is that, Michael?<\/p>\n Michael Lewis<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s a really great question. I think part of it is that we have the luxury of being that way. There are various safety nets for our idiocy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is a key idea, because technology has become so sophisticated, the average person has no idea how anything works. (It’s not the 1950s, when guys could repair their own cars, and take vacuum tubes to the hardware store to fix their TVs.) And so designers of machines and devices build in protections so that naive users cannot wreck things. (The 1950s sf story “The Marching Morons,”<\/a> by C.M. Kornbluth, made exactly this point.)<\/p>\n [Y]ou might say [the answer could be], \u201cWell, in a lot of spheres of life, there has risen new expertise. It\u2019s very complicated and it\u2019s not easy to understand the expertise, especially for people who are not particularly numerate or statistical or scientific.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Examples of weather forecasting, and medicine.<\/p>\n Doctors will tell you they know so much more than they did 30 years ago as a profession. They are much more useful to patients. But every day more and more people are walking into the office after reading something on WedMD and they think they know what they\u2019re talking about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another long example. Lewis likes to tell illustrative stories.<\/p>\n Sean Illing<\/strong><\/p>\n A certain amount of skepticism of expertise and authority is healthy, but at what point do you think that skepticism becomes pathological?<\/p>\n Michael Lewis<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s an unanswerable question, but I\u2019ll give it a whirl.<\/p>\n It becomes pathological when your unwillingness to take in what the putative authority or expert is saying kills you. It\u2019s pathological when you turn up in the emergency room as a 45-year-old healthy police officer with Covid, as someone in one of our stories does, and he\u2019s circling the drain and refuses to be intubated because, in his view, hospitals are trying to kill people in the ICU \u2014 that\u2019s pathological.<\/p>\n It\u2019s pathological when you are running a big Wall Street firm and you\u2019re unable to distinguish between the trader, who\u2019s making a lot of money in your firm, making really dumb bets on the subprime mortgage market, and the person who has actually got a bead on how the subprime mortgage market is working and can explain it to you, but you don\u2019t want to hear it \u2014 and so your firm blows up.<\/p>\n You can get away with ignoring a lot of expertise in your life as you move through the world. And I agree that you never want to lose your ability to question the things you\u2019re being told, but it\u2019s also not true that everybody has a right to an opinion about everything. I don\u2019t have a right to an opinion about climate change. Neither does Donald Trump. There are people who study this stuff, their whole lives are devoted to trying to understand it. They are state of the art. It is a scientific consensus. My opinion shouldn\u2019t exist, but people think they have a right to an opinion about it.<\/p>\n Sean Illing<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you think, on some level, that the world has become so big and so complex that it\u2019s too much for people to make sense of, and the temptation to retreat into conspiracy theory or tribalism is just too irresistible?<\/p>\n Michael Lewis<\/strong><\/p>\n To default into a narrative that\u2019s fueled by anecdote that happens to come from the small circle of people in your world \u2014 I\u2019ve seen this. I\u2019ve been amazed with people I admire and who I think are intelligent who will sit down with me and tell me they\u2019re not getting vaccinated because the vaccine is making people sick.<\/p>\n And they\u2019re not wrong in one way. They know somebody who got sick, but that\u2019s the thing that they pay attention to as opposed to the 1 billion studies that show that you were just so much better off being vaccinated. It\u2019s like you walked into the casino for the first time in your life, looked at all the games, and you saw someone pull a slot machine and they hit the jackpot, and you decide, \u201cOh, well, the slot machines are the smart game to play here.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s people organizing a complicated world with stories that are basically not true stories. They\u2019re not representative stories. They just happen to be the stories they hear. …<\/p>\n Sean Illing<\/strong><\/p>\n Do you have any sense at all of what it would take to rebuild trust in our society?<\/p>\n Michael Lewis<\/strong><\/p>\n …if you\u2019re handing me God-like powers, one of the things I\u2019d do is, maybe not create some kind of mandatory national service, but at least strongly incentivize people, when they\u2019re 18 or 19, to spend a year or a year and a half working in some government service where they\u2019re all mixed up with other kinds of people.<\/p>\n Part of the problem is we\u2019re not mixed up enough. It\u2019s much easier to think of \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d if you\u2019re in Berkeley, California, and you\u2019ve never met anybody from Alabama, or if you\u2019re in Alabama and you\u2019ve never met anybody from Berkeley, California. Or if you are poor and you\u2019ve never met a rich person, or if you\u2019re rich and you\u2019ve never had to do anything with a poor person.<\/p>\n It\u2019s amazing how helpful it is when people have personal experience doing something together, trying to achieve something together with people entirely different from themselves. Then we have a living sense that we\u2019re not all that different. There\u2019s no us and them. We don\u2019t belong in these tribes. It\u2019s not the natural order of things. So mixing up the society more in various ways is one answer I would give.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This neatly follows up from yesterday’s comments about ideologies. The issue is, why don’t Americans trust experts?. And to cut to the chase, Lewis sees the problems as: people drawing conclusions about the world (including ideologies!) based on anecdotes (personal … Continue reading