Let’s put experts in their place

Here’s a joyous internet nugget you may not have come across: an orphaned baby beaver, which has never had the chance to learn dam-building from its parents, gamely trying to construct a barricade of soft toys across a corridor. 

It’s a powerful testament to the triumph of instinct over context — and it sprang unbidden to mind as the perfect model for a certain political tribe: the all-purpose, pseudo-expert gatekeeper.

The prompt for this realisation was seeing someone challenge Yuan Yi Zhu on whether he knew what an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice was. Zhu is Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Law at the University of Leiden and co-author of a heavyweight Policy Exchange paper on the Chagos Islands question. Turns out, he does.

In this case, the absurdity of the conceit was laid bare by an especially poor choice of target. Such condescending tactics are normally targeted at laypeople, or at least people without formal experience in a vaguely-related field or any sort of academic qualification.

Yet whilst this usually helps to disguise the absurdity of it, the absurdity often remains. The row over the British Indian Ocean Territory has exposed this in an especially brutal manner, with many supposedly wise heads who rowed in behind the Government’s position left high and dry as Sir Keir Starmer’s deal became an object of ridicule and then started to fall apart.

This trend extends far beyond a single foreign policy dispute, however, and it has an obvious root: that expertise privileges the views of the expert. When the expertise is real, and in an appropriate domain, this is entirely proper. 

But privilege is a hard thing to give up, especially if one has developed a taste for talking down to people or would otherwise struggle to defend a policy one supports. As a result, political debate is rife with attempts to wield the privileges of expertise inappropriately.

This takes two main forms. The first is to attempt to smuggle a debate across Hume’s Guillotine by reframing a normative debate as a descriptive one. 

This tactic is the sine qua non of the strategy employed by public lawyers. Think of the Secret Barrister trying to dismiss dissatisfaction with short sentences by explaining the workings of the court system; they are assuming (or affecting to assume) that critics are making an uninformed claim about the operation of the status quo, rather than a perfectly valid normative assessment of the results.

On a more fundamental level, there are those such as Professor Mark Elliott, who claim that the question of whether or not the Supreme Court is ultimately superior to Parliament can be resolved by the court itself. This rests on fundamentally circular reasoning — the court could only “discover” the limit of parliamentary sovereignty if it already had the power and right to impose it — but the case is presented as objective, expert inquiry rather than the fundamentally political claim it actually is.

Such tactics are similarly employed in other constitutional spheres. Critics of “muscular unionism”, such as Ciaran Martin and Iain Maclean, are wont to describe its advocates as making various objective mistakes about the character of the Union whilst presenting their own fundamentally political assumptions (about the legitimacy of Britain as a political community vis à vis the Home Nations, most obviously) as objective facts.

The other, less subtle form is the assumption of the fungibility of expertise; that is, the idea that being experienced or credentialled in one sphere makes one generally better able to parse evidence and assess arguments in other, unrelated spheres.

This conceit is, understandably, most popular with academics: not only does it flatter any who fancies wading into public debate that they deserve a privileged place in it, but the idea that education makes people generally wiser and more able is the keystone assumption of the higher education lobby, trying to justify endless public subsidy in the face of increasingly dubious tangible returns.

It also appeals to experts who first gained prominence on one topic and don’t want to give up the limelight once the debate moves on. A prime example is David Henig, a trade expert who has tried to diversify into the housing debate as news cycle moved on from the Brexit wars — and ended up beclowning himself by claiming that the common law is the reason we cannot today build airports as swiftly as did the Thatcher Government in the 1980s.

Not a little ironically, if perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual academic evidence for “transference” — the technical term for the ability to effectively use skills learned in one context in another — is all but non-existent. 

Bryan Kaplan, in his provocative book The Case Against Education, dug through the relevant studies and found that not only do people struggle to apply even newly-honed skills in even aesthetically different contexts (a logic challenge explained with a medical example and then immediately presented again with a military frame, for example) but that ability to use skills even as trained declines over time unless they are continually employed.

This shouldn’t be at all surprising: how many of us can recall today most of the mathematics we learned at school, however well we did in our exams? But that realisation is bad news for any self-styled expert demanding deference outside their own domain.

For anyone on the receiving end of these tactics, the best defence is David Hume’s aforementioned guillotine, also known as the “Is/Ought Problem”. Is a given debate about how things are — the proper domain of (relevant) expertise — or how they ought to be?

Expertise is invaluable in the right context. But the technocratic worldview demands undue deference

When debating the construction of a bridge, for example, most sane people would defer to qualified engineers on the question of how to build it and from what materials. But we would not extend the same courtesy to lawyers, academics, or trade negotiators, however eminent. Nor should we defer even to the civil engineers on the question of whether to build the bridge, a much broader debate about costs, benefits, and scarce resources on which many more people can have informed and legitimate views.

It’s easy to mischaracterise disagreement with “experts” as dismissal of expertise; Michael Gove fell victim to this when his claim that “the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong” got shortened — thanks to an outraged harrumph from his interviewer — to “people have had enough of experts”.

Expertise is invaluable in the right context. But the technocratic worldview demands undue deference where it either hasn’t been earned, either because the experts have a poor track record or are outside their area, or isn’t appropriate, because the questions at issue are fundamentally political. Whilst an overcorrection in the other direction is strenuously to be avoided — by letting local councils have the final decision on national infrastructure, for example — it will be a thoroughly good thing for our politics if this murder of crows were forced to shed their borrowed feathers, and defend their beliefs on equal terms with the rest of us.