The Expert's Conceit

When I first entered the realm of commercial real estate (my current semi-career), my well-traveled and well-seasoned attorney warned me against doctors as tenants. His experience was that they tended to be lousy businessmen who refused to admit their limitations. Obviously, there are exceptions, but even so it's a caution to exercise greater scrutiny during due diligence.

Having known many doctors across decades (and not just of the medical sort), I have borne witness to this phenomenon too often to dismiss as mere coincidence. Yes, indeed, by and large it takes a certain amount of brain power to run the academic gauntlet that ends with an MD or PhD degree, but success in one field does not convey expertise in another. I'm purportedly smart, and educated or experienced in many areas, but I don't know bupkis about farming, or diesel engine repair, or corporate law, or bookbinding, or animal husbandry, or cancer treatment, or cooking meth, or countless other fields of expertise. I'm also a mere "jack" rather than a master in many of the skills I have acquired. Sure, I expect I could learn if I devoted time and effort, but so can anyone else, and there's nothing about me that suggests I could offer an opinion any more valid than any other layman on any of those topics. Being a (retired) rocket engineer doesn't give me magical divinatory insight into everything.

Another attorney friend mentioned his experience deposing doctors: Arrogance is common, and often correlated to practice area (see: surgeons). Auteur David Mamet used this tendency in his movie House of Games: con artists love to target doctors, because doctors think they're too smart to be conned. Furthermore, when they are conned, their embarrassment at being suckered despite their brainpower prompts their silence. Embarrassment is a powerful motivator.

Yet another friend (today seems to be about anecdotes - though this one isn't an attorney) reports witnessing people in group discussions reflexively seeking the opinions of the MDs therein, even when the topic wasn't medical.

Just like that, a positive feedback loop is born.

Now, cocoon that person socially. Academia is one such swaddle. Self-selecting friend groups (just as cops hang out with cops, and truckers hang out with truckers, doctors hang out with doctors) is another. Fertile ground for sowing the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

[I]n psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.

Next, remove the feedback mechanism offered by face-to-face interactions. The aforementioned powerful motivator: embarrassment, is severely diluted on social media, where you can be flat-out wrong about something but either ignore everyone telling you so, equivocate, pretzel-logic, or simply gaslight, gets dampened almost to the point of insignificance, rather than feel the burning flush of red-faced shame that might caution you going forward. Bloviate all you want, throw your credentials in (As a ____, I can tell you X is truth) even when they don't apply, and others who may actually know a lot about X might have a moment of doubt.

Add an order of magnitude to this conceit when things move into the public sector, and especially the Beltway and its incestuous gladhanding, logrolling, and "we are the people we've been waiting for" arrogance. The people many naively conceive as political foes (e.g. Big Government and Big Business) reinforce and work together in that echo chamber when we expect them to counterweigh each other. Above all, they're all convinced they know better, and that this behooves them to "do unto" the unwashed masses for their own good.

Want to see it even worse?

I once attended a party where some UN types were in attendance. Low-mid-level people, not ambassadors or what have you, but the same "we are the ones" vibe dripped from their pores. My level of impressed-ness was what you'd expect.

The shame is that we need experts. Specialization and division of labor build wealth and cultural prosperity, and as human knowledge advances, the depth of specialization at the cutting edge of each field and sub-field becomes greater. A society without experts will regress rapidly to misery and hunter-gatherer subsistence levels.

We can urge humility, but that's sweeping against the tide. About the best way to insulate ourselves, apart from being aware of it, is to reduce its coercive power. A government expert that can only recommend, or with very limited power to coerce, is far better for us than one with unlimited mandating authority.

We are also served by finding and promoting the people who acknowledge their limitations. Unfortunately, even the best of those can fall prey to the opposite of D-K: the Impostor Syndrome:

[A] psychological occurrence in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

And, in doing so, be more likely to be reserved in pursuing the positions of authority where such reservedness would be welcome. Leaving the seats of power open to those we'd rather not assume them.

This echoes William F. Buckley's famous aphorism:

I would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from an Ivy League University.

and it warns us against investing trust, power, and deference in those who feel they deserve it.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.