As a scientist I've spent my entire adult life campaigning for the importance of expertise. The importance of climate change, for one, motivated me, as well as the goofy letters from cranks we would get positing who new kids of physics.
Covid has knocked me back a solid 10% on this. The fields of public health and epidemiology seem to have put forward really poor efforts, from giving bad advice, to being unable to make even the very roughest projections or paint plausible pictures of how this would play out (remember test, trace, and extinguish the virus without vaccines? Then models that showed every human on the planet infected inside a month? Then flatten the curve? Then ethics experts telling us challenge trials, which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were unethical? Then approving vaccines for 12 year olds but not for 11 year olds six months later? Then not allowing tests unless they were perfect, but slow? Then constantly deflating vaccines? Then fighting perpetual war on case loads post-vaccine?).
Over and over reasonably smart generalists with backgrounds in statistics routed them.
It's been a change in perspective for me for sure.
I've definitely seen the phenomenon recently of experts using their expertise to disguise as science what are actually ethical questions. For example, Matt Yglesias advocated human challenge trials for COVID vaccines, and epidemiologists told him to stay in his lane, that there was an expert consensus for how we do trials. But I don't think they even had a scientific disagreement. Everyone knew that human challenge trials would lead to faster approval, it's just that the medical establishment has an ethical norm against them. Fair enough as far as it goes, but that's not a scientific question, and the epidemiologists have no more expertise on the matter than anyone else.
I think one reason credentialed experts hate outsider input is because sometimes outsiders dispute the entire foundation of their field. Most obviously, Dawkins has written the whole discipline of theology is nonsense and doesn’t belong in the academy; and the field of critical theory frequently draws commentators from outside saying it's inherently nonsense. People generally don’t like being told their job is a waste of their time and their employers’ money, so there’s some sunk-cost fallacy happening. Indeed, I also think the anger at ‘epistemic trespassing’ is partly driven by overproduction of PhDs – if someone spent eight years studying something and then can’t get an academic job in the field, but some 60-year-old guy with an unrelated career and a house in Palo Alto decides he wants to comment on the concept and immediately gets published to wide press coverage, you can see how that would cause resentment.
But I think this post is really important and people should really resist the impulse to denounce outsider/generalist commentary. Some fields, like journalism and legislation, will always need people who can ably and quickly learn the basics of expert consensus in any given field. Plus, sometimes entire fields really do need questioning – YMMV re Dawkins but I'd say if the cost of admission into religious studies debates is averring that religion is a healthy part of human nature that’s never going away and must not be subjected to value judgments, that’s a problem. And just in general, part of the the ultimate progress of human knowledge is not just someone in an ivory tower making a discovery, but making that discovery public, which necessarily entails subjecting it to people’s questions and their skepticism, however dumb. We can’t have an educated populace without academic debates becoming open to laypeople at least at some point.
John McWhorter talked about this idea in a recent podcast with Glenn Loury. He pointed out that it's only ever used to dismiss those with whom you disagree, or who those fromm the outgroup. Nobody minds epistemic trespassers that uphold the party line.
I think you give too much credit to the CDC owning up to their mistakes. A few isolated individuals partially owned up, but the truth is the CDC and the Doctors who blindly followed their masks aren’t required message and the who perpetuated the flawed droplets theory are responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths.
Doctors and the CDC killed people. Their credibility is shot. Epidemiologists might as well be alternative medicine practitioners until they own up in mass unequivocally to their manslaughter of Americans.
I could be equally as harsh on the officers and strategists who over the last 20-years deployed over and over to Afghanistan and lied to their superiors, civilians leaders and the public for the sake of promotion. Any of my enlisted friends who deployed to Afghanistan could of told you the truth and inevitable result, simply because their promotions were not based on the same pressures. Every officer who deployed to Afghanistan has a promotion statement that states they left it better than when they arrived.
Expertise is overrated in any of the most concrete of fields like engineering or mathematics.
one other comment... though Gosset worked for Guiness, he was an oxford trained mathematician and probably shouldn't be thought of as an epistemic trespasser in a field he was one of the major creators of!
One thing I find amusing, coming from religious studies, is that in general, the old timey religious studies scholars generally find the "philosophers of religion" utterly vapid and complete epistemic trespassers (also, they don't actually know anything about anyone's religion!). Perhaps this has some bearing on the issue...
This idea of epistemic trespassing is just 'argument from authority' in different clothing.
Obviously if you're going to wade into a discussion in which you are not an expert, humility is in order. But, if somebody is not staying within their lane and they offer bad arguments, then let's attack the arguments, not whether they're staying in their lane or not.
The professional classes are very insecure, and thus become very defensive when "lay" persons question their pearls of wisdom. Expert fragility, is probably a thing :) Pink Floyd's "Money" comes to mind: "I'm all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack."
This post brings to mind a book I enjoyed reading, "Range" by David Epstein. He sort of gives a bunch of examples (with statistics to back it up) of generalists "finding their path" late in life and then excelling. I kind of think there's a lot of overlap between "finding their path" and epistemic trespassing.
I actually took a class with Nathan Ballantyne back when he was working on this and you might have more agreement with him than you think. I'm sure he'd be happy to have a discussion and address your questions if you reached out to him.
Not to dismiss the meta-level point, but the string theory example is poorly thought out. There is no other theory of quantum gravity, by which I mean there is no other theoretical framework of quantum gravity. Everything else has been ruled out. That's not to say string theory has empirical predictions (nor am I saying that it doesn't), but word of its demise is extremely premature.
String theory has given us holography and AdS/CFT correspondence, for instance, which is used everywhere from condensed matter to nuclear physics. (I know that someone calculated the exact viscosity of quark-gluon plasmas using string theory.) String theory definitely has not been a waste of funding, which is often the implication of "string theory does not make predictions". (See also: https://4gravitons.com/2014/03/28/gravity-is-yang-mills-squared/)
Those you cite don't have the greatest track record either. Sabine Hossenfelder has been saying that quantum gravity should be focused on hashing out predictions, e.g. particle scattering, which is what a selection of string theorists are doing. Lee Smolin's brainchild, loop quantum gravity, can't even derive Hawking radiation, and is pretty much dead in the water after we've seen neutron star collisions. Sabine, at least, is usually excellent elsewhere (I'm not familiar enough with the other two), but they come off as having an axe to grind.
While I'm against random people claiming to be experts on Afghanistan, it's not like the experts were any good at it either. They were not being frank on afghan security forces.
Technocrats can be good at creating policy, but they need to be beholden to public scrutiny. This does mean plenty of stupid questions, but I'd prefer that if we get one good one every so often.
As a scientist I've spent my entire adult life campaigning for the importance of expertise. The importance of climate change, for one, motivated me, as well as the goofy letters from cranks we would get positing who new kids of physics.
Covid has knocked me back a solid 10% on this. The fields of public health and epidemiology seem to have put forward really poor efforts, from giving bad advice, to being unable to make even the very roughest projections or paint plausible pictures of how this would play out (remember test, trace, and extinguish the virus without vaccines? Then models that showed every human on the planet infected inside a month? Then flatten the curve? Then ethics experts telling us challenge trials, which would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, were unethical? Then approving vaccines for 12 year olds but not for 11 year olds six months later? Then not allowing tests unless they were perfect, but slow? Then constantly deflating vaccines? Then fighting perpetual war on case loads post-vaccine?).
Over and over reasonably smart generalists with backgrounds in statistics routed them.
It's been a change in perspective for me for sure.
Epistemic Trespassing implies Epistemic Property implies Epistemic Rent-Seeking. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
I've definitely seen the phenomenon recently of experts using their expertise to disguise as science what are actually ethical questions. For example, Matt Yglesias advocated human challenge trials for COVID vaccines, and epidemiologists told him to stay in his lane, that there was an expert consensus for how we do trials. But I don't think they even had a scientific disagreement. Everyone knew that human challenge trials would lead to faster approval, it's just that the medical establishment has an ethical norm against them. Fair enough as far as it goes, but that's not a scientific question, and the epidemiologists have no more expertise on the matter than anyone else.
I think one reason credentialed experts hate outsider input is because sometimes outsiders dispute the entire foundation of their field. Most obviously, Dawkins has written the whole discipline of theology is nonsense and doesn’t belong in the academy; and the field of critical theory frequently draws commentators from outside saying it's inherently nonsense. People generally don’t like being told their job is a waste of their time and their employers’ money, so there’s some sunk-cost fallacy happening. Indeed, I also think the anger at ‘epistemic trespassing’ is partly driven by overproduction of PhDs – if someone spent eight years studying something and then can’t get an academic job in the field, but some 60-year-old guy with an unrelated career and a house in Palo Alto decides he wants to comment on the concept and immediately gets published to wide press coverage, you can see how that would cause resentment.
But I think this post is really important and people should really resist the impulse to denounce outsider/generalist commentary. Some fields, like journalism and legislation, will always need people who can ably and quickly learn the basics of expert consensus in any given field. Plus, sometimes entire fields really do need questioning – YMMV re Dawkins but I'd say if the cost of admission into religious studies debates is averring that religion is a healthy part of human nature that’s never going away and must not be subjected to value judgments, that’s a problem. And just in general, part of the the ultimate progress of human knowledge is not just someone in an ivory tower making a discovery, but making that discovery public, which necessarily entails subjecting it to people’s questions and their skepticism, however dumb. We can’t have an educated populace without academic debates becoming open to laypeople at least at some point.
John McWhorter talked about this idea in a recent podcast with Glenn Loury. He pointed out that it's only ever used to dismiss those with whom you disagree, or who those fromm the outgroup. Nobody minds epistemic trespassers that uphold the party line.
Interesting to see a philosophy professor dedicate a 24-page essay to defense of a narrow form of ad hominem.
I think you give too much credit to the CDC owning up to their mistakes. A few isolated individuals partially owned up, but the truth is the CDC and the Doctors who blindly followed their masks aren’t required message and the who perpetuated the flawed droplets theory are responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths.
Doctors and the CDC killed people. Their credibility is shot. Epidemiologists might as well be alternative medicine practitioners until they own up in mass unequivocally to their manslaughter of Americans.
I could be equally as harsh on the officers and strategists who over the last 20-years deployed over and over to Afghanistan and lied to their superiors, civilians leaders and the public for the sake of promotion. Any of my enlisted friends who deployed to Afghanistan could of told you the truth and inevitable result, simply because their promotions were not based on the same pressures. Every officer who deployed to Afghanistan has a promotion statement that states they left it better than when they arrived.
Expertise is overrated in any of the most concrete of fields like engineering or mathematics.
one other comment... though Gosset worked for Guiness, he was an oxford trained mathematician and probably shouldn't be thought of as an epistemic trespasser in a field he was one of the major creators of!
great article. very insightful
One thing I find amusing, coming from religious studies, is that in general, the old timey religious studies scholars generally find the "philosophers of religion" utterly vapid and complete epistemic trespassers (also, they don't actually know anything about anyone's religion!). Perhaps this has some bearing on the issue...
This idea of epistemic trespassing is just 'argument from authority' in different clothing.
Obviously if you're going to wade into a discussion in which you are not an expert, humility is in order. But, if somebody is not staying within their lane and they offer bad arguments, then let's attack the arguments, not whether they're staying in their lane or not.
The professional classes are very insecure, and thus become very defensive when "lay" persons question their pearls of wisdom. Expert fragility, is probably a thing :) Pink Floyd's "Money" comes to mind: "I'm all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack."
This post brings to mind a book I enjoyed reading, "Range" by David Epstein. He sort of gives a bunch of examples (with statistics to back it up) of generalists "finding their path" late in life and then excelling. I kind of think there's a lot of overlap between "finding their path" and epistemic trespassing.
I actually took a class with Nathan Ballantyne back when he was working on this and you might have more agreement with him than you think. I'm sure he'd be happy to have a discussion and address your questions if you reached out to him.
Not to dismiss the meta-level point, but the string theory example is poorly thought out. There is no other theory of quantum gravity, by which I mean there is no other theoretical framework of quantum gravity. Everything else has been ruled out. That's not to say string theory has empirical predictions (nor am I saying that it doesn't), but word of its demise is extremely premature.
String theory has given us holography and AdS/CFT correspondence, for instance, which is used everywhere from condensed matter to nuclear physics. (I know that someone calculated the exact viscosity of quark-gluon plasmas using string theory.) String theory definitely has not been a waste of funding, which is often the implication of "string theory does not make predictions". (See also: https://4gravitons.com/2014/03/28/gravity-is-yang-mills-squared/)
Those you cite don't have the greatest track record either. Sabine Hossenfelder has been saying that quantum gravity should be focused on hashing out predictions, e.g. particle scattering, which is what a selection of string theorists are doing. Lee Smolin's brainchild, loop quantum gravity, can't even derive Hawking radiation, and is pretty much dead in the water after we've seen neutron star collisions. Sabine, at least, is usually excellent elsewhere (I'm not familiar enough with the other two), but they come off as having an axe to grind.
While I'm against random people claiming to be experts on Afghanistan, it's not like the experts were any good at it either. They were not being frank on afghan security forces.
Technocrats can be good at creating policy, but they need to be beholden to public scrutiny. This does mean plenty of stupid questions, but I'd prefer that if we get one good one every so often.