First Principles: Expert Ignoramuses and President Eisenhower's prescient warning about them

They study a wing on a beetle on a tree and then set out with government power to wreck the whole forest. Deny them standing to rule our lives.

President Dwight David Eisenhower 1953 - 1961

I.

Experts become experts by focusing ever more narrowly and looking ever more deeply and more minutely at their object of interest. In other words, they know more and more about less and less.

The idea is to hold everything else constant and see what happens with their object of interest. That’s just fine as far as it goes for whoever is interested, but it doesn’t go very far.

First, everything else cannot be held constant, except for the most narrowly defined, truly scientific experiments, such as in physics and chemistry.

Second, such researchers are likely to be so focused on their narrow, deep dive that they know much less about life than what most people learn and know from their daily experiences.

Third, the problem for all of us arises when experts get public recognition for what they have done. Then they get treated as experts in general. Greedy and power-hungry ones then take social and political advantage—joining with politicians eager to grab power for themselves—to push for vast influence over the whole field of which their work is just a small part, which has led to dreadful consequences.

That’s how we got “the nation’s foremost expert in infectious diseases” who does not treat anyone for any infectious disease, yet who weighs in and forces doctors to do nothing to treat people who are deathly ill in a pandemic, and he denounces or gets doctors fired who successfully use medications such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, and nutrients such as vitamin c, zinc, etc.

Specifically, that’s Dr. Fauci; but a whole lot of other “experts” in the CDC, FDA, etc. did the same thing and cloaked themselves in the mantle of “science” too..

That is medical malpractice and they should all lose their licenses for it; being, truly, very dangerous expert ignoramuses

Governors or mayors who enforce medical orders on advice of such medical ignoramuses are practicing medicine without a license and should be prosecuted for the felony it is (or should be).

Now take the case of the Nobel Prize winner in economics who writes a regular column for the New York Times (Paul Krugman). In one column highly praising AOC early in her congressional career, he said the top marginal income tax rate should be 80% because the rich “don’t need the money.”

It’s as if he doesn’t know that capitalism exists, i.e., that rich people in free markets put their money at risk of loss to invest in new products and companies and mortgages, creating new jobs in the process, all of which make life better for the rest of us.

Or else he doesn’t like capitalism and wants to kill it by replacing everything with government actions, which would kill virtually everything we hold dear in life.

So how could he be so ignorant?

Well, he didn’t win in the whole field of economics, nor in the subfield of taxation. Nor did he win in the whole subfield of trade. He just won in one subfield of trade, regarding international trade. Well, governments can trade among governments; no private capital or free markets are needed. So he needn’t consider capitalism at all, especially if he wants to exercise power personally in, or with, government. Another truly dangerous expert ignoramus.

They are not alone.

As long ago as January, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us to beware of becoming captive to a scientific-technological elite, in his Farewell Address to the Nation:

In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. [Emphasis added, here and below]

He also warned that Federal government money could come to dominate—and direct—research.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded

This after his more-famous warning about the military-industrial complex:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

And finally:

As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

[We] must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mututal trust and respect.

All this is happening now.

His prescription:

We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense [and other bureaucracies] with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

On top of all that of course are the countless non-experts who present themselves as experts, such as Al Gore and John Kerry, social media censors, and now AI chatbots such as ChatGPT (which is programmed by “woke” ignoramuses), who piggyback on expert ignoramuses, or misrepresent facts and actual expert opinion, and function under the cover of censoring dissent.

My point here is different from my usual posts. In those I try to blend general understanding for a non-technical audience with specifics for people more knowledgable of the subject matter.

Here, I am giving a simple method to deny standing to expert ignoramuses, their users, and their opinions (or orders) in the first place. Then you don’t need to debate on their terms at all, a debate they are likely to win by sheer arrogance and technical mumbo jumbo, or by other people being intimidated into believing them.

II.

A second, easier, and much more sweeping way to deny standing to “experts,” and all the authorities pigging back on them, is to maintain that they are not scientists and are not “following the science” at all.

I developed this theme extensively in my post When following the "science" is NOT science. I’ll summarize it here:

“Science” only means something reliable and useful when an experiment is repeated by many different people and they get the exact same result each and every time, within only an insignificant margin of error.

Not incidentally, there is always a margin of error. If you don’t see the margin of error reported in the data, you know that the data has been “massaged” for an agenda-driven purpose.

(FYI, performing these types of experiments is the first of three stages in the scientific method—the latter two being formulating a theory that explains all existing known facts AND predicts new results, and then testing that theory to see if its predictions come true, after which a new cycle starts.)

So medicine is not a science because:

• Even if it uses narrowly focused experiments in test tubes or petri dishes (“in vitro”), they are not remotely comparable to living human beings.

• Further, human beings are not all the same (as if they were electrons) and cannot be as rigorously controlled as electricity or chemical reactions.

The best that medicine can do is the so-called “gold standard” of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. Done well (always a question), they do reduce the likelihood of some common errors being made, but they can’t overcome the many differences that exist among people.

In other words, even with the best double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials, significant exceptions will always exist, and “side effects” for those exceptions can be horrible, or worse. It’s like the old saying about mixing apples and oranges; only, I would add poisonous mushrooms. That’s why there are so many blood-pressure drugs, for example, and why what works for one person could harm or kill another person.

Similarly, climate studies are not science because we can’t control the Sun, volcanoes, Earth’s variable motions, and nearly eight billion people (see my post discrediting climate-change alarmists).

Likewise, economics is not a science. “Political science” is not a science. Psychology is not a science. Etc., etc., etc.

To be sure, disciplined studies such as the above may be useful if they provide insights into likelihoods of events and actions, but having the reliability—and therefore having the authority of reliability—of genuine science? Not at all.

Deny standing to any claims of infallibility, be they implied as science, or openly insisted as science (such as “I am science” and “anyone who disagrees with me is denying science”—this, from Dr. Fauci, in case you hadn’t heard of it). The advantage here is you don’t have to research to see what narrow speciality the “expert” has attained and is leveraging to gain great power.

The Bottom Line: “Expert ignoramuses,” no matter their form, lack standing to be definitive, lack standing to be believed, and lack standing to order us around (as we see can happen and has happened when people even in a democracy believe the ignoramuses and follow their orders).

Insist on their lack of standing in your own thoughts. Explain it civilly and patiently to other people. Persevere. You’ve got the “high ground.” Find people who are responsive to the message. Stick with them. Organize for social impact.