"People have had enough of experts" - Michael Gove
God help us
God help us
It's still not necessarily true, but by taking just part of that quote is misrepresenting what he said.
Just thought that'd be good to keep in mind next time you might consider digging it up.
I'll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt just for the sake of argument, but I have my doubt most people voting for folks decrying "experts" or "the establishment" have paid the least bit attention to what experts actually say.
The end results seems to be the same sort of "oh man those jokers" argument in favor of ... some folks who seem like bigger jokes / less knowledgeable.
Or
"People have had enough of experts, (who are consistently getting it wrong)."
Regardless, his logic is completely wrong and unfounded but who cares anymore. Who are these experts? No idea. When are they right? Irrelevant. What constitutes being wrong? Doesn't matter.
They clearly decided on the nuclear option, i.e. Campaigning with an incredibly vacuous overly-simplistic divisive message that has broken the United Kingdom. Some of the more abrasive untruths would have made Goebbels proud: Particularly the idea that this was them against the "establishment" e.g. Their mates, or the £350 million affair - Not because of the figure but because of the tax income from doing trade with the EU.
Such predictions have been the subject of academic study. One obtains gold-standard data on the accuracy of short term predictions merely by waiting. The classic book is Expert Political Judgment by Philip E. Tetlock https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11152.html
His findings sent shocks waves through the intelligence community. What is going to happen next? Answering that question is raison d'être of the intelligence community. They depend on expert political judgment and Tetlock had found that it was rubbish. This prompted the Good Judgment Project https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/newsroom/iarpa-in-the-news/2...
Experts - when we think of them, we think of professionals with experience, people who've done research on the subjects, and in general just people who are better informed than the public.
What I think the people who say things like "enough with the experts", I find it to be entirely within a political/media context - many of whom are paid lobbyists, industry representatives, people with a lot of paper qualifications with their own agenda, etc. AKA, bullshit artists. A call against them is a call against systemic corruption, since they are a primary tool the powerful use to keep the public's consent.
The other side of that is a blanket callout against all experts obviously is just anti-intellectualism. This pessimistic worldview is that well since we can't tell which experts are telling the truth, I'm going to go with what I believe, and not listen to anything to the contrary. This is quite easy to criticize - however I think that those that criticize it aren't always taking into account that they do it as well, even if less often or on a less global scale.
This doesn't really happen much. First off, only a tiny percentage of people are thinking about this critically and independently. So it's more like "People are told X is bullshit, and choose to believe it". That holds regardless of the truth value of X, and has more to do with the intentional undermining of science as a source of finding truth.
So yes, we should listen to the scientists. Not the people trying to spin what they say, but the scientists. And not individual scientists, but disciplines as a whole. We should be able to understand when there is meaningful consensus and when there is not. How confident the community is in quality of the work. What ways there would be to interrogate it better. We should be funding competent and trained scientific journalists to synthesize and present this things in as objective a way as they can, instead of listening to PR hacks and politicians spin a random paper they found to support the conclusion they want.
Absolutely there are problems in science, and to some degree we have caused them by creating poor incentive structures. So lets fix that. We should probably be focusing more on evidence-base policy, and creating oversight structures that keep it working well.
After all, for the questions that science is capable of addressing, it is far and away the most effective approach humans have ever come up with. And as recent history shows us yet again, if you throw out those voices they will most likely be replaced by blind true-believers and opportunistic mountebanks. You can't honestly believe this will improve things, can you?
Of course, we shouldn't only listen to the scientists. But these day's we've swung too far in the other direction.
Within the context of Brexit, the leavers had their own group of "experts" i.e. the ERG but any attempt at economic prediction was clearly shunned on the grounds of it being "Project Fear" despite no specific biases being demonstrated. Because that's the only way, along with blatant lies, to get people believe that leaving the largest trading block - possibly even with no replacement deal with anyone - could possibly be a good thing (At all costs being the current mantra i.e. No Deal)
It's not the lack of listening to certain experts that bothers me, it's them clearing playing the card. Gove, and most of the others on the leave side, is very well educated and damn well knows that careful thought ("expert"ism) is important.
It's very interesting to me, cause I observe experts in expertise everywhere in Russian media, and have been feeling lately, that they'll close themselves in no time, if they proceed that way, or turn into buzzfeeds.
Btw, I think this is equally true of research outside the social sciences...but there is just far more scope to engage in puffery within the social sciences and, unfortunately, people are often far too lazy to counteract it.
It isn't even about data or the distinction between hard and soft...if you can make a solid argument that is justified and you have no data (which is sometimes the case) then fine. The issue is that, in most areas, the evidence doesn't justify any clear conclusion. Again, you see this in harder sciences where the title is eye-catching, the data less so (often in proportion to the nonsense in the title).
Areas like "peace building" and "conflict resolution", mentioned in the article, are deeply political areas. In my opinion, they rarely do much to advance human knowledge. For example, as the article inadvertently shows, peace building is explicitly based on the idea that democracies are best because they don't attack each other. Sounds great...but there is no data to support this conclusion.
Note well: This does not excuse purging intellectuals, in Turkey or anywhere else. Intellectuals aren't gods, but they aren't vermin, either.
Speaking of which, I recently saw a petition which was sold along the lines of "100s of scientists sign petition condemning 5G", where the vast majority of signatories were either scientists not working in a related field or physicians (Who are not scientists at all).