Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus

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When you lie to people repeatedly, they stop trusting you. If you think they should continue to trust you because you're an "expert," despite your proven track-record of dishonesty, that says more about you than them. None of this is complicated or confusing. None of this needs a sophisticated academic examination to plumb its impenetrable atavistic depths. It's obvious on the face of it.

If people fail to understand something so simple, it can only be due to cognitive dissonance caused by a refusal to acknowledge their own moral and ethical bankruptcy. You cannot go around murdering people day and night and then stand, drenched in their blood, and complain that no one RESPECTS you anymore.

And lest anyone think this is hyperbolic, remember that lies have consequences, and when "experts" in power lie, those consequences are often injury and death.

>When you lie to people repeatedly, they stop trusting you

When someone starts thinking of most of the world as if it were one person who is gaslighting them, it's a warning sign.

If an expert class were "most of the world" we wouldn't have to even talk about trusting the experts.

The point of the comment appeared to me to be that none of the "experts" deserve the label. But they are angry at someone.

When I look at the comments section of a right of center blog these days, I see people dismissing in similar language to the grandparent:

   - the federal government
   - the military
   - local governments
   - teachers
   - health care employees
   - hospitals
   - doctors
   - the corporate world
   - people who run non-profits
   - those who run higher education
   - academics
   - people who went to college in general
   - tech companies and tech employees
   - scientists
   - people who live in cities
   - political activists

and many others.

I think the above are most of society collectively, and while they are certainly not 100% experts, they are grouped due to assumed support of some sort of orthodox power structure that puts so-called experts at the top.

Well now you're the one grouping all of society together. A single person might distrust some of those groups, but not all at once generally. additionally it's hard to find a left of center individual that doesn't distrust a bunch of those groups, and then others.

>not all at once generally

I don't get the impression that anyone distrusts them all at once, more like sequentially. Like, when Mark Milley was in the news, people were going oh, the military is run by libs too.

And I'm not interested in debating whether or not the people who run things actually should be respected or not, what's disconcerting to me is that anyone who generally appreciated the military would not realize that's how the high ranking people think.

“Don’t be buffaloed by experts and elites. Experts often possess more data than judgment. Elites can become so inbred that they produce hemophiliacs who bleed to death as soon as they are nicked by the real world.” -Colin Powell

Note that Powell was a real-world leader of an extremely large organization, which pretty much delivered extremely difficult and complex real-world results (victory in Operation Desert Storm) on time and within budget. (Yes, I know about his role in whitewashing My Lai. And later moral failures. Not. The. Point.)

Also - how much are anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism grounded in repeated experiences by groups of "ordinary people" with intellectuals and elites who are oblivious (at best) to the concerns and problems of ordinary people? If not busy using their intellectual and elite status to justify or excuse treating ordinary people like crap, for their (intellectuals and elites) own benefit? Marie Antoinette probably never said "Let them eat cake" - but that phrase and the surrounding French history sum up very well how things often work out, given human nature, when society contains self-absorbed elites.

The problem I have with populist anti-elite rhetoric is not so much that the elites don't have their failures (they do, and in fact any major failure is almost by definition the responsibility of elites, since they run things).

The issue is that it is often used by one group of power-seeking elites vs another, where one group tries to pretend if they win it will be putting the ordinary people in charge somehow. Often it doesn't seem to work out that way in practice.

True. I'm not saying that populist anti-elite rhetoric has a history of ending well. I'm saying that sh*tty elites who inspire and empower such rhetoric are the real problem.

Note that in history, when things really get nasty, it usually ends badly for 'most all current and wanna-be elites. The French Revolution was 10 bloody years of upheaval, and the eventual victor was no intellectual, but a ruthless general who seized power in a coup. Many of recent history's other highly successful revolutionaries (Hitler, Mao, Stalin, ...) have viewed elites at best with extreme suspicion, and at worst as a problem for which the best solution was some sort or other of death camp.

> I'm saying that sh*tty elites who inspire and empower such rhetoric are the real problem.

Some of it could also be due to external circumstances, I think Hoover was supposed to actually be pretty competent and intelligent relative to other politicians of his time, but countries everywhere had trouble dealing with the great depression effectively.

Ray Dalio has an interesting perspective on populism where he goes into detail on a bunch of specific cases [1].

In general, he argues that part of the reason for the emergence of populism this time is the end of a long-term debt cycle, where debt levels increase and interest rates decrease until interest rates hit 0 and can't be easily lowered further, and that the great depression and the financial crisis are examples of this dynamic. And that after this happens, internal tensions often increase (keep in mind on a macro level, dollar debt/savings are two sides of the same coin, so if debt levels stop increasing savings do also, and the economy takes on a more zero-sum dynamic). He covers the economics more on the home page of the same site [2].

[1] https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phe...

[2] https://economicprinciples.org/

The fundamental problem is the assumption that there will always be scarcity.

This creates the capitalist mindset where consumption will always be too high and savings/investment too low. Considering that every economy starts out with scarcity that assumption isn't too far off. So the reinvestment of capital isn't such a terrible idea.

However, what if you have exactly enough capital to meet all consumer demand? If you were to keep reinvesting then the consumer economy would shrink to nothing and the investment economy will be all that is left. At some point there is simply too much capital and because of the reinvestment dynamic it's all in the hands of the people with the lowest time preference.

So now you have a class that controls almost the entire economy and everyone else whose involvement in the economy keeps shrinking. Now you get elite vs commoner class warfare.

If the elite class wants to keep its wealth it must give concessions to the commoner class. There'll be things like welfare, philanthropy or just dressing yourself up as some super hero (Elon Musk pretending to be ironman).

If no such things happen, then the commoner class will take what it needs. That means war or revolution.

How would you end this vicious cycle? It should be pretty obvious. Stop pretending that abundance is scarcity. If there was no excess capital that was created at the expense of consumer demand there would be no need to destroy it.

How does this all relate to interest rates? Wars create the need for growth. Every time capitalism wins the board is reset so that capitalism can win again, just like a monopoly board. If there is not enough capital, interest rates are positive. If there is too much capital interest rates are negative. Thus the ideal interest rate would be 0%. However, that goes against the capitalist mindset. It is so inconceivable that war is preferred. Making weapons is just another growth market.

But a low interest rate requires trust. If we want to stay at 0% we will need trust. For interest rates to become negative you need even more trust, a whole truckload of it. Inflation erodes trust. Political corruption/involvement in the economy erodes trust. Instability erodes trust. Business/debt cycles erode trust. Unemployment erodes trust. Inequality erodes trust. If we want to avoid a war we should do everything we can to maintain trust.

Worst of all. The zero lower bound on cash causes economic distortions because negative interest rates are difficult to represent directly. Effectively there is a cap on trust. Once we hit 0% we have reached the end of how much trust can grow. In fact, people are now looking for currency systems that are more trust efficient i.e. they need less trust. As if a lack of trust is something to live up to. (looking at you Bitcoin).

We have outgrown our current fiat currency system the same way we have outgrown the gold standard. The only way interest rates will become positive is through a war or collapse meaning we stop trusting each other.

> At some point there is simply too much capital and because of the reinvestment dynamic it's all in the hands of the people with the lowest time preference.

> everyone else whose involvement in the economy keeps shrinking

> Wars create the need for growth

This sounds very similar to a book that was recently recommended to me. [1] I've not yet read it, but I understand it makes the case that, historically, an eventually diminishing middle class is the natural state of things and wars and other disasters have been the only things to effectively reverse that trend.

I'm not necessarily so pessimistic just yet. Certainly there are other things than war we could spend money on to get the same desired macroeconomic effects, and I think there is a general understanding among (some portion of) the establishment of the economic issues at hand. And even if enough low-hanging investment fruit has been picked so that companies have trouble finding profitable investments at 0%, if enough demand is produced that will increase the number of profitable investment opportunities (factories etc) and eventually raise interest rates again (and that path probably makes more sense than interest rates that are substantially negative, do you really want "investments" that return less than the resources they cost?).

The infrastructure and families bills seem like steps in the right direction, the proposed families bill is ~1.5% of (current) GDP/yr, which while not close at all to WWII is substantial compared to most recent policies.

But even if we could navigate the post-0% environment it doesn't mean we will. I think there's a reasonable risk that political dysfunction will prevent us from addressing (potentially solvable) economic problems, leading to further dysfunction, in some sort of self-reinforcing process.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler-Inequality-Twenty-First...

> Third, evidence shows anti-intellectualism is connected to populism, a worldview that sees political conflict as primarily between ordinary citizens and a privileged societal elite.

Sounds like a strange definition of populism. The presence of the political conflict brings attention to it, and the best model of the conflict so far includes tension between ordinaries and elites. Even experts don't propose a better picture, so this worldview is rational.

Also isnt Marxism (as in the Communist Manifesto) about the elite vs commoners but in an economic framework.

Marxism is bourgeoisie and proletariat

However, his writing is much more about Optimates and Populares as factions of the Roman politicals

> Sounds like a strange definition of populism.

It seems pretty close to the dictionary definition (from Google): "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups".

> the best model of the conflict so far includes tension between ordinaries and elites. Even experts don't propose a better picture, so this worldview is rational.

A reasonable alternative model (for political conflict) is rival political factions that each contain both elite and non-elite members. This model doesn't necessarily conflict with the presence of anti-elite sentiment at the base level.

There has been a concerted effort to conflate populism with podunk racist hillbillies since the term populist was coined.

Great book documenting the anti-populist efforts:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250220110

This reads like a how-to on logical fallacies such as Appeal/Arguments of Authority, False Authority, Popularity, Normality, Common Belief, and Accomplishment.

Being skeptical is good science, as science is a process/method, not a dogmatic religion.

You know what else is good science? Staying in your lane, and placing more faith in subject-matter experts' ability to do their jobs than in your ability to gainsay their work.

When Galileo saw that Copernican Heliocentrism better explained the observations he made with his telescopes that existing theory of Aristotelian geocentrism, he did not then shutup about it despite facing a litany of criticism from the State & the Church, and finally, the Inquisition. He was more correct, and they were not.

Good science is critical science.

True, but not everybody is Galileo and not everybody's opponent is a dogmatic and powerful church. Just like it's probably not a compiler bug, an oil geologist's difference of opinion with a climatologist on whether and how the planet is heating up is probably not due to a fault in the climatologist's data or analysis.

Opponent is a strong word; competitor perhaps instead?

It just could be siting problems with an observing system, or two, instead, in my personal experience.

Yet it is axiomatic that there exist powerful groups of entrenched scientists that do oppose challenges to dogma without any semblance of due diligence. While many examples exist, two immediately come to mind- a researcher, Jim Allison, at my own institution who recently won a Nobel after decades of having the core tenets of his research marginalized.

"When I first came to Berkeley in the 1990s, for example, they were in the midst of trying to redefine modern biology, and certain very powerful people there did not even want there to be a department of immunology. They felt that immunology was not a real discipline because it didn’t deal with the static, fundamental processes of biology that apply to everything."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/nobel-laureate-james-p-alliso...

Those "very powerful people" were, in point of fact, scientists.

Barry Marshall faced years of ridicule for working to validate the hypothesis that many, if not most, cases of idiopathic gastric inflamation and lesions were a direct result of H. Pylori infection. Again, the hostililty from the entrenched scientific community was well-documented. He eventually won a Nobel as well.

Many factors other than "science" have played a role in the spirited defense of dogma by experts. Researchers are as susceptible to all types of bias, logical fallacies, desire for power and money, etc. as anyone else.

This clearly isn't always the case, but often enough that the moment someone says "...because I'm an expert therefore I say this is so." without supporting evidence that may be examined -and- debated, the veracity of their statement and motive in making it are suspect.

Yeah actually no.

You know "experts" can and often are wrong write? Not saying you should blindly deny shit you don't understand but if you are asking questions and the experts don't have good answers.... I mean yeah dude use your fucking brain

That's actually not good science at all, not even a little bit. What that is is brow beating dissent of any kind, as well as a good laugh that a human being said this unironically.

Thats... not.

Maybe they should stop shilling out their credentials to special interest groups and do something to actually earn trust?

Many academics basically just say 'trust me bro', then work for various think-tanks and industry groups. It's no wonder they've lost trust.

> Third, evidence shows anti-intellectualism is connected to populism, a worldview that sees political conflict as primarily between ordinary citizens and a privileged societal elite. Exposure to randomly assigned populist rhetoric, even that which does not pertain to experts directly, primes anti-intellectual predispositions among respondents in the processing of expert consensus cues.

The formulation of "populism" here reveals something critical. Populism has always existed ever since there has been an elite. What's new, in the U.S., is that scientific institutions are perceived as being part of that "privileged societal elite."

It's obvious why this is happening: governance is becoming more technocratic. Before, policies were justified by reference to values or power struggles. Increasingly, they're being justified by reference to "experts" and "science." There is more and more of a sentiment that scientists aren't just doing science, they're playing a key role in elite governance of the masses.

Ultimately, this is bad for science and scientific institutions, and it's in the interest of scientists and experts to fight these trends. Too often, experts allow politicians to hide behind them to avoid making political decisions, or allow political decisions to be framed as scientific ones.

A scientist can, e.g., explain how a mask mandate will affect propagation of a disease. But it must be a politician that synthesizes that information with other information, weighs the political considerations, and decides to impose mask mandates. When a Governor says "I'm imposing a mask mandate because that's what the scientists say" they're actually throwing scientists under a bus. They're being made accountable in the public eye for a judgment call that's not really their's to make, and collateral consequences they have no control over. E.g. if the cops are abusive in enforcing the mandate, backlash will flow back to the scientists because they've been made the figurehead of the whole endeavor.

It doesn't help that the banner of "science" is being applied to social studies that have nothing to do with science. But those social studies theories are being invoked as if they had the credibility of science, in the context of debates that are fundamentally political in nature.

The idea that populism and a lack of trust is bad is interesting, since it is mostly people in the "elite circle" that hold that it is bad, or those that wish they were. They don't seem to entertain the idea that maybe their expertise is not as strong as they believe. Many people seem to discount ideas that seem "bought and paid" for by an outside organization for example, which is reasonable. If an X studies person is an expert, but I don't believe they have the rigor to actually be an expert, why is it wrong to discount their views?

I find it fascinating that science is not performed in a vacuum, it requires the vast breadth of expertise in scientific disciplines, physics, math, and statistics, supported by IT & Engineering.

Yet, it those dreaded statistics Pros most often finding flaws in my limited, anecdotal experience

I think it is important to think about the different way in which we humans can look at the same data and draw dramatically different conclusions. Although I have views, I like to read contrary opinions for the sake of balance and synthesis. Believe this is different from "bought & paid for" external opinions, although, most organizations need income. So a think-tank, an FFRDC, or Academia are likely equally willing to study a topic and analyze it for funding. Provided you are not dictating conclusions I don't see an issue with it though.

Lacan/Zizek "a pervert is someone who knows the meanings of your actions better than you do" and that "perversion is on the side of power." (perverts sustain the power of the Big Other) - your friendly neighbourhood analytic philosopher

Zizek! Simultaneously the most entertaining and the most useless philosopher alive today.

"People who disagree with us are stupid, ignorant, or at least misled"

I don’t think it’s that people don’t trust experts, I think it’s that people don’t trust media sources to accurately deliver experts’ findings. Nobody is actually reading scientific papers, everything they get from experts is at best getting filtered through something like the New York Times.

Well, populists can also be pro-intellectualism when the scientific consensus benefits their agenda.

For example, here in Brazil the president Bolsonaro started to promote a migration of the current DRE voting system to a system with a physical audit trail (such as VVPAT).

The result was pure chaos. He and his followers started to mix up legit stuff such as the ACM statement on voting systems and articles written by world renowned researchers with conspiracy theories claiming fraud by "the communists" in past elections.

Meanwhile, almost all newspapers (with the exception of one or two) started to bash the scientific consensus as if it was bullshit just to argue against the conspiracists.

A horror show which is still going on.

Is this satire? This is almost like an onion article.

So they are showing that anti-intellectualism is driven by ideology and strong presupposed notions by doing a survey on fucking amazon mechanical turk about fucjing climate change GMOs and water fluoridation? Absolutely hilarious.

Any time someone uses the term "XYZ- denier" or "anti science" you cab pretty well bet they are a brainless drone who would buy a study like this hook line and sinker.

In my experience, if you truly believe in the power of human rationality, you think rationally about the results of an experiment and come to your own conclusion rather than just swallowing whatever dumb fuck conclusion some nitwit at berkely derived from their dumb fuck social experiment.

Sorry for the vitriol, I've just been accused of being anti science by completely scientifically illiterate people far too many times.

Contrarian data point:

"The most vaccine-hesitant group of all? PhDs"

https://unherd.com/thepost/the-most-vaccine-hesitant-educati...

Based on a Facebook survey where people self-selected their education level, in which a significantly larger proportion of respondents claimed to have a PhD than would be expected (compared to a random sample of the US).

Still an interesting data point which could be worth following up on with a more rigorous study, but easy to see the potential for skewed results.

Considering the linked study covers January-May 2021, it's too bad they don't have a breakdown of the reasons for not getting vaccinated vs. education. The vaccine was still in short supply in the US for a number of those months, and I could see a lot of educated people choosing the "Other people need it more" option, with the intent of getting vaccinated when the shortage wasn't as severe.

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