Beware The Man Of One Expert

You shouldn't trust what the media says experts say

The thesis I intend to defend in this article is neither grand, surprising, nor ambitious. But I think it’s something that some people need to hear.

When I was in tenth grade or so, I remember reading about travel restrictions at the very beginning of COVID. They seemed like an obviously good idea. But, of course, there were spates of media articles cautioning against it—with this being a representative sample, suggesting it was a bad idea, and potentially xenophobic. Not only did the media assert it was a bad idea, they claimed that “experts” asserted it was a bad idea. In my naivety, I was persuaded that there must be something that the experts knew that I was missing—surely it couldn’t be that they were just bullshitting for obvious political reasons.

This was a pretty staggering failure. We shut down civilization for almost a year. We shut down schools for over a year. I had to spend my junior year of high school on Zoom online school because of the supposed great risk of kids transmitting the virus and most of my senior year masking. And yet the experts—many of whom recommended every one of these failed policies—didn’t think it was a good idea to temporarily prevent people from countries that had COVID to migrate to countries that didn’t have COVID. Some experts.

These same experts, the media told us, claimed that school closures would be a great idea, with many of those news sources publishing later pieces much more critical of the closures. Some experts, huh? Most of the “experts” who said this did so confidently, as if anyone who disagreed with them was an uninformed Fox News viewer, before quietly walking back their claims, never acknowledging their errors or the thin basis for their original assertions.

Sander van der Linden is a man who has made a career out of saying “experts say,” before pushing implausible and contentious views (that and smearing effective altruism by falsely claiming “that EA promoted the idea that ‘saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country’". The alleged promotion comes from the fact that Nick Beckstead said that in an obscure 2013 Ph.D thesis while discussing an obscure hypothetical!). Van der Linden is very concerned about misinformation and has published work describing it being rampant by classifying images like the following as misinformation:

Linden thinks that an obvious joke about Biden being old and mentally slow is misinformation. He’s not alone: half the establishment have spent the last year claiming that concerns about Biden’s age are misinformation, generally while ignoring the reasons that people had concerns. In spectacular fashion, it blew up in all their faces when it became clear during the debate that Biden is not where he used to be cognitively.

Linden is one of the chief proponents of a view that is weirdly popular among liberals: everything is misinformation. The reason people don’t agree with the mainline liberal consensus is that they’ve been systematically misinformed. If they just read a good Snopes debunking or Vox article titled “No, actually thing you think isn’t true,” they’d be cured of the misinformation virus, transformed into good cosmopolitan liberals.

It’s quite a self-serving ideology, and it’s no surprise that many of its proponents seem to be quite smug. If your opponents only disagree with you because they get their news from lyingclowns.com, you never have to seriously consider the possibility that you’re wrong. You never have to engage with anything that goes against the dogma of the liberal establishment—you can easily call it all conspiracism and misinformation.

It’s very easy to write an article claiming that experts agree with your contentious view. All you need to do is find one expert who does and then pass off their view as what the experts think. For this reason, we shouldn’t expect articles like this to be trustworthy.

And we’ve seen over the last many years that we shouldn’t trust it. The supposed experts have been wrong over and over again. These are the same people who told us we didn’t need to mask, that COVID wasn’t airborne, that shutting down the schools wouldn’t adversely impact learning. As Phil Tetlock has noted, experts don’t do better than chance at predicting geopolitical events. Certainly out of context experts selected at random by CNN to bolster their political agenda don’t do better than chance.

It’s not hard to find a single study arguing for anything. For this reason, we shouldn’t place that much stock in individual studies. It’s even less hard to find an “expert” who thinks something—and then claim that they represent the view of the experts. The same incentives that cause Fox News to churn out bogus propaganda with nothing going for it beyond the supposed stamp of experts also incentivizes your favorite news source to do the same.

Certainly, there are lots of times when experts should be taken seriously. I take Nate Silver seriously when he talks about the election because he has been quite right over and over again. You should take a representative poll of economists pretty seriously. But when the media wheels out their favorite establishment “expert” to say “see, we were right all along,” you should take it about as seriously as the dust on your floor.