This neatly follows up from yesterday’s comments about ideologies. The issue is, why don’t Americans trust experts?. And to cut to the chase, Lewis sees the problems as: people drawing conclusions about the world (including ideologies!) based on anecdotes (personal or on the web); people misunderstanding of statistics and probabilities; and people not interacting with people different from themselves, which might be solved through some kind of encouraged government service for a year at 18 or so. Also: not everyone has a right to an opinion about everything — because most opinions are uninformed. (And yet Americans, in particular, resent being ‘schooled’ by anyone who presumes to know more than they do.)
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Vox, Sean Illing, 24 Apr 2022: Michael Lewis on why Americans don’t trust experts, subtitled, “How a society that is so good at creating knowledge can be so bad at applying it.”
Michael Lewis is the author of many books, notably The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Premonition. Sean Illing begins:
Lewis is as good a storyteller as we have, and he takes a close look at what’s happened to our trust in experts and expertise. The problem, he says, isn’t that we lack experts; in fact, we have lots of experts and some of them have likely saved your life before. The issue is that we don’t value expertise and are therefore really bad at recognizing it when we see it.
Sean Illing
We live in a society that is very good at creating knowledge and very bad at applying it. Why is that, Michael?
Michael Lewis
It’s a really great question. I think part of it is that we have the luxury of being that way. There are various safety nets for our idiocy.
This is a key idea, because technology has become so sophisticated, the average person has no idea how anything works. (It’s not the 1950s, when guys could repair their own cars, and take vacuum tubes to the hardware store to fix their TVs.) And so designers of machines and devices build in protections so that naive users cannot wreck things. (The 1950s sf story “The Marching Morons,” by C.M. Kornbluth, made exactly this point.)
[Y]ou might say [the answer could be], “Well, in a lot of spheres of life, there has risen new expertise. It’s very complicated and it’s not easy to understand the expertise, especially for people who are not particularly numerate or statistical or scientific.”
Examples of weather forecasting, and medicine.
Doctors will tell you they know so much more than they did 30 years ago as a profession. They are much more useful to patients. But every day more and more people are walking into the office after reading something on WedMD and they think they know what they’re talking about.
Another long example. Lewis likes to tell illustrative stories.
Sean Illing
A certain amount of skepticism of expertise and authority is healthy, but at what point do you think that skepticism becomes pathological?
Michael Lewis
That’s an unanswerable question, but I’ll give it a whirl.
It becomes pathological when your unwillingness to take in what the putative authority or expert is saying kills you. It’s pathological when you turn up in the emergency room as a 45-year-old healthy police officer with Covid, as someone in one of our stories does, and he’s circling the drain and refuses to be intubated because, in his view, hospitals are trying to kill people in the ICU — that’s pathological.
It’s pathological when you are running a big Wall Street firm and you’re unable to distinguish between the trader, who’s making a lot of money in your firm, making really dumb bets on the subprime mortgage market, and the person who has actually got a bead on how the subprime mortgage market is working and can explain it to you, but you don’t want to hear it — and so your firm blows up.
You can get away with ignoring a lot of expertise in your life as you move through the world. And I agree that you never want to lose your ability to question the things you’re being told, but it’s also not true that everybody has a right to an opinion about everything. I don’t have a right to an opinion about climate change. Neither does Donald Trump. There are people who study this stuff, their whole lives are devoted to trying to understand it. They are state of the art. It is a scientific consensus. My opinion shouldn’t exist, but people think they have a right to an opinion about it.
Sean Illing
Do you think, on some level, that the world has become so big and so complex that it’s too much for people to make sense of, and the temptation to retreat into conspiracy theory or tribalism is just too irresistible?
Michael Lewis
To default into a narrative that’s fueled by anecdote that happens to come from the small circle of people in your world — I’ve seen this. I’ve been amazed with people I admire and who I think are intelligent who will sit down with me and tell me they’re not getting vaccinated because the vaccine is making people sick.
And they’re not wrong in one way. They know somebody who got sick, but that’s the thing that they pay attention to as opposed to the 1 billion studies that show that you were just so much better off being vaccinated. It’s like you walked into the casino for the first time in your life, looked at all the games, and you saw someone pull a slot machine and they hit the jackpot, and you decide, “Oh, well, the slot machines are the smart game to play here.”
It’s people organizing a complicated world with stories that are basically not true stories. They’re not representative stories. They just happen to be the stories they hear. …
Sean Illing
Do you have any sense at all of what it would take to rebuild trust in our society?
Michael Lewis
…if you’re handing me God-like powers, one of the things I’d do is, maybe not create some kind of mandatory national service, but at least strongly incentivize people, when they’re 18 or 19, to spend a year or a year and a half working in some government service where they’re all mixed up with other kinds of people.
Part of the problem is we’re not mixed up enough. It’s much easier to think of “us” and “them” if you’re in Berkeley, California, and you’ve never met anybody from Alabama, or if you’re in Alabama and you’ve never met anybody from Berkeley, California. Or if you are poor and you’ve never met a rich person, or if you’re rich and you’ve never had to do anything with a poor person.
It’s amazing how helpful it is when people have personal experience doing something together, trying to achieve something together with people entirely different from themselves. Then we have a living sense that we’re not all that different. There’s no us and them. We don’t belong in these tribes. It’s not the natural order of things. So mixing up the society more in various ways is one answer I would give.
