I think it's important for scientists to speak in their own voices and not just be mediated by journalists or others speaking for them.
There has been a subtler but very far-reaching change: the decline of respect for expertise. Americans once accepted with little question the views of experts… The experts tended to speak with one voice, and they enjoyed a reputation as neutral specialists and servants of the general welfare.
For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority.
Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
Attacks on the legitimacy of the U.S. electoral system tend to come from the most disreputable and ill-informed voices in conservatism — and from the most highly-esteemed and knowledgeable authorities in liberalism.
A bit of irony in this quote.
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that keeps getting told about the inevitability of American progress.
Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts. But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.
Also, many consumers consider a critic to be like God Almighty.
Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian.
There’s not much hostility toward experts in unhurried realms of inquiry like numismatics or number theory. It’s when uncertainty collides with urgency that the authorities enter the fray, convene commissions, and issue findings. Those who accept the sanctioned conclusions gain official backing. Those who don’t are ruled out of bounds. No longer recognized as colleagues with legitimate hypotheses, they risk being treated as crackpots, deniers, and conspiracy theorists.
I actually think that one of the most dangerous phenomena is the bowing to expertise, whether it's in international relations or how to use technologies.
In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.
