Why You’re Not an Expert (And I’m Not Either…)

A Reaction to Sam Harris

Sam Harris commented for roughly ten minutes the other day on his latest podcast about why most people aren’t experts and why, therefore, we still need experts and institutions. I have a response.

Before getting into this, for those of you who don’t know who Sam Harris is, click HERE. Harris’s basic, brief biography goes as follows: Harris is a mid-fifties philosopher, atheist, neuroscientist, bestselling author and fairly famous podcaster. He has a PhD from UCLA, a BA from Stanford. He’s been doing his podcast, Making Sense, for roughly a decade. He got into the podcast game after a big flareup with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show Real Time in 2014. Harris has been a stalwart of commonsense and finding middle ground between the two political extremes. Over the past near decade he’s been my #1 Go To for Rational Debate. (Lately he’s taken heat from the Right a la suppression by MSM of Hunter Biden’s laptop. A story for another time.)

Anyway, here is Harris’s latest podcast episode, which I am referring to. The first ten minutes address his commentary about expertise and institutions.

In a nutshell, and I am 100% paraphrasing here, this is what Harris says in those ten minutes: 1. Most people are not experts nor anything near experts on most if not all ideas. 2. #1 therefore indicates that we do in fact NEED actual experts, people who have high degrees and specialization in specific fields, who are actually qualified to speak on certain topics, especially topics of great societal importance which affect masses of human beings. 3. Yes, Free Speech is profoundly important, and yes, all platforms should exist for people to use openly, and yes, anyone is of course allowed to have and express a view, whatever that view may be. 4. However, given the proliferation of social media, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc, and the mass followings of people such as Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Tulsi Gabbard, etc etc, it’s important to grasp that likely millions of people allow their opinions and ideas to be shaped by the people mentioned above, and for the most part these people and many others are NOT qualified to make many of the unfounded claims they consistently make, whether that’s about mRNA vaccines, Covid generally, health, finance, biology, etc.

I 100%, wholeheartedly agree with Harris’s assessment. A clear example happened for me yesterday. I was browsing Substack and randomly came upon a certain writer. Now, I don’t want to start a Substack War, so I’ll leave this stack’s name, and its author, unknown. This Substack writer was covering points made by another person, a “philosopher” I’d never heard of. But these are the salient points: 1. This author had a large following, including hundreds of comments and likes; 2. The article was making massive claims which purported to basically be upending modern science as we understand it, including long-accepted ideas around evolution, brain function, etc. 3. The author sounded very, very confident about these claims. 4. Scanning quickly down the comments, it seemed almost every single one was agreeing with the article.

Now, I had never heard of the philosopher the Substack writer wrote about. So I Googled the guy. The first giveaway was: It was difficult to find anything on this man at all. Never a good sign. The few items that did come up said things which indicated in obvious ways that he was a kooky, discredited nonentity. One site mentioned he is known for “HIV/AIDS denialism.”

So this is a clear case of: Random Substack writer with big following picks up random kook wannabe philosopher and tries to make a cuckoo case for modern science being “bullshit.” C’mon.

I see this on Substack too often. It comes from both the political left and the political right, from young and old, women and men. The idea seems to be: Fill-in-the-blank writer read half a Wikipedia article on fill-in-the-blank person, and BOOM: Expert. One thing Harris mentions in his mini-diatribe is that, because of some of the failures of some institutions over the past few years, the result has been this wild, lurid fragmentation of “media,” cracking open MSM (Mainstream Media) and allowing in its place a million new “newsletters.” Now, in theory, on its face, this is a good thing. Especially for free speech and Democracy.

But.

Like everything in life: It’s about tradeoffs. Nothing in life is free. What we gain is more democratic and easy access to information. What we lose is oversight. It’s now so easy to disseminate information that anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any reason, can do it, and almost immediately. We live in the “Instacart” of the Information Age. It’s too easy, and that’s precisely the problem.

A lot of people nowadays engage in what I’ll term C.P.R.—Copy and Paste Repeating. You see it with Woke leftism, and you see it with Conservative people on the Right. What I mean by C.P.R. is: Language copied consciously or unconsciously from favored news sites or commentators which then gets summarily dumped onto Twitter or Substack or Medium etc as if the writer is a long-held “expert.” One of my favorites on the left, as an easy example, is when leftists claim CRT doesn’t exist; they’ll say “But it’s just a ‘graduate level’ college course.” This phrase “graduate-level” was coined (not the phrase in general, but the phrase in conjunction with CRT specifically, I mean) on MSNBC, circa 2020. When someone makes this language gaff, I automatically stop listening; I can no longer take them seriously. Because it immediately tells me that they: 1. Don’t think independently; 2. Probably don’t read at all; 3. Are 100% tribal and entirely disinterested in serious, rational conversation or debate.

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