The world has become too complex for "experts" to have the influence and relevance they once had.

And it seems all of us understand this….except for the experts.

— Jack Murphy (@jackmurphylive) March 5, 2019

Experts are great if you need expertise in the very very VERY specific 0.000001% of human knowledge they have any idea about.

But if you don’t require that, experts are worse than useless and most likely attempting to rob you. Because of course the problem with experts is that they know a great deal about very little, but believe that they have an abundance of knowledge about much more because of their mastery of one infinitesimally tiny area of human experience.

Almost no one (expert or not) is even passable at systems-level thinking, and experts almost to a one are worse than anyone else, even non-experts. STEM training and the like causes you to be far inferior as a systems-level thinker, as it’s designed to do this (among other things), while it convinces you that your mastery of one area leads to intuitive comprehension of all others.

So if you have glioblastoma and you need an expert on this, depend and rely on the expert on glioblastoma-specific information only. But I wouldn’t even depend on them for advice or any true knowledge on migraines, much less any other topic.

Lately, I am obsessed with systems thinking because I believe that is a hugely unappreciated and understudied area, and one where I can use my innate skills to really upgrade my own understanding.

Dear artists AND scientists: I will throw away your life’s work without regret if you are terrible to other people. I will re-derive it from first principles.

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) March 5, 2019

This way, the abyss. This attitude, as much as I like Emily, is just moronic and counterproductive. It doesn’t make anything or anyone better; it’s just virtue signaling.

The problem is, of course, that moral standards change over time, and sometimes very quickly, and not in ways that are predictable or obvious. The whole idea of jettisoning the past is attractive, especially in the context of the neoliberal mindset, but it is dangerous because in the future all of what we do and are now will be seen as problematic and tossed away just as cavalierly.

This discarding of the past leads to an ahistorical ever-present now where we must “re-derive” everything, which is an enormous waste of time and also impossible, and rather than grapple with moral quandaries or imperfection we instead just plaster over it, pretend it never happened, and invite the same mistakes again and again.

People can usually identify a problem but their solutions are often the worst of any that are available. This is yet another example.