| | Forgive me for tooting the same horn so often, and in such a different venue... but, like I've tooted elsewhere, "Intelligence is complicated, and made of many different components, and it is NOT IQ, or even the actual capacity or potential that IQ pretends to represent." (And my apologies for what amounts to mini-hijacking of a thread.)
Now, having gotten that out of my system, back to the topic... There is a deepening political rift in our country and some of it amounts to what the founding fathers feared... Factionalism. The inability to do anything because of virulent differences between two sides.
They feared it, having studied the bad endings of many of the ancient republics, and saw it as an often fatal political disease.
Now we are stuck in factionalism (left v. right) and it perverts the way issues are attended. What good there could be in experts is gone because factionalism has overridden intellectual integrity in the public arena and people just buy experts to support their side while science is made part knowledge, part whore, part the new PC religion.
I think this is a sign of End-Game. When factionalism rules, the end is most likely to be that one extreme wins, and the other is totally crushed out of existence (or in the old days, barbarians came over the wall and ate everyone's lunch). But there maybe an alternative. We Objectivists can see this as an opportunity since we aren't part of either faction. We have an alternative to their tired, old positions of this or that Marxist variation, or this or that Right-wing, militaristic, social dictatorship.
We can eschew the "expert" approach which grows less impelling as a type of argument each month, and find the clean, simple way to cut through to the basics.
One example, taken from John Stossel and the title of his new book, is "No, you can't!" He saw how often progressives used this war cry of "Yes, we can!" He showed clips on his show of this bit of emotional fluff being used to fire up the troops by Hillary, by Obama (repeatedly), by Gore, by Biden, etc. Stossel's point was very simple. The government can't. It never has been able to do these things (provide a safety net, fix the economy, provide a good education, etc.)
He just pointed out that people are asking of a government things that aren't in it's nature to provide. Me, I think it is about as likely to get a frog to sing opera as to get a good educational system from the government. Fuck the experts - they argue for both sides, but let me see just one of them with a real singing frog. (I bet that resonated more with those of you that bothered to read this far, then had I quoted studies from some research group :-)
(edited in response to Joe's entertaining reply below... I now require that it be a real frog. And besides, Joe, that isn't opera! :-)
(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 5/27, 1:39pm)
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Experts tend to suffer from groupthink. ... Moreover, because experts tend to believe more than most in the absolute authority of experts, the average expert in the room will defer to the judgment of the superexpert. ... Some recent examples include Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and, of course, the release of New Coke. ... One of the more fascinating counterintuitive facts of life is that the introduction of dumb people can make a group of smart people collectively smarter. Bluntly stated, some stupid people are too stupid to automatically defer to smart people. Remember the story about the truck that got jammed in the tunnel because it was too small? All the experts were stumped. But some kid yelled, "Let the air out of the tires," saving the day.
