One of the most commonly heard debater's challenges, online and in real life, is: "Are YOU an expert in (X)?" The obvious if generally unspoken corollary is: "If not, then shut up." However, very often, you don't need to.
There is little evidence that a smart normal citizen, capable of effective analysis of empirical data, cannot criticize the work of academic or journalistic "experts" in most fields — or any reason that he or she should be intimidated by these title-holders.
Obviously, some professional background in a topic that one is discussing or researching is a good thing.
However, no credential can substitute for a relatively unbiased and non-partisan approach to data, or for what can bluntly be called intelligence. Whether due to political motivation or plain incorrect statistical assumptions, credentialed experts have a long and entertaining history of wildly false predictions — like the recent predictions of between 1,000,000 and 10,000,000 COVID-19 deaths in the United States before the end of 2020.
1, 2 This sort of thing is likely to become even more common in the politicized academy of today, where essentially no statistical support appears to exist for theories of "white fragility" and univariate white privilege. When debating such questions as "How many human sexes are there?" a taxpayer who finds the experts arrayed against her need not feel a fool.
The basic fact that famous experts are often wrong is not itself in dispute — but is worth reviewing. Scholars writing in my own "neck of the woods" — the intersection of hard quantitative methods with topics of interest to social scientists —
have a long history of producing (in addition to much fine work) globally influential but false apocalyptic predictions. Most notably, Stanford University's Paul Ehrlich penned the international best-seller
The Population Bomb in 1968, arguing that worldwide famines would devastate Earth during the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. The book opens by claiming that hundreds of millions of people will starve before 1980 despite mankind's best efforts — "The battle to feed all of humanity is over" — and goes on to argue that widespread human sterilization may be necessary and then to essentially write off the entire nation of India — arguing that there is no way the sub-continental giant could feed even "200 million more people."
Comment:
- New York City bows to cancel culture, passes budget with nearly $1 billion in police cuts
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- Minneapolis City Council cuts $8 million from police budget as violent crime surges
- Portland grapples with surging homicides following police budget cuts
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A phenomenon not confined to the US:Theresa May blamed for police budget cuts that have led to staggering wave of knife crimes in British inner cities