The Potemkin Village of Expertise

First there is this from yesterday afternoon.

The Internet is forever. pic.twitter.com/f9qm5nhU2J

— (((AG))) (@AG_Conservative) January 27, 2019

Obviously there are some issues in the tweet.

More pertinently, if you go to Lawrence Tribe's Twitter timeline, that tweet is no longer there. I have seen other thread tweets which appear to have been linked to that tweet which now read as that this tweet is no longer available.

So the first question is whether that screenshot is a real tweet from Lawrence Tribe or whether it is a photoshop. Impossible to tell but given that other's accounts are showing that something was removed, it appears that it is quite possible that this was indeed a real, though unconsidered, tweet by Tribe. It is certainly customary for right leaning commentators to screenshot embarrassing left leaning commentators' tweets. They say embarrassing or vile things and then reconsider and take them down, though typically not before they have been retweeted many thousands of times.

It is actually quite a slick technique. You can say unspeakable things to your followers and then, absent a screenshot, deny that it was said or claim that it was misunderstood.

In this instance, Tribe isn't saying anything vile. He is just saying things that are incompatible with his reputation for being knowledgeable.

1) That's not Mitch McConnell's Twitter account.

2) He's the Senate majority leader. He has nothing to do with the appointment of members to the House Intel Committee. You're making stuff up.

3) This is a conspiracy pushed by Rachel Maddow. The R members will be announced soon. https://t.co/A01x8nsbNl

— (((AG))) (@AG_Conservative) January 26, 2019

Which brings to mind this observation from Richard Fernandez.

Click to enlarge.

Since at least 2006 with Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock, we have begun to understand the dimensions of just how poor are the pretenses of expertise, especially against the harsh test of forecasting. If the deep knowledge experts produce forecasts no more accurate than that of informed observers, then there is no predictive value inherent in the expert knowledge.

Tetlock landed a hard blow to the credibility of generic "experts". That is not to say that there is no value in deep knowledge or even forecasts. There is value and it is value determined in application and utility, not in the abstract.

It was not Tetlock's intention to threaten the Mandarin class but there was now a mental model and data which provided a basis for an informed debate about the real value of public experts and commentators. There was a grace period for the next ten years in which the whole issue of inaccurate expert forecasts was set aside. A period which may be seen as the calm before the storm.

But with accumulating failures despite the forecasts of experts, failure which directly and negatively affected the body politick, the continuing collapse of credibility in any sociological or psychological or even anthropological research, the foundations for Mandarin Class experts continued to quietly erode. The failure of an economic recovery despite such forecasts by house economic experts did not help. Serial international failures undermined the foreign policy community. The healthcare debacle debased the credibility of medical experts and politicians alike.

So when the harsh accusations of Fake News and direct attacks on the court "experts" came, it was a shock to a system already on poor footing.

The shock of 2016 to the pundits in mainstream media and to academia was extreme. They were accustomed to unquestioning respect and deference. Harsh questioning of both their arguments and their evidence has not brought out the best in them. The irony is that the worst damage to the Mandarin reputation has not come from direct questioning or harsh language.

They have been their own worst enemies. They reacted badly to the implied insult of the results of 2016 and their behavior has spiraled since then, leaving far behind dispassionate argument or respectful treatment of facts. Tetlock provided the empirical evidence to question the purported expertise of the experts. Trump has incited the Mandarin Class experts to emotionally, continually, and in an accelerating fashion to demonstrate why Tetlock's empirical data makes sense.

It is not the Emperor who has no clothes, it is the Experts.

We do need knowledge and experts and credibility. But we have so long substituted credentials and Mandarin status for real expertise that it might take a good while to dismantle the Potemkin Village of Expertise and build a real platform of Experts. Those who have enjoyed the status and recompense of being highly paid but wrong experts, won't go gently into the night to make way for non-Mandarin Class people who are actual and demonstrated experts.