Leading and widely acknowledged experts misjudged with a degree of certainty that in retrospect is no less remarkable than the analytic failure itself.

From The Russia-Ukraine War: A Study in Analytic Failure by Eliot A. Cohen and Phillips O'Brien.

Surprise occurs in many forms. Many think of it in terms of a surprise attack, but it occurs in other dimensions. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a good example: the attack was foreseen, but the immediate outcomes were astonishing. To use an old Soviet phrase, analysts misunderstood in fundamental ways the “correlation of forces.” Their judgments about Russian and Ukrainian military capacity were not merely off—they were wildly at variance with reality. And even more perplexing, leading and widely acknowledged experts misjudged with a degree of certainty that in retrospect is no less remarkable than the analytic failure itself.

Their misjudgment was not a case of normal error or exaggeration. The expert community grossly overestimated Russian military capabilities, dismissed the chances of Ukraine resisting effectively, and presented the likely outcome of the war as quick and decisive. This analytic failure also had policy implications. Pessimism about Ukraine’s chances restricted military support before February 24, 2022. 

True enough for Ukraine but more generally true as well.

It seems as we become increasingly expert in narrow domains, we become increasingly incapable of systematizing and integrating knowledge and expertise across domains to produce useful insight into the future.  

Partly, I suspect this is a consequence of the structure and nature of incentives within academia.

Partly, the sheer volume of knowledge and information is likely a contributor to the problem.

I wonder whether Woke ideology (Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Postmodernism, etc.) might not also be a contributor, both as an ideology as well as a consequence.

If there is no truth or meaning, a fairly fundamental Woke position, if everything is socially constructed, then expertise loses meaning both as a pursuit and as an outcome.  Thats what I mean by an ideological contributor.

But I suspect the consequences of Woke are also a contributor.  With the DEI pursuit of inclusion, dismissal of empirical standards and deliberate pursuit of variety, you can see a consequence.  If you are at expertise level 100 and suddenly start including those below 100, you necessarily must now have a sub-100 expertise level.  Independent of the ideological commitment against expertise, you also generate less expertise in the first place.

What we attribute to institutional decline is often, I suspect, simply a matter of fact that we have deliberately recruited lesser capability into important positions and are now beginning to see the consequences.  

Decline is a choice, once again. 

And always, the more individuals are gifted through edict the prestige of expertise, without actual expertise, the more they are going to have confidence in their expertise which exceeds their demonstrated capability.  

Experts will have great confidence in their erroneous judgments.  As we have seen in just about every field since it became unavoidably obvious with Covid-19 in February 2020.