Bush Lawyers

From Westminster hacks & bush lawyers by Helen Dale.  The subheading is Why we're all drowning in rivers of bullshit. 

I have been thinking about this from an epistemic perspective for the past couple of weeks.  Civic conversations seem now largely on social media.  In that environment, a few voices dominate and they tend to be highly partisan (on both sides), i.e. they can be taken as evidence of conviction but not of validity.

The sciences are in the midst of their replication crisis, predominantly in the soft sciences but apparently to a lesser but still significant degree in the hard sciences.

The mainstream media is collapsing but long ago traded away their credibility for both partisanship and for press-release journalism (for cheaper to rewrite what others claim than to actually spend time and money investigating.)

Academia similarly has sold their reputation down the river, indulging in Weimar Republic exoticism over responsible transmission of knowledge or creation of new knowledge.  

Public health bathed its reputation in gasoline while playing with Covid matches.

Most old line religious institutions have sacrificed their important and necessary reputations on the alter of sexual appetites or the alter of stylish social irrelevance.

And trust in Government?  Well.  Government! After the serial and concomitant scandals and failures of the past three years?  'Nough said.

As citizens of the Age of Enlightenment, we need a free flow of trustworthy information and the former streams have constricted or dried up.  

From Dale's article.

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows, on Monday HMGov decided to use Section 35 of the Scotland Act 1998 to “veto” the SNP’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill (Scotland) before royal assent.

The particulars don't really matter.  It is arcane Scottish law in the context of UK governance complicated by devolved authority to the Scottish Parliament.  Her point is that a lot of people had shallow, and demonstrably incorrect, opinions, strongly held, on a topic about which only a few people have actual knowledge of the real intricacies.  

Sometimes, expertise is necessary.

[snip]

It used to be the case that when laymen did things like take sides in debates about Scots public law when they’d struggle to locate Scotland on a map, experts would correct them, and we could all go on our merry way.

[snip]

However, it’s no longer possible for experts to play the respect mah authoriteh game, Cartman-style.

[snip]

Australians have an unkind phrase to describe people who wade into a legal dispute in this way, or who turn up in court as a self-represented ‘party litigant’ when they can actually afford representation. They’re called ‘bush lawyers’, and the activity in which they indulge, ‘bush lawyering’.

And despite the clear specialization of the field and the intricacies involved, apparently only two media outlets bothered to even contact specialists in the field.  Clearly the loss of reputation is compounded by MSM incompetence.

It’s no exaggeration to say the rest of civilisation has watched academics, lawyers, and medical professionals behave absolutely disgracefully on social media while being wrong in an easily-documented way.

This means we’re all now drowning in rivers of bullshit, it’s genuinely difficult to know when something is true or real, and only two outlets thought it worthwhile to make a telephone call to an expert in Scots law before wading in and opining about it.

Once public respect is lost, it’s close to impossible to win it back.

I repeat, we need a free flow of trustworthy information and the former streams have constricted or dried up.  Technological and sector evolution is challenging and these are, from the perspective of empiricism,  some very challenging times.  We'll make it through because the need is so great and the threats so bad.  But it is hard to see how we are going to get through it and that absence of a game plan is always uncomfortable.