Humans are social learners, Arnold Kling reminds us:
We have to trust other people in order to gain knowledge and to make decisions. Our social epistemology will not get better by simply showing less deference to people who have a reputation for expertise.
I believe that the fundamental issue in social epistemology is the process by which people climb the status hierarchy. If the process is meritocratic, as in a chess tournament, it is a good idea to trust the people at the top. If the process is corrupted, by rules that are unfair or easily gamed. then the high-status people are not so worthy of our trust. But the solution to corruption is to improve the process, not (just) to belittle high-status people.
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How do I determine that you are knowledgeable in a field? If I knew enough to independently verify your knowledge, then I would not need your expertise. Since I cannot personally evaluate your knowledge, I rely on a signal. The fundamental social challenge is to make sure that these signals are accurate.
Incumbents with high status in a field usually participate in setting up and operating the signaling system in their field. To at least some degree, this is desirable. You want doctors involved in the system that decides the qualification for who becomes a doctor.
But you also need a system that is open to innovation and capable of discarding conventional views that turn out to be wrong. If there is insufficient competition, an entire field can decay. I saw this happen in macroeconomics in the 1980s, as Stanley Fischer all but monopolized the placement at prestige universities of young macroeconomic specialists. Students who did not want to conform to Fischer’s approach ended up avoiding macroeconomics and/or accepting low-status placements. The result, in my opinion, was the atrophy of macroeconomics.
“We have to trust other people in order to gain knowledge and to make decisions.”
Bullshit. What we have to trust is the evidence of our senses. Because other people are liars and fools.
Meritocracy begins with yourself.
Any trustworthy system begins with yourself. Have your own back. Do your own detecting. Build your own university, on your own Kindle.
Trust no signal except the signal of success. Observe the successful and do what they do. Not what they say, what they do.
“…macroeconomics in the 1980s, as Stanley Fischer all but monopolized the placement at prestige universities…”
Ah! The 1980s, when some universities had “prestige”. Since then, the denizens of those universities have lost all their prestige — except in their own eyes, of course.
The message, of course, is that trust has to be earned every day, and is so easily lost. Apart from the easily-led, no-one pays much attention to Brand Name prestige any more — an inevitable consequence of the Long March Through The Institutions.
Well, since we see what we have at the top cannot be trusted, we can now utterly dispense with meritocracy.
Be the meritocracy you want to see in the world. Autarchy is a state of mind, and a state of mind is (sometimes) a choice.
When our masters are incompetent at mastery, are we in fact mastered? Under the chaos of inept rule, the clever and willful man is a nation unto himself. Sovereignty by default. No need for any legal theory. Do what you can get away with has always been the only real law.
If you’re good enough at schmoozing, you may even get a spot in the next elite.