“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing,” philosopher Nicholas Murray Butler once quipped.
While the statement holds some truth, expertise undeniably shapes our modern world. Without specialists, many advancements we take for granted — medical breakthroughs, technological innovations — would not exist. Their deep knowledge and skills drive human progress.
Yet, the term “expert” has gained some negative connotations in recent years. Over the last five years, heated debates over misinformation and public policy have raised questions about who should speak on complex issues. Should only experts have a voice, or does this stifle broader discourse?
Humanity owes much to experts across fields, but blind trust in their views can be risky.
History shows mainstream expert opinions have sometimes been overturned through public debate and diverse perspectives. Just think about Galileo Galilei and how the experts of that time loudly refused to accept his observed truth that the Earth moves around the sun and not vice versa. Thus, while expertise is invaluable, overreliance on it can hinder societal growth.
At worst, it’s a danger to a free society.
Expertism And Its Virtues
Expertism has played a significant role in the world’s economic growth. Adam Smith, the founding father of modern economics, already showed that the division of labor benefits society. Instead of one person doing every step of the production cycle, leaving each step up to someone specializing in it can increase output per hour. Henry Ford used this concept when he introduced the moving assembly line.
Virtually our whole economy relies on experts’ work, albeit in a practical rather than academic sense. Specialization frees up everyone’s time as opportunity costs fall. Specialization plays an even more critical role in a world with a growing complexity of goods and services. Imagine a broken car that needs to be repaired. You could spend months trying to acquire enough specialized knowledge and skill to fix it. Instead, it’s much easier to hand your car over to someone who has already specialized in doing it. A mechanic is an expert in repairing cars, so to speak.
The same is true for human sciences, such as medicine. Choosing to see a doctor, and expect that he will be trustworthy as a result of his medical study and credentialling, may be necessary given all we know about the body, and a specialist doctor can both apply that knowledge and push forward our understandings of science. Individuals will not have the time or the knowledge to learn and keep current with all medicine when their profession is entirely different, so they rely on an expert. In that sense, expertism plays a significant role and is a primary contributor to the rise in wealth that our civilization experienced.
Dangers of Expertise
Nevertheless, the increase in specialization and the containment of knowledge also have a darker side. Despite all the benefits of specialization, it can only thrive in a “free market of ideas,” where progress is guided by discussion, trial and error, and peer review. In cases such as the mechanic’s example, expertise can be judged by the outcome.
But, a mechanic or a plumber would rarely describe himself as an “expert.” The more specialized the knowledge, the more fragmented it will be. People engaged in more abstract, theoretical fields are likelier to refer to themselves as “experts.”
Things get more complicated than engines and pipes, and humanity is immersed in more philosophical or theoretical concepts. The more complex, specialized, and theoretically expert a field becomes, the more it risks becoming an echo chamber. Sometime a field of expertise may become so complicated that no one outside the field can quantify the significance of its findings.
Expertism As A Self-Feeding Machine
When expertise is so detailed and complicated, hardly anyone outside can evaluate whether the work makes sense. Expertism can become self-justifying within an echo chamber.
Sabine Hossenfelder – a former physicist who became a publicly known figure because she quit academia and started a YouTube channel to study her interests – has become very critical of specific fields in physics because she argues that the study has no actual value in the real world. She once put some of her worries into words by publishing an article in “Nature Physics”.
In a YouTube video, she reveals that she received an email from another physicist who works in the field. He asked her to stop raising such questions because she would put the experts who work in the field at risk of losing their jobs if universities conclude that the money they spend on the subject leads nowhere. Although that’s very specific, it unveils one of the dangers when experts argue that other experts shouldn’t question their work, and further, the complexity of their work shields them from criticism from non-experts.
Unsurprisingly, Hossenfelder received a lot of criticism from her academic peers, because she questions the necessity of things that some probably consider their “life work.” Her case proves that if someone questions the work of experts, even if as experts themselves, they immediately face a backlash.
But at least there’s a debate. More concerning is when experts collaborate with government authority to shut down debate. In such cases, relying on expertise can become dangerous.
The Danger of a Symbiosis of Expertism And Government
One of the darkest examples in history where alleged expertism had disastrous consequences is the story of Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko, the son of a Ukrainian peasant, had a crude theory that completely abandoned the findings of genetics. Due to his ties to the Communist Party, however, and his argumentation that Mendelian genetics were a “Bourgeois theory,” he became the central figure in Soviet agriculture.
Even though his theory deepened the 1932-1933 famine that killed seven million people, it remained dominant in the Soviet Union. Criticism of his views was suppressed.
Only after Stalin’s death was Lysenko quietly sidelined from the Politburo and allowed to fade into irrelevance. It was exposed that most of his findings were manipulated and fabricated. Although some quietly criticized his theories, they remained dominant for decades because they were backed by government force.
While Lysenko’s case is rather extreme, it shows how far the abandonment of discussion can go if governments feel it is necessary. More recent examples include critics of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, who were shadow-banned on the web, discredited in the media, and sidelined from academic discussions.
One of the most famous epidemiologists, John Ioannidis, was attacked by the media, politicians, and colleagues simply because he opposed the measures governments implemented and argued that the mortality of COVID-19 was lower than many purported.
Even though his criticism was purely scientific, he was quickly accused of being a “right-winger” and his work labeled as unscientific.
Conclusion: Experts Are Great, But Public Questioning And Debate Are Necessary
Ideas and expert opinions are not dangerous as long as there’s free public discourse. In a free society, such ideas can be debated openly and accepted or dismissed. When debate and discourse are suppressed, expertise can become a form of despotism.
When no one is permitted to “question the experts,” the free market of ideas stultifies and we are actually prevented from acquiring additional knowledge. If history is a guide, primary sources of disinformation have been experts whom governments pushed forward to justify policy. The voices of critics were shut down and excluded, lest the public doubt the policy.
In conclusion, expertism has many positives but also some potential negatives. It’s a primary source of human progress, as long claims can be questioned and argued about. Knowledge thrives when people are allowed to question dominant ideas and to look for better theories. And if debate isn’t allowed or is shut down, it’s a signal that something in the dominant view is deeply flawed, and unable to withstand criticism.
Then, expertism becomes an appeal to authority. At worst, it can give rise to despotism.