Why You’re Not an Expert (And I’m Not Either…)

A Reaction to Sam Harris

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Sam Harris commented for roughly ten minutes the other day on his latest podcast about why most people aren’t experts and why, therefore, we still need experts and institutions. I have a response.

Before getting into this, for those of you who don’t know who Sam Harris is, click HERE. Harris’s basic, brief biography goes as follows: Harris is a mid-fifties philosopher, atheist, neuroscientist, bestselling author and fairly famous podcaster. He has a PhD from UCLA, a BA from Stanford. He’s been doing his podcast, Making Sense, for roughly a decade. He got into the podcast game after a big flareup with Ben Affleck on Bill Maher’s show Real Time in 2014. Harris has been a stalwart of commonsense and finding middle ground between the two political extremes. Over the past near decade he’s been my #1 Go To for Rational Debate. (Lately he’s taken heat from the Right a la suppression by MSM of Hunter Biden’s laptop. A story for another time.)

Anyway, here is Harris’s latest podcast episode, which I am referring to. The first ten minutes address his commentary about expertise and institutions.

In a nutshell, and I am 100% paraphrasing here, this is what Harris says in those ten minutes: 1. Most people are not experts nor anything near experts on most if not all ideas. 2. #1 therefore indicates that we do in fact NEED actual experts, people who have high degrees and specialization in specific fields, who are actually qualified to speak on certain topics, especially topics of great societal importance which affect masses of human beings. 3. Yes, Free Speech is profoundly important, and yes, all platforms should exist for people to use openly, and yes, anyone is of course allowed to have and express a view, whatever that view may be. 4. However, given the proliferation of social media, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc, and the mass followings of people such as Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, Tulsi Gabbard, etc etc, it’s important to grasp that likely millions of people allow their opinions and ideas to be shaped by the people mentioned above, and for the most part these people and many others are NOT qualified to make many of the unfounded claims they consistently make, whether that’s about mRNA vaccines, Covid generally, health, finance, biology, etc.

I 100%, wholeheartedly agree with Harris’s assessment. A clear example happened for me yesterday. I was browsing Substack and randomly came upon a certain writer. Now, I don’t want to start a Substack War, so I’ll leave this stack’s name, and its author, unknown. This Substack writer was covering points made by another person, a “philosopher” I’d never heard of. But these are the salient points: 1. This author had a large following, including hundreds of comments and likes; 2. The article was making massive claims which purported to basically be upending modern science as we understand it, including long-accepted ideas around evolution, brain function, etc. 3. The author sounded very, very confident about these claims. 4. Scanning quickly down the comments, it seemed almost every single one was agreeing with the article.

Now, I had never heard of the philosopher the Substack writer wrote about. So I Googled the guy. The first giveaway was: It was difficult to find anything on this man at all. Never a good sign. The few items that did come up said things which indicated in obvious ways that he was a kooky, discredited nonentity. One site mentioned he is known for “HIV/AIDS denialism.”

So this is a clear case of: Random Substack writer with big following picks up random kook wannabe philosopher and tries to make a cuckoo case for modern science being “bullshit.” C’mon.

I see this on Substack too often. It comes from both the political left and the political right, from young and old, women and men. The idea seems to be: Fill-in-the-blank writer read half a Wikipedia article on fill-in-the-blank person, and BOOM: Expert. One thing Harris mentions in his mini-diatribe is that, because of some of the failures of some institutions over the past few years, the result has been this wild, lurid fragmentation of “media,” cracking open MSM (Mainstream Media) and allowing in its place a million new “newsletters.” Now, in theory, on its face, this is a good thing. Especially for free speech and Democracy.

But.

Like everything in life: It’s about tradeoffs. Nothing in life is free. What we gain is more democratic and easy access to information. What we lose is oversight. It’s now so easy to disseminate information that anyone, anytime, anywhere, for any reason, can do it, and almost immediately. We live in the “Instacart” of the Information Age. It’s too easy, and that’s precisely the problem.

A lot of people nowadays engage in what I’ll term C.P.R.—Copy and Paste Repeating. You see it with Woke leftism, and you see it with Conservative people on the Right. What I mean by C.P.R. is: Language copied consciously or unconsciously from favored news sites or commentators which then gets summarily dumped onto Twitter or Substack or Medium etc as if the writer is a long-held “expert.” One of my favorites on the left, as an easy example, is when leftists claim CRT doesn’t exist; they’ll say “But it’s just a ‘graduate level’ college course.” This phrase “graduate-level” was coined (not the phrase in general, but the phrase in conjunction with CRT specifically, I mean) on MSNBC, circa 2020. When someone makes this language gaff, I automatically stop listening; I can no longer take them seriously. Because it immediately tells me that they: 1. Don’t think independently; 2. Probably don’t read at all; 3. Are 100% tribal and entirely disinterested in serious, rational conversation or debate.

Harris calls our moment now a “new age of contrarianism.” He’s right. I myself identify as a “contrarian.” But really, what I mean when I say this is that I appreciate a well-oiled dialogic machine that is The Dialectic. A back and forth. Agreement and disagreement. A push and pull. A shove and fall. Together, two people can argue their points and get to a more rational idea beyond both understandings. People on the Right are often hurling phrases like “MSM” or “Wokeism” or “identity politics,” and, though I sometimes use those words and phrases myself, they can, similarly to the leftists, crush the notion of productive dialogue. This isn’t an either/or in the Kierkegaardian sense. I lean more to the left politically but I am fiercely anti-Woke. That said, I am no Republican. Yet I don’t think DeSantis is inherently “evil.” I criticize both sides. (I reject “Both-Sides-ism” as being taken seriously as an idea.)

Way too often I see writers on Substack and other places who make very strong claims and seem far, far too confident. Mostly these people, if you push a little, crumble pretty quickly. Harris makes a fantastic point: If you had cancer, would you seek advice from Joe Rogan? How about Bret Weinstein? Or Candace Owens? None of the above, of course. You’d go to an oncologist, and not just that, but a specialist who focused on the specific cancer you were struggling with. You can, as Harris adds, always get second, third, even fourth opinions (or more). But throwing the whole notion of expertise out the window altogether and just “doing your own research” is not the smart path forward.

Harris admits that HE himself is also not an expert. (And neither, if this even needs saying, am I. Obviously.) Despite his having a PhD in neuroscience, he also is NOT an expert on, say, mRNA vaccines.

Doing your own research is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. We all should. Especially since the failures (and frankly, lies) of large institutions such as the WHO over the past few years, as well as from our own Government, both under Trump and under Biden. (Not to mention the identity bias, obsession, narcissism, etc.) But, your own research should be in addition to reading/listening to/following genuine experts in particular fields. You don’t go to a pro golfer to understand brain cancer, just as you don’t go to a lung cancer specialist to learn how to surf. As Harris comments: Can experts as individuals sometimes be wrong? Or biased? Or lying? Or under pressure from bad incentives? Absolutely. Yes. Of course. Does that then mean we should reject ALL experts as false prophets and just follow our own favorite podcasts and come up with our own ideas? NO.

Harris is calling here for a moment of pause, to consider the fact that, if we actually get to the point of essentially [culturally] doing away with all expertise, we’ll be entering a very scary period in history, something akin to a return to medieval times. ChatGBT and new AI technology is only going to increase these fears and problems. Should Alex Jones be allowed to share his views with the world? Yes, I think so.

I’m a pretty strong free speech absolutist. (If you reject certain language the speaker and their following only grow stronger and go underground. Better to let it stand and fight against it with more speech.) But the more Alex Jones’s there are, the more genuine, honest experts, in my opinion, we need. People with strong backbones and strong voices. I’d add Harris to this list because: 1. He honestly admits when he doesn’t know something, and that he’s also not an expert; 2. To resolve #1 he routinely interviews people who are, in fact, genuine experts in their fields, people working, writing and teaching at institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and who work at the top of their fields and who write books which address issues in their fields. He dialogues and debates with these people, and gives them ample time to speak and make their claims.

Sam Harris may be a lot of things, but he’s not dishonest, and he’s not in it for the money. I’m not claiming he is a prophet, monk or god in any way, shape or form. Sometimes, in my opinion, Harris comes off as arrogant. Sometimes I definitely disagree with his views. Sometimes he is no doubt wrong in his ideas. Sometimes he contradicts himself. Guess what: He’s human.

But I don’t feel, when listening to Harris, like I do when I sometimes (not often) listen to say Joe Rogan, the feeling of which is something like: Hm. That sounds like cuckoo bullshit. Yes, I know Rogan does some fact-checking. No, I don’t hate the guy or think he’s evil. I don’t think he’s a massive found of mis or disinformation. But…I also don’t feel like he’s anywhere near as interested as Harris or people like Harris in accurately and honestly dissecting the truth. Rogan is about Rogan. Entertainment. Nothing wrong with that. But there’s a big, yawning chasm between entertainment and serious intellectual conversation. Just like there’s a big difference between the opinion of an expert and the opinion of some random Substacker. (Myself included.)

Opinions, in my view, aren’t all equal. Yes: Everyone is allowed to have one. Of course. That’s a good thing. But there’s a wide gulf between the Substacker who read half a Wikipedia page and someone like Harris who does deep research and reads books constantly. (Or like Ben Shapiro, a very intelligent thinker I have mixed feelings about, who supposedly reads five books a week.)

I myself, as I said, am NOT an expert on anything. Hard-stop. Yet I do read books voraciously. I listen to people like Sam Harris, podcasts like The 5^th Column, the Reason Podcast, etc. In other words: I read widely, listen to voices who criticize both/all sides, interrogate their own ideas/opinions/views, and yes, I try to do my own research as well, knowing this will get me limited understanding on most salient issues.

My first question for people who seem highly unqualified yet incredibly confident is: Where are you getting your information? What are your sources? If all the info coming from ONE source? Is the source/are the sources from tiny, questionable publications no one’s heard of before? Do you listen to both sides of a debate, or do you immediately rush to your own protected camp and hurl figurative mud? Do you question your own ideas/thoughts/motives? How do you KNOW you’re right? Where are your numbers/data/statistics coming from? Do you tend to use words like “Wokeism” or “racism” as antidotes to honest and open dialogue with people you disagree with? (These questions are for myself as well.)

Dig deep within yourself and answer these questions. No one doubts the incentives today in our information and attention-sucking culture are bad. Information, as I said, is far too easily accessed. Opinions are fun and easy to have and to slop onto others. The easiest thing in the world is to double, triple, quadruple-down on “your side’s” tribal instinct and Official Narrative.

But if we’re going to cleave ourselves from the horror of Binary Thinking, and Blue Versus Red, Doomsday America, we’ve got to start owning our own bullshit. We’ve got to start thinking seriously about how we debate and argue and dialogue with others. We’ve got to realize, on both sides, that both sides ARE the problem. Antiracism is the problem. Anti-Woke obsession is the problem. (Perhaps I’m a part of this problem myself.)

I dare you, challenge you to break from your tribe and THINK.

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Great Podcasts Which Don’t Bullshit You:

1.    Making Sense (Sam Harris)

2.    The 5^th Column

3.    Coleman Hughes

4.    Reason Roundtable

5.    Real Time (Bill Maher)

6.    Lex Fridman

7.    Glenn Loury