(Look, ma!  No drift!  I was gonna enter this in #17, but I'm giving it
its own item now, before it's too late.)

In item 17, Greg (flem) mentions the
 
  notion that in order to comment publicly on a topic of social interest,
  one must be "qualified", one must have the appropriate credentials. 

What do you think of this attitude?  Do "ordinary folks" have the right to
be heard?  At what point do we start needing to ignore those without
credentials and listening to the experts?  Are there any issues on which
the unqualified should just keep their mouths shut?

Sometimes, I've noticed the reverse of what Greg's talking about -- a fear
of experts that also seems typically American.  Political speeches and
movies both get a lot of milage out of this fear -- the plain-spoken
regular guy who's gonna defend you against those smarty-pants bureaucrats,
or the kid who sees the truth (if only the stuck-up grownups would believe
him).  Are there any issues where the opinions even of genuine experts
should count for less than those of laypeople?

14 responses total.

Everyone has a right to an opinion and I dont think that a person's 
opinion should be deemed worthless because they dont have some obvious 
qualification. On the other hand, there is something to be said for 
education and experience. For example, I give more weight to the 
opinion of a graduate of a well known law school than a high school 
dropout if the subject were a legal one. But that doesnt mean that the 
high school dropout automatically would have nothing to contribute to 
such a discussion. 

The informally, or self-educated person in our society has a much more 
difficult time establishing credibility, even in the context of popular 
fear of hidden agendas, which is what primarily undermines the opinions 
of the formally credentialed.

The situations in which the outsider is presented as having the superior 
opinion rely almost exclusively on the suggestion that the insider is 
pursuing a secret agenda and the outsider either isn't or couldn't be.

The amount of expertise I want from someone providing information 
depends in part on the importance of the information, as well as it's 
complexity and specialization, and also the apparent validity of the 
answer I get.  If it's the sort of thing a well-read person could be 
expected to know, and their answer makes sense, I might depend on a non-
expert source.  If it's something highly technical or specialized, and 
the answer doesn't seem to be what I'd expect, it better come from an 
expert.  I'd trust about anyone to give me a report of the current 
weather.  If two people are shouting at me to go X way or Y way to get 
away from an oncoming tornado, and one of them is the meteorologist I 
saw last night on the Weather Channel, I'm going to do what he says.

There was an interesting letter in the AA News a few days ago from 
someone complaining about the self-appointed and self-perpetuating 
elite of literature choosing who could join their ranks and get 
published.  He was probably a disgruntled hopeful writer.  I still 
thought he had a point, or part of one.

The award-winning cream of the crop of literature is stuff written for 
literature critics, not work that anyone else can ever read.  Stephen 
King and Tom Clancy do not win Nobel prizes.  No one on the bestseller 
lists can get literature awards.  The novels which are going to be 
passed down through the centuries as the best of 20th and 21st century 
American literature aren't going to be stories at all  They're going to 
be postmodern swirls of incomprehensible words, given by people with 
post-doctoral educations to other people with similar degrees who came 
from the same few schools.  They are if the critics really do determine 
such things.

That remains to be seen; the literary elite is an invention of about a 
century ago.  "Huckleberry Finn" is the great American novel of the 
19th century because lots of people like it, more than because the 
critics chose it.  It would be interesting to see what survives from 
the 20th century to still be read and assigned to high school classes 
at the beginning of the 22nd (or 25th).  Will it be the literary 
critics choice, or The Lord of the Rings, or Spiderman comic books, or 
Atlas Shrugged?  Maybe it'll be the Agora from Grex.  Who should pick?

I have served on some public committees whose job it was to hear testimony
from experts and the public and reach a conclusion. Our society is, in
fact largely run this way, with congressional committees doing the same
thing and politicians being committees of one (until them get on a
committee). The signal to noise ratio is low from both sources. Experts
have lots of "true" information, but very often on only one side of an
issue. The public has a sense of what they think is right for them, but
their information and analysis tends to be flawed. It is, of course, the
committee's job to filter and balance both the signals and the noise, and
try to arrive at a conclusion based upon a comprehensive understanding of
the facts and consequences of possible actions. Unfortunately, it doesn't
work extremely well. 

The problem is that the committee itself is made up of similar experts and
"public", with their expertises and ignorances, biases, irrationalities,
and obligations to others. I have found it rare, though refreshing, to
hear a truly objective analysis of a problem from a committee member,
whether expert or just an observer. 

I think it is these reasons why we must try to be open to both expert and
lay opinions, as they both contain some truth and some falsehood;  some
rationality and some irrationality. Our government is, in fact, based upon
this premise, in that we create legislative bodies to argue among
themselves, with the hope that truth and rationality might just arise and
prevail, although with mixed success.

Agreed that art and literature critics have enormous power to decide what
is "art" or not, and that this power is used in what certainly looks like
bizarre and abusive ways.  I think there was a screed about this a few
years back called "The Painted Word" which made the point that the actual
appearance of visual art hardly mattered next to the stylish patter that
accompanied it.

A few years ago, a contemporary art museum in Cincinnati was prosecuted
for obscenity over showing an exhibit of photographs by Mapplethorpe.  The
prosecutor got away with breaking many of the rules of obscenity law, for
example, by focusing exclusively on the most offensive pictures and not
allowing the defense to present the context of the whole exhibit.  There
was more, but I don't remember the details.  That the jury would find the
museum guilty was a foregone conclusion, so everyone was getting ready for
the inevitable appeal phase.

Then this conservative Cincinnati jury astonished everyone by finding
the museum Not Guilty.  Why?  Interviews with jury members afterward
showed that the expert witnesses (i.e., art critics) were the critical
factor.  The jurors were quoted saying things like: "The experts said it
was art, and who am I to disagree?"

That verdict was surely a victory for free speech, but I was not happy to
hear that undue deference to the arrogant art critics had been the reason.

An even worse example is the architecture profession, but I'll denounce
them later.

Any time I hear someone harping about the legitimacy or qualification of
someone critiquing someone or something else, my alarms go off.  The "I'm more
qualified to make judgements about this topic than you are" is a surprisingly
widespread phenomenon in American culture, perhaps descending from the
prevelance of television and radio commentary by personalities perceived to
have field expertise, rightly or wrongly.  Perhaps it's more elemental, too,
the pride that humans nurture and the inherent humility in having to learn
what appear to be basic facts from someone else.  It's a submissive position,
one that people will willfully keep themselves ignorant to avoid.  

Pity.  I think even uninformed opinions can often cast unexpected light on
a subject that experts often get too wrapped up in to have perspective. 
Anyway, I think people who insist that certain opinions need credentials to
be valid are completely full of it.  

I think that certain opinions need credentials to be valid.  However, I 
believe the definition of credentials is broader than those provided by 
the formal educational process.

In general, I prefer informed opinion to credentialed opinion.  Sometimes,
the two occur together; othertimes, they don't.  

A good example of the lack of correlation between credentials and truth
are the credentialled biochemists (PhDs, etc) that are pushing "intelligent
design" against evolution. Although they have research  degrees, none
have ever done, much less published, an iota of peer-reviewed research
on the subject. 

Chomsky pointed out, in the few pages I casually glanced over a few days
before posting the comment quoted in #0, the interesting fact that his
qualifications were frequently questioned when he spoke, outside of his field,
on politics or culture, but rarely when he spoke on mathematics, though that
was also outside of his field.  He went on to conclude somewhat dubiously that
this was evidence of a conspiracy of the self-appointed intellectual elite
to keep the power of forming public opinion to themselves and their
indoctrinated (through universities) heirs.  Dunno about his conclusions, but
it certainly can be observed that in fields where there is some kind of
objective measurement available of the validity of someone's claims, it's much
easier to get those claims heard than in fields that consist of more, ah,
abstract opinions.  

*snort* You should see how Chomsky and his followers act in Linguistics. HE's
one to talk about elitism.

do you speak english?

Not if I can avoid it.

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