Knowing vs. questioning, and the challenge of expertise
Lately I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of this quote by Laurence Endersen: “We can be too quick to blurt out what we believe are the correct answers, when more value can be gained by searching for a better question. A questioning mentality is far more effective than a knowing mentality. Once we have declared an answer, our biases towards commitment and consistency cause us to defend our answer, wasting energy that would be better applied to exploring alternatives.”
In the context of the current political battle over COVID-19 (how serious is it overall? what means are best to combat it? when can we start to re-open?), I’m seeing a lot of “knowing” mentality on all sides and very little “questioning” mentality. In many ways, it’s just a repeat of what the climate change debate has become—a series of arguments based exclusively on dogma and flag-planting, with very little room for independent thought or genuinely intelligent debate. Many of my conservative acquaintances have expressed concern that we’re overreacting to the virus, and causing greater harm societally by shutting everything down; meanwhile most of the liberals I know are insistent that the virus is terribly dangerous, and the measures we’re taking are absolutely justified despite the costs. Both sides have staked their claim: either the virus is overblown hype, or it’s an existential danger. By “knowing” their claim to be true and declaring their answer to the world, they have locked themselves in to a point of view and must defend it, making it near-impossible to change their minds in response to newer, better information.
This is detrimental all around. But is one side’s “knowing” mentality causing more harm than the other’s? There are plenty of thinkers who answer that question firmly: it’s the right. On the issue of the pandemic, as with the debate over climate change, many conservatives like to portray themselves as hard-nosed skeptics who are just asking tough questions, but that’s often a facade meant to conceal that much of their contrariness is a more emotional reaction to change, perhaps rooted in the fear that the individualist/capitalist system they revere might be in danger. There is a reluctance to accept scientific data that challenges their worldview, and this initial resistance is then amplified by the condescending tone that liberal commentators and media figures often take, routinely accusing doubters of recklessness or stupidity for daring to question the completeness or conclusions of the current science. A combination of fear and anger leads many conservatives to dig in their heels and resist the scientific narrative.
But while bloggers and journalists have extensively explored that side of the issue, what worries me equally (and in some ways, more) is the obverse: that so many liberals present themselves as pro-science and fact-based, yet their unwavering (even quasi-religious) acceptance of expert opinion reveals their own lack of critical thinking. They seemingly fail to understand that the scientific method is based on constant questioning and the endless discovery of new knowledge, and also that no amount of subject-matter expertise can be of much use without its integration into other fields of knowledge in order to generate a bigger picture. The slavish devotion to the cult of expertise that I’m seeing so much nowadays (almost entirely on the left) is not rooted in a genuine quest for the best available knowledge, but is instead a mere affectation, a signaling of allegiance to a certain political worldview (i.e., technocracy).
The irony of a dogmatic adherence to scientific expertise is that science only works well when it’s not dogmatic, when it embraces the questioning mentality over the knowing mentality. Science isn’t a specific set of facts or beliefs, it is a process. (The physicist Jim al-Khalili recently wrote a nice article on this very subject.) One problem with affecting such militant faith in science—insisting on its possession of absolute truth and mocking those who do not eagerly bow to its authority—is that when the scientific narrative changes (e.g., are masks beneficial or not? are ventilators more helpful or harmful? what percentage of infected are asymptomatic?), those who insisted on the veracity of the earlier narrative are backed into a corner and must quickly pivot to the new narrative and embrace it with the same fervent devotion, proclaiming its rightness and again leaving no room for dissent, while conveniently ignoring the fact that a change has occurred. Having already declared an answer—”this is how bad the virus is” and “this is how we must fight it”—they have tied that “knowing” to their own ego and must defend it accordingly.
A terrible byproduct of all this is that when the scientific narrative adjusts, many other people (not just conservatives) fail to see the new findings as progress on a path to better understanding the virus, and instead assume that the reorientation of medical opinion represents waffling at best, or ignorance at worst. This is a huge disservice to those scientists working hard to fight the virus. And let me be clear—I don’t think that the medical experts themselves are to blame for this reaction; many of them (including Dr. Anthony Fauci) have tried to be flexible in their messaging and reasonable in their guidelines, frequently admitting that our understanding of the virus will change rapidly as the weeks go by and that our behavior will need to adjust accordingly. The problem arises only when those liberals who have claimed “science” for their side then turn those experts’ pronouncements into dogma, and begin the vilification of any who dare to ask questions or express concerns.
Thus, sadly, much of the population begins to think according to the terms set by these noisy and insistent commentators: that science is infallible and demands absolute faith. While learning new things and changing one’s mind based on better information are aspects of science that should be celebrated, the current imbuing of scientific and medical experts with an aura of infallibility undermines that attitude, and only helps to degrade debates over the pandemic into mere ideological politics. The liberals who claim to revere science and its expert practitioners are actually subverting those very experts, setting them up for failure by insisting on their perfect knowledge instead of appreciating that experimentation and reevaluation are keys to the success of science.
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In a broader sense, I think there’s plenty of valid criticism of the technocratic approach that our modern liberal society has adopted. This is the mentality that says, “Listen to the experts. They are the ones who should be in charge.” But there are several problems with this approach. First, being an expert in any one field is incredibly hard—my own limited experience has taught me that, usually, the more you learn about a subject, the more you realize how much you still don’t know, and your confidence is tempered accordingly. You likely know more about a subject than others in the room, and your opinion should indeed carry more weight, but your knowledge is always incomplete and never infallible. This is particularly true of science in the 21st century, where new discoveries and better theories are appearing at an accelerating pace.
But alas, people typically look to experts for ironclad pronouncements (see al-Khalili’s piece again). They want the comforting fiction that someone out there knows what is going on and can fix things. They see experts as having all the answers, which of course they never do, and as such it is typical (although unfair) for people to turn on those experts and write them off entirely if they recommend an unsuccessful course of action or fail to accurately predict the future. One would hope that liberals—typically well educated and frequently claiming to be open-minded—would push back against this trend and embrace questioning over knowing. But instead many seem to be doing the opposite during this pandemic, by insisting on the inviolability of scientific expertise. Meanwhile our knowledge of the disease and the results of various analytical models are constantly changing over the weeks and months. Given this disconnect, it’s unsurprising that more people are beginning to doubt the official narrative and instead coming to view the virus as just another political football.
A second problem with technocracy is that being an expert in multiple fields is almost impossible. I myself dabble in many areas of knowledge, and have a solid understanding of several, but to become a genuine expert in two or more fields—particularly if they are disparate—is a very rare achievement. Someone like Dr. Fauci (whom I deeply respect) may have an extraordinary grasp on the medical problem posed by COVID-19, but he likely has much less expertise in the fields of economics or sociology, and is therefore not as well equipped to deal with the financial and behavioral challenges that also derive from this pandemic. But any successful mitigation of the virus’s spread must incorporate those fields and others.
This is because the COVID-19 pandemic presents not just technical and medical problems, but social and behavioral problems as well. Successfully containing the spread of the virus requires not just knowledge of epidemiology and immunology, but also social psychology and behavioral economics. Medical experts can issue all the guidelines they want, but if those guidelines don’t take into account things like basic human behavior, the cultural and social norms of particular regions, and the economic consequences of the shutdowns, then they will likely fail or rapidly lose support. Which is why we (and our elected officials) cannot turn to medical experts alone for leadership; there must also be many other voices in the room adding their expertise in many other areas, in order for us to formulate a response that is effective and sustainable because it takes into account not just how the virus behaves, but how human beings (and particularly Americans) behave. Ideally, our political leaders would have the wisdom to collect all of this disparate expertise and craft it into a coherent overall plan…but of course the quality of political leaders varies wildly across time and place.
Given the flaws in our current technocratic approach to the virus, it is not surprising that there are people expressing doubt over the severity of the pandemic or showing frustration with our current lockdown measures. But reacting to them by pounding one’s first on the table and shouting them down (or more likely haranguing them on social media) is just an ego exercise. Labeling those people as foolish or anti-science is a political statement; it evinces no interest in changing their minds or understanding their concerns in order to better formulate plans for coping with the virus long-term. Granted, there are a few bad-faith actors like the “open up!” protesters descending on state capitals in their pickup trucks while waving their “Don’t Tread On Me” flags. Most people condemn them as dangerous and selfish, and I don’t disagree with that sentiment, but those individuals represent a fringe that is purely politically motivated. Meanwhile there are plenty of reasonably intelligent, moderate people in this country who—for reasons I discussed in my previous post and that were also explored in Travis Hornsby’s fine article—question our reaction to the virus or are eager to see the restrictions ease. There are many people who just want the security of re-employment, or to see and hug their friends again, or even to simply go relax at the beach. Should we condemn those people and accuse them of stupidity or recklessness for not kowtowing to expert opinion? And would doing so have any positive effect on their behavior, or change their minds?
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Ironically, although genuine expertise is hard to acquire, it can exist quite easily in a vacuum. A person can be an expert in some technical field—knowing tons about their particular subject matter—but nonetheless understand very little about human nature and social behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly illustrated this divide: we have some of the brightest medical minds working on the technical problems of combating and containing the virus, but many of the social and economic restrictions implemented in response to their recommendations don’t fully account for certain basics of human behavior. If we lack appreciation (or at least recognition) of how the quarantine measures will affect people’s actions societally and impact people’s lives economically, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see pushback coming from places that are feeling the economic pinch, or to hear rumblings in certain quarters about liberties being infringed upon, or to have people think wishfully that the virus is over-hyped. Some experts and intellectuals, despite all their knowledge, seem surprised by these reactions—but any broadly-educated, common-sensical person who has actually observed the quirks and contradictions of human nature would not find these behaviors surprising at all. Rather, they would be perplexed that none of the people in charge seemed to anticipate them.
In the end, I’m not an adherent to the cult of technocracy. I don’t believe that a better, healthier society can be created by divvying up our lives into increasingly specific areas and allowing experts in those areas to tell us how to live. Knowledge works best as a unified whole—a combination of intelligence and technical skill with wisdom and life experience. I’ve argued in the past that our current infatuation with STEM (and its attendant obsession with facts and data) is not the golden key to the future, particularly since it is coming at the expense of social studies and the humanities (disciplines that help us understand the human condition and the varieties of culture). The knowledge that our society desperately needs—for both our current pandemic and for any future financial/social/ecological crises—is not the hyper-precise “knowing” mentality we associate with the subject-area expert, but rather the wide-ranging “questioning” mentality of those great leaders (Lincoln, JFK, etc.) who led us successfully through previous crises by listening to all of their various experts and then using that abundance of intelligence to formulate a strategy that was wise.
Perhaps the people best equipped to lead us into a better future are not those who are supposed to know everything, but rather those who—to paraphrase Socrates—”know that they know nothing.” Almost 2500 years later, might Socratic questioning still be the way to wisdom? Instead of simply telling his students things, Socrates constantly questioned them, drawing out their ideas and encouraging them to elaborate on them. In the ensuing conversation, Socrates would use more questions to thoroughly probe those ideas, helping the student recognize the validity or inaccuracy of certain points, so that by the end, the student’s thinking was much more clear. More importantly, their new understanding was based not on what the teacher (or “expert”) had taught them, but on what they had learned themselves. I get the feeling that we’d all understand ourselves, each other, and humanity itself much better if we started engaging each other like Socrates and his students: much more questioning, much less knowing.
Addendum (04/29/20):
Yet again, within a day of publishing a post I find an article that communicates similar sentiments, and probably more effectively! This piece by Ed Yong is a long read but well worth it; if nothing else, I suggest reading sections III (The Research) and IV (The Experts) since they specifically relate to the content of my post.
