Against the Experts

Some of the oldest works that have come down to us identifying the pathologies of expertise were written by the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus. Although most of his works focused on these pathologies as they showed up in philosophy, he also wrote about how they showed up in other fields such as medicine, music, mathematics, and rhetoric. The surviving work that is the best example of this is known as Against the Professors (other translations of the title are Against the Learned, Against Those in the Disciplines, and Against the Mathematicians - the last being a common but bad translation). The book is a slog to read because much of the content is about now arcane and obscure expertise that was state of the art in the Roman Empire during the second century CE. The general principles Sextus used, however, are timeless. 

Before going into those principles, it’s worth mentioning that one principle now popularly attributed to Sextus is actually not one of them. That principle is, “Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.” This quote is now frequently misattributed to Sextus. The true source of the quote is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Here’s the section in his book Skin In the Game where he implies this quote is from Sextus:

…science has been taken over by vendors using it to sell products (like margarine or genetically modified solutions) and, ironically, the skeptical enterprise is being used to silence skeptics. 

Disrespect for the vapidly complicated, verbalistically derived truths has always been present in intellectual history, but you are not likely to see it in your local scientific reporter or college teacher: higher-order questioning requires more intellectual confidence, deeper understanding of statistical significance, and a higher level of rigor and intellectual capacity—or, even better, experience selling rugs or specialized spices in a souk. So this book continues a long tradition of skeptical-inquiry-cum-practicalsolutions—the readers of the Incerto might be familiar with the schools of skeptics (covered in The Black Swan), in particular the twenty-two-century-old diatribe by Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors.

The rule is:

Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk

with some dispensation for self-standing activities such as mathematics, rigorous philosophy, poetry, and art, ones that do not make explicit claims of fitting reality.

Sextus gave no rule that looks anything like that. But it is true that Sextus found fault with things that might be called “vapidly complicated, verbalistically derived truths.” I’d use terms such as “theory-bound” or “abstract rule laden.” 

Sextus begins Against the Professors with a comparison between the two ancient philosophical schools known for critiquing expertise: the Pyrrhonists and the Epicureans. There was no need to mention other schools, such as the Stoics, Platonists, and Aristotelians. They were all in on expertise.