The Weaponization of Expertise

A book review that underscores the current urgent need for skepticism.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a coincidence that illustrates his thesis must center his essay on that anecdote.

When Jacob Russell, the co-author of The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism, responded to my request for a review copy, he noted that he grew up in the same small (population about 5,000), rural, New Hampshire town where I now reside.

It is a peaceful town. In 2024, it was ranked the safest town in New Hampshire, which, in turn, was ranked the safest state in the country.

Peaceful, except for the politics. The town has been repeatedly sued by its own citizens and has made headlines for the embarrassing actions of a few of its elected representatives.

After moving here, seeing this, and being directly affected by it, it seemed to me that I was in a position to help by being a citizen journalist. As my stepfather, an investigative journalist, liked to say, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Lawsuits are a strong indication that some smelly rot has set in. As the destruction of the newspaper industry has turned small towns into news deserts, bloggers have become the only source of disinfectant.

But, what is the cause of the rot?

On the surface, it might seem to be ideology. Even though all town offices are officially non-partisan, the town has its Democratic and Republican organizations that endorse candidates, and the candidates often campaign on partisan issues with only the most tangential relationship to what is happening in town. Or, it might seem to involve conspiracies - a popular theme in social media. They are not altogether implausible, as some people most certainly have axes to grind about other people, but the evidence for them tends to be… interpretive.

But scratch the surface, and one can see elected officials who are often over their heads. An outgoing and popular person who has never managed anything bigger than a household can get elected to the School Board and be thrust into a role managing a $25 million annual budget and several layers of management. So, lack of expertise would seem to be a good candidate for the town’s problems.

However, an even closer look shows that while these elected officials may lack expertise, they’re seldom foolish and stupid. The town's big troubles have involved officials obtaining and seemingly unquestioningly deferring to expert advice.

After several years of closely watching the town’s decision-making processes, I observed that the lawsuits seemed to be due to failures on the part of one of the town’s expert advisors. Eventually, the town replaced that advisor. The replacement’s first action was to tell the town that the former advisor had given bad advice on a currently disputed issue.

Everyone likes confirming evidence.

So, there’s a simple problem associated with all experts: some of them are not very good, and it is difficult for non-experts to evaluate those claiming expertise. This has always been the case, and it is one of the key issues addressed in The Weaponization of Expertise.

As this Substack is about ancient wisdom, let’s first investigate how the weaponization of expertise has always been the case. Our current situation is very much not new, although it may seem so to those who don’t read history. The ancients have long-standing advice about this problem that may help us today.

The earliest discussion of this problem I know of comes from the Sythian philosopher Anacharsis (6th Century BCE). That something this old has come down to us suggests that Anacharsis said something profound. He reasoned that not only were ordinary people unqualified to evaluate experts, but no one was qualified to evaluate experts - not even experts.

Who judges something skillfully? Is it the ordinary person or the skilled person? We would not say it is the ordinary person. For he is defective in his knowledge of the peculiarities of skills. The blind person does not grasp the workings of sight, nor the deaf person those of hearing. And so, too, the unskilled person does not have a sharp eye when it comes to the apprehension of what has been achieved through skill, since if we actually back this person in his judgment on some matter of skill, there will be no difference between skill and lack of skill, which is absurd. So the ordinary person is not a judge of the peculiarities of skills.

It remains, then, to say that it is the skilled person - which is again unbelievable. For one judges either a person with the same pursuits as oneself, or a person with different pursuits. But one is not capable of judging someone with different pursuits; for one is familiar with one's own skill, but as far as someone else's skill is concerned one’s status is that of an ordinary person.

Yet neither one can certify a person with the same pursuits as oneself. For this was the very issue we were examining: who is to be the judge of these people, who are of identical ability as regards the same skill. Besides, if one person judges the other, the same thing will become both judging and judged, trustworthy and untrustworthy. For in so far as the other person has the same pursuits as the one being judged, he will be untrustworthy since he too is being judged, while in so far as he is judging he will be trustworthy.

But it is not possible for the same thing to be both judging and judged, trustworthy and untrustworthy; therefore there is no one who judges skillfully. (cited in Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, I.55-59)

This issue about judging experts turned out to be a matter of life and death for Socrates. In Plato’s Apology (21-23), Socrates tells the jury about his reaction to the Pythia’s declaration that no one in Athens was wiser than him. He sought out anyone who was said to be wise and asked them questions to gauge their wisdom. The only people he found who could genuinely be considered experts were the craftsmen who made physical objects, and their expertise was limited to their craft. The statesmen, poets, and rhetoricians had no real expertise. Socrates said that this quest caused some people to become angry with him, and it was this dislike of him that led to his being accused of crimes for which he was innocent.

Was Socrates’ execution due to the vengeance of the experts Socrates discredited, or was it due to the mob who wished to discredit expertise?

We do not have an impartial reckoning of this. Our surviving accounts are from Socrates’ supporters. There were also critical accounts, but they’ve not come down to us. We know about them only from mentions. This is part of the problem as well. It should be unsurprising that on any historical issue in which experts pass on history, the resulting history should flatter experts, and that the experts are incentivized to make this so. Because the experts are advising the people with power, it’s predictable that they should try to persuade those with power to protect the experts’ reputation.

This is weaponization of expertise. Experts manipulate the narrative to their own benefit.

In the anecdote I began this article with, I suspected that the town had a faulty expert and found an opportunity to challenge their work. By statute, I was allowed to request that a state agency review a portion of the expert's work. The expert advised the town to fight to prevent their work from being reviewed. The town spent over $5k in legal fees on this before ultimately losing. I like to think that this was a contributing factor in the town’s decision, a few months later, to replace that expert.

Again, this is weaponization of expertise. Reasonable rules aimed at keeping the experts honest often get sabotaged by the experts themselves to protect their own interests.

These examples illustrate, on a local level, what The Weaponization of Expertise discusses on a national and international level: experts have misused their authority to suppress dissent. The misuse has become evident to the public, causing a backlash. And, as Anacharsis pointed out, there is an insurmountable problem with resolving this backlash: no one is in a position to accurately judge the experts.

The Weaponization of Expertise tells a story in three parts. The first part discusses how elites became overconfident in their skills and knowledge. The second part is about populist backlash to what is perceived as the elite’s failures and conceits. The third part is about the elites’ bad reaction to the backlash. Overall, the story is about the need for skepticism: how large parts of the public have come to doubt what the experts say, and how the experts need to shed their self-serving dogmatism and embrace greater intellectual humility and honesty.

Looked at another way, we’re still in ancient Athens. Socrates is pointing out that the people in charge don’t actually know what they claim to know, and those people want Socrates to shut up. Instead of accusations of corruption of the youth, we now have corruption of knowledge - disinformation and misinformation. Instead of accusations of impiety, we now have “trust the science.”

There are, however, some changes. For one, as the authors point out, we now have a diploma divide. The negative consequences of it are contempt for the uncredentialed, a mistaking of credentials with good judgment, overconfidence in technocratic solutions, and the exclusion of the uncredentialed from the decision-making process. This exclusion seems to have caused various institutions, such as academia and the media, to shift from left-leaning to ideological monocultures. Associated with this is the tendency for the credentialed to think that the values of the credentialed class are universal values. “The elite use of expertise is often motivated not by facts but by values masquerading as judgments.”

Another change is the catastrophic failure and incoherence of the US’s response to Covid that made it abundantly clear to ordinary people that something was wrong with the experts. Dissecting this and the reactions by elites to having their authority questioned form a sizable portion of the book.

Yet another change is the outright failure of science to produce truth, as evidenced by the replication crisis, contradictory findings, rampant exaggeration, and numerous exposures of academic fraud and shoddy work. On top of that, there’s bias, poorly constructed experiments, and financial and career incentives. The example the public may know best is about nutrition, with study after study and expert after expert contradicting each other.

The experts deserve the backlash, and the populists are the ones to give it to them. As the authors put it:

Populists believe in common sense and are skeptical of many elites’ and experts’ claims. Skepticism gets a bad rap these days. This is puzzling because skepticism has such a long and intellectually grounded pedigree. Populists are skeptics, but they aren’t wild-eyed global skeptics. …their skepticism is grounded in experience and motivated by elite overclaiming.

The history of skepticism is the topic of the book’s sixth chapter. The authors point out that philosophical skepticism originated with Pyrrho and his philosophy of Pyrrhonism, the main topic of this Substack. There, the authors lament:

It strikes us as a bit peculiar that we need to defend skepticism given its long intellectual pedigree, especially among academics. In the context of intellectual culture, with its practice of tenure, skepticism should precisely be the type of practice that would be defended or encouraged. Skeptical inquiry is of the essence of the academic temperament. Or so we thought. …It is common, indeed all too common, for social scientists to see skepticism as a psychological state bordering on an affliction.

What the authors found is that among experts, skepticism is frowned upon. Things were no different in antiquity. The key problem is that skepticism primarily points out that experts do not have secure reasons for the knowledge they claim to possess. Hence, so many of our surviving ancient Pyrrhonist texts have titles such as Against the Ethicists, Against the Rhetoricians, Against the Physicists.

If you’re interested in an analysis of the extensive and wide-ranging recent failures of expertise, The Weaponization of Expertise is the go-to book.