The Rise and Fall of the Expert Class

Wisdom of Crowds

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This week we invited the author Oliver Traldi on the podcast to talk about the role of experts in society and how we assess different kinds of skill, talent, and truth. Oliver, a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy and a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, is one of the most exciting young thinkers and writers around today—as evidenced by his recent tour-de-force of an essay titled "With All Due Respect to the Experts."

The conversation begins with Shadi's half-joking admission that he is being red-pilled in real time, mostly due to the increase in crime and many liberals' inability to concede that it is indeed a problem. This leads to an interesting back and forth about the difficulty of pinpointing truth in a pluralistic and democratic society.

What is the role of experts really? Are "experts" the academic equivalent of pilots flying planes? Would we be better off as a society if we diminished the importance of punditry?

In the full subscriber episode, the conversation zeroes in on the role of elites, and the qualities needed for effective leadership. Would technocracy seem like a more desirable system if our expert class hadn't sullied its credibility so extensively over the last 20 years? Is the horse-sense of normie voters a better guiding light than the prophecies of an elite class that is all to0 often high on its own supply?

Required Reading

- "With All Due Respect to the Experts" by Oliver Traldi (American Compass)

- "The Red-Pilling of Liberal America" by Shadi Hamid (Wisdom of Crowds)

- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Phillip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner (Amazon)

- Smug Pilots New Yorker Cartoon

- How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley (Amazon)

- Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen (Amazon)

- "The Point of Political Belief" by Michael Hannon (Academia)

- "A crying shame" by Oliver Traldi (Washington Examiner)