Experts, Experts, Experts. By Daniel Greenfield.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in these past few years it’s to believe the opposite of what experts say.
The media has given up trying to get people to trust it and now asks it to trust its handpicked experts. And those experts say the same exact things that the media says. …
Experts warn of the rise of “misinformation”. And misinformation has come to be defined by people disagreeing with experts. Experts say that anyone who disagrees should be deplatformed. If you disagree with the deplatforming, they say you should be deplatformed too.
Much like Canadians say “eh”, and the Brits say “innit”, the media says “experts say”.
The media is notorious for sticking “experts say” in any story no matter how irrelevant. No opinion, no matter how stupid or wrong, can fail to be headlined with expert opinion. Take, “Can a Person Be Fat and Fit? Health Experts Say Yes”, “Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say” and “Is it safe to blow out birthday candles? Here’s what experts say”.
I don’t know about you, but I always consult experts before blowing out candles. …
When Jill Biden insisted on being called “Dr”, the media rallied to her defense. “She has a title of her own that isn’t ‘wife’ but ‘expert,’ in this case on education.” Rana el Kaliouby, “an expert in artificial emotional intelligence”, urged other PhDs to add “‘Dr’ to your twitter name to show how many of us there are. We deserve respect.” Experts in being experts say they deserve respect. …
Jill Biden’s thesis for her Ed.D degree was filled with spelling errors and read like a freshman term paper. It was based on a questionnaire and Kyle Smith noted that “again and again, the books she cites turn out to contain a huge proportion of the material relevant to her discussion in their first 20 pages.” But experts say all of that is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. …
Proliferation of PhDs:
Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people with doctorates more than doubled from 2 million to 4.5 million. …
In 1958, a total of 8,773 doctoral degrees were awarded, the majority of them in scientific fields. Back then they were a whole lot rarer and the holder was worthy of some respect. Three years later, the Apollo project was underway. In 1969, the year we landed on the moon, 25,743 doctorates were awarded, most of them in science.
In 2020, 55,283 doctoral degrees were awarded. And we’re far dumber for it, even if the experts won’t say so because they’re part of the problem. Many of the doctorates may be in science, but only in the sense that Dr. Jill Biden is a doctor. Quite a few, like Jill’s, are in education including plenty of emotional intelligence doctorates. There are PhDs in diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. Including a Justice and Diversity in Education from Vanderbilt. Arizona State boasts of the “nation’s first School of Social Transformation” as part of a gender studies PhD program. Fat studies have their doctoral programs and experts say that’s good. …
During COVID, we discovered the proliferation of Masters of Public Health, bureaucrats knew nothing about science, understood even less and claimed total authority anyway.
The less the experts know, the more they say. The petty fascism of a bureaucrat with a nonsensical degree would shame the worst Latin American autocrat. Every political official who can now puts a PhD after his name. Visit California’s election site and you’ll see “Shirley N. Weber, Ph.D” in much larger letters than her actual title as the Secretary of State. …
The proliferation of experts is a measure of the decline of individual autonomy. Beginning in the last century, a new class of experts, think tanks and invented authorities began envisioning the world as a sterile laboratory in which society and human beings would be engineered to perfection. The great experiment, which began with socialism, eugenics and the end of nations is now concluding with a cargo cult of clowns waving their worthless degrees at the sky.
Genuine expert opinion is welcome when it’s relevant and open to debate. But the degradation of expertise into credentialism and credentialism into Kafkaesque tyranny that pervades every area of modern life demands that the politically convenient opinions of every woke PhD in an invented field be treated as if they have the verities of Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein.
The activists have become experts and the experts, activists, and, like at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, we look from activist to expert to woke idiot, and we can’t tell which is which, but we know that we don’t trust a single damn one of them.
