You’ve most likely never heard of Arthur Allen, but he has saved thousands of lives, perhaps even the life of someone you know. Mr. Allen is a Coast Guard oceanographer, and he has spent his entire career studying how objects drift in the ocean. On his days off, he would go to Long Island Sound near his home and chuck things in the water and measure how far and how fast they drifted. Does this sound incredibly boring and utterly pointless? Well, you know what objects this is particularly useful for? Humans - people who’s boats sink or who are so drunk they fall off a boat or who decide it would be fun to try to swim to Hawaii. Allen developed calculations that he built into software that allowed the Coast Guard to find people in the ocean that they never would have found before. As his reward for this incredible feat, Allen was furloughed in 2018 by the Trump Administration because he was just another ‘useless bureaucrat.’
This is just one of many examples of how we ignore, abuse and ridicule experts; in fact, 'expert' has become a pejorative word in many people’s addled minds. With reams of information available to us all through technology, many people seem to be confused and deluded as to what constitutes fact and what is mere opinion. The result is a failure to use the truly staggering amounts of knowledge and data we have spent decades accumulating. Pick a topic (I’ve written about many of them) - parenting, taxes, urban planning, health, and on and on; we have data and methods that can dramatically improve all of our lives, but too many people refuse to accept much of what we know. The author Michael Lewis sums it up perfectly: we are very good at creating knowledge but very bad at applying it.
As you might suspect, the blame falls squarely on our dysfunctional politics and our childlike notions about freedom and free speech. It’s idiotic and absurd to think that you’re entitled to have an opinion about everything and anything. This is a deluded fantasy created by political hacks and social media grifters who have politicized every fibre of our society. Your opinion on climate change is wholly worthless, because in actuality, you know absolutely squat about it. Science isn’t political; there is a process, the scientific method, which handles and resolves scientific disputes. Moreover, you aren’t “doing your own research.” This phrase has become a mantra for many people, who apparently think they are so smart that they can just google some topic, read a few snippets and look at social media memes and magically, they know more than people who study the topic their entire lives. Covid was a perfect example, whereby millions of people suddenly believed they were experts on infectious diseases. The result was hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, economic hardship and a pandemic that lasted months longer than it should have.
But even the pandemic doesn’t top the issue of climate change, where still roughly 40 percent of the population refuses to believe scientists, instead preferring to listen to morons on Fox News and other right-wing media. The issue is perfect for disinformation because it’s complex and the changes were initially very subtle and hard to see - at least until the last few years. Charlie Veron is a biologist who has studied coral reefs for more than 50 years. He has been on 67 expeditions and logged 7000 hours under water. He has named about 20 percent of the worlds corals and created a taxonomic framework for corals that is now used by all researchers. In short, there is no one on this earth who knows more about coral reefs than Veron. In 1997 - 27 years ago - Mr Veron predicted that climate change would destroy the coral reefs because the increased water temperature would cause mass bleaching, a previously rare event, to become a common occurrence from which the reefs wouldn’t be able to recover. His prediction, mostly ignored and mocked at the time, has proven to be bang on; the Great Barrier Reef has experienced eight mass bleachings since Mr Veron made his prediction, including the worst one this past winter. Why wouldn’t we listen to Veron rather than some troll on Twitter?
Many people can’t see past anecdotal evidence and so they easily succumb to disinformation (Look at all the snow we had last winter!) and most of us have a hard time understanding probabilities and statistics. Lewis has suggested that everyone should have to take a basic statistics course, a good idea that will never be accepted by the “my freedom!” crowd. But we don’t need everyone to fully understand complex data and statistical analysis, we just need to have a modicum of trust in our experts and our institutions. I certainly don’t mean we should never question what experts tell us. They aren’t infallible, they get things wrong and make mistakes. Science is about getting things wrong as a way of making progress. A hypothesis is proposed and then tested by different people. Usually it is disproven, which leads to a new hypothesis, each time getting closer to the truth. Getting things wrong is how we eventually get things right. So questioning and debating in the public space are an essential part of the process of gaining knowledge. But that’s not what’s happening. The people most loudly talking about issues like climate change are people who know nothing about it. And much of our population doesn't want to hear debate at all; they want to live in their own cocoon of ignorance, faith, superstition and ideology.
We don’t act this way in our own day-to-day lives; almost all of us are able to admit that we need the expertise of others. We hire professionals like plumbers, mechanics, dentists, financial advisors, etc, because we know we don’t know enough about those fields. We willingly rely on and pay someone to do them for us. But when it comes to larger, societal issues, suddenly this humility disappears and is replaced by an aggressive and arrogant ignorance. You hire an actual plumber to fix your pipes, not some smart ass on Facebook who claims to be a plumber. You won’t trust your finances to someone who isn't a certified financial planner, but you’ll believe some halfwit 'influencer' about Covid or climate change? Point of fact, it would be far, far easier for you learn enough to do most of your own plumbing or investments than it would be to become an expert like Arthur Allen or Charlie Veron.
We spend tons of money and time training people so that they become experts. Universities all across the world have spent literally hundreds of billions of dollars on research. We have innumerable think tanks, foundations, and non-profits that study specific problems and try to find solutions. We do this so that we can increase our overall knowledge of the world and to help us solve problems that will improve our lives. But instead of using all of this knowledge, it gets attacked and ignored. It’s akin to ordering filet mignon and lobster at a fancy restaurant and when they bring you the food, you dump it on the floor and stomp on it. From a societal viewpoint, it is pretty well impossible for me to think of anything that is as stupid and self-destructive as our refusal to listen to experts.
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