The guy I made the bet with is a pretty big fan. He has a fantasy team in a league with a cash payout, so he pays close attention to the week-to-week goings on in the league. I couldn't have named more than three players on the Eagles, and probably not more than ten on the Patriots. He knew every player who would be involved.
I only made the bet because I like to have something to balance out what I want. That is, whenever I do bet (and it's always a small bet), I bet against the team I hope wins. That way, I get something no matter what happens in the game.
I ended up winning the bet. My lack of a system beat his highly organized system. My lack of knowledge beat his extensive knowledge. Not just his--nearly all the experts picked the Patriots.
Results and expertise
Whenever the experts are wrong about something--like, say, the 2016 presidential election--there's a temptation to make fun of them for their self-imagined expertise. If there's anything the Trump presidency has been about, in fact, it's been a war against the culture of rule by expertise. And why wouldn't it be? Everyone said he had no chance of winning. The "experts" all wrote him off as a joke, but he persevered, energized a base of voters who had never voted before or hadn't voted in a long time, and won.
So when it came time to run the country, when everyone was saying that now that he'd won, he needed to learn to be presidential, he went his own way again. He has kept on tweeting. He hired a cabinet and a staff with a few old pros, but a whole lot more genuine neophytes to politics. (To the extent he has hired anyone--there are still a lot of jobs unfilled.) He doesn't even feel it's important to be informed about the world in any exhaustive sense, as every other president in recent memory has. He gets a hyper-trimmed-down version of the Presidential Daily Brief, and that's on the few days when he actually chooses to get the brief at all.
This tendency to ignore the experts drives me crazy. I may have gotten lucky in the Super Bowl, but that doesn't mean I have some brilliant intuition the experts lack. Most of the time, they'll be correct more often than I am. And even when they're wrong, they'll have a more valuable explanation than I will of why the unexpected happened. Everyone knows the unexpected can happen. As they say, that's why they play the game. That doesn't invalidate expertise.
More than that, the repudiation of expertise is a threat to me. I'm someone who makes a living off my reputation as an expert. If the culture begins to revile expertise and look for simple explanations that tell us what we want to hear, I may be out of a job.
The revulsion of expertise isn't new in America, of course. The earliest great American literature, Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, features the jock Bram Bones getting the better of the nerd Ichabod Crane. The jock picking on the nerd is a well-established trope in America. Even stories that seem to celebrate nerds, like Big Bang Theory, are simultaneously mocking them, making it look like anyone who has worked to achieve mastery in a subject is automatically socially inept and clueless outside of his narrow field of mastery.
The Book of Mormon and when facts might not matter that much
I recently confessed to liking musicals. Here's a lesson from another one. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's 2012 smash "The Book of Mormon" gets plenty of laughs from picking at the dogmas of Mormonism.
But the musical is doing a lot more than just making fun of Mormon beliefs. It seems to be saying two things at once, both "Look, I could never actually believe this stuff," but also "but it obviously does really good things for the people who do believe it, so far be it from me to tell you to stop believing it." Or, as the end of one South Park episode had it:
The truth is that even for us experts, there is a lot we have to admit we don't know. Friends are always asking me, because I've been following Korean issues for a long time, about what I think will happen on the peninsula. The truth is that I don't know anymore than anyone else. I can tell you a lot more details than the average person about the background to the current situation. I can explain why one outcome or another might be possible. But I don't know what's going to happen.
If you were trapped beneath a giant box suspended in the air, and that box was held by a rope to the ceiling, you'd want to know if the rope would hold it. I'm like a physicist trapped next to you. I can tell you what I suspect the tensile strength of the rope might be, and I can estimate how much weight it might be capable of holding given the particular angles of the pulley system. But if I don't know what's in the box, I can only guess what will happen. I can know everything about the physics of falling and nothing about whether this object will fall.
The outcome belongs to God
I'm something of an enthusiast for studying the American Civil War. I didn't mean to become such an enthusiast, but living here in Maryland, within 100 miles of most of the major battle sites of the Eastern theater, it's pretty compelling to go and walk the grounds where the war was fought. I've always been fascinated by Robert E. Lee. He is remembered as a great General, and well he should be. But if you've ever been near a group of officer candidates or military school students at a place like Antietam or Gettysburg, you'll note that the instructor is struggling to not simply say that Lee screwed up at these battles.
In fact, Lee made a lot of decisions that were questionable from a military standpoint. He was often rashly aggressive, although he realized the North could replace lost men and supplies much more easily than he could. He had to avoid attrition. In the Civil War, taking a good defensive position and waiting for the enemy to come to you was usually a winning strategy, but Lee ignored that strategy often.
The amazing thing is that Lee often made his bad choices work out. It's difficult to say why, but I'd guess at least part of the reason was because his men believed in every choice he made. The Confederate States of America had strong lieutenants and a strong belief that God would give them the victory. Lee himself, although he carefully planned his campaigns, also believed in the end that the battle belonged to God. The army didn't know enough to realize it should fail, and so it held off failure for an impressively long time.
There is an old saw in the military that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Lee, understanding this, realized that although he had a responsibility to plan as best as he could, he also could not be paralyzed by the contradictory advice his experts would offer him. Everyone raised to think in a university learns that all arguments have many sides, many competing arguments, and good academics sometimes learn to balance those sides until they almost argue themselves out of having a viewpoint. That's the point of academics. But outside the academy, where decisions have to be made with imperfect knowledge, decision makers have to compartmentalize what they don't know from what they must do.
Trump has not been without victories
For me, the main Trump approach to governance that flies in the teeth of expertise is his switch from liberal globalism's "win-win" approach to a competitive model. And though the majority of experts decry this change, it has won Trump some victories. The Chinese, for example, seem to be cooperating with enhanced sanctions on North Korea. Trump's blunt, aggravated bluster against North Korea, which many were sure would push the Chinese toward its traditional ally, has, for now, had the opposite effect. Even though sanctions on North Korea had been taking a toll during the Obama administration, everything on Daily NK, the South Korean journal with sources inside North Korea, seems to indicate that sanctions have begun to bite much harder in the last few months.
Does this mean Trump's madman approach is working, even if he is, possibly, literally a madman and not just someone playing a part? (And is madman theory even more effective with an actual madman?) Or is Trump just temporarily on a lucky streak?
Expertise does matter, but experts need to remember humility
General Eisenhower once said that plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Of course expertise matters. Of course leaders have an obligation to understand the landscape of their decisions. But in the end, it is impossible to make a perfect plan. In the end, focusing on all one does not know can prevent someone from doing anything. I'm a big fan of agnosticism, of admitting our ignorance. And I think it's okay to avoid action where we don't know enough to act. But sometimes, situations arise where inaction is simply not acceptable, and in those times, we have to act with imperfect knowledge.
It is possible that an imperfect plan, carried out resolutely by competent lieutenants, can succeed where a better plan carried out in doubt may fail.
Of course we who call ourselves experts have a responsibility to share all the relevant knowledge we have with those who must make decisions. We have a responsibility to insist leaders listen. But we also have a responsibility to realize with humility the limits of our expertise, which is, in the grand scheme, quite limited indeed.
Trey Parker, in commenting on religious beliefs of friends while discussing his musical, had this to say:
I have religious friends, and they're like, 'Well, if you look, it's proven.' And you're like, 'No, it's not proven.' Don't try to tell me that you can prove this stuff. Just say 'I believe it,' and I'm down with you. Don't mix the two together. Because you can't logically say, 'We know that Jews came from Jerusalem and settled in America and turned into Native Americans.' That just doesn't make any sense. But at the same time, if you say, 'I believe this,' I say, 'OK. Cool, man.' Because at the end of the day, we all have certain beliefs and deeply held things that probably don't make a lot of sense to anybody else.
Experts can resist claims that clearly are not factual. If Trump said Kim Jong Un were insane, a Korea expert could offer proof that this isn't true. A Korea expert can offer alternate global strategies based in fact. But nobody has it all right. Nobody has enough of a grasp of reality to offer an iron-clad promise that any particular way forward is the right one. The Eagles might win the Super Bowl. Mormons might be happy, even if they're wrong.
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