Brendan O’Neill posted what he says is a speech he gave at QED, and I guess is what he said on that panel. It’s a bizarro rant about expertise and what a bad thing it is. This is apparently because expertise is undemocratic.
So the idea that we need more expertise in politics is not actually a new one. It’s been around for a long time, and it has always been on the wrong side of the debate about democracy, in my view. Because it’s an idea which tends to depict ordinary people as not sufficiently enlightened for serious political debate, especially on really complicated matters like war or law and so on.
This outlook survives today, in the widespread belief that we need more expertise and less ideology in politics; more science, less passion; more cool-headed, educated people like David Nutt, and fewer nutters from the mass of the population who think they know everything but don’t actually know very much at all.
The only difference today is that where once it was fat old Tories and stiff American officials who said politics is better done by experts, today it is young rationalists and humanists who say politics needs more expert input and less playing to the public gallery, less populism, less ill-informed passion or wrongheaded ideology.
He’s mashing things together there, probably on purpose. Especially he’s mashing together the people or citizenry as a whole, and expertise in the process of government and administration. That’s ludicrous. It’s perfectly possible to include expertise in the process of government and administration without excluding the people or citizenry in general on the grounds of non-expertise.
What we have today is a situation where evidence and expertise are the main drivers of policy. For many complicated historical reasons, politicians no longer feel they have the moral or electoral authority to make judgements or decisions, and so they outsource their authority to scientists and other researchers. They call upon these people to provide them with authority, to provide them with a good, strong, peer-reviewed justification for taking a certain course of action, often a course of action they had already decided upon but felt too morally denuded to push forward.
When politics and science mix in this way, both of them suffer, I think. We end up with evidence-driven policy and policy-driven science, neither of which is a very good thing.
There see it’s that kind of thing that makes me think he doesn’t mean a word of anything he says, he just says it to create a stir. Come on. Evidence-driven policy is not a good thing? Policy should carefully exclude evidence?
I don’t believe him.
Someone has to stand up to the experts!
How dare anyone think that informed, science based opinions make for better policies, that’s just ludicrous!
Yeah, and no more editor driven publications, or engineering driven bridges either!
I agree with him about policy-driven science. That’s something that should be eliminated. But evidence-driven policy is bad? He’s either not thought this out or is too caught up in his own rhetoric.
Huh? Obviously the world is just too complicated for his tiny brain. Or he is angry that no one is asking for his opinion
What we have today is a situation where evidence and expertise are the main drivers of policy.
A situation where Todd Akin sat on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology and Michele Bachmann on the Intelligence Committee one. Can you get more sciencey than that?
W.T.F.??? Evidence driven policy is exactly what we need.
And incidentally, what my job is all about. We supply the reliable evidence.
@Ulysses, to a certain extent science can be legitimately policy driven. Of course, results cannot and must not be! But if you want evidence based policy, you need to actually go get the evidence. Funding for various areas is a political choice – we want more funds for renewable energy research, cancer & HIV research etc.
lol. no we don’t. has this dude ever seen who sits on the science committee in the us?
LOL. Has he met a politician?
I think what he is *trying* to do is speak out against a trend towards more “technocrats” deciding policy. In the context of Europe, I can see where he is coming from.
The reality however is that he is basing his assumption on a false premise and buying into a narrative that isn’t accurate.
What politicians actually often do is find “experts” in a particular academic field that just so happen to have an agenda said politician agrees with. In economics a good US example is Milton Friedman. What they will then do is adopt the policy position and use the credibility of the “expert” (often highly partisan “expert” at that) in order to say “this isn’t what MY position, it’s what the expert says…surely we can all agree to trust the experts?” yada yada yada. It’s similar to George W. Bush’s insistence on “listening to his commanding officers on the ground” when selling his Iraq escalation. All while having Petraeus testify before Congress on September 11. It’s a good way of exploiting the “non-political” nature of an individual for what is a completely political end.
I can also agree with him that in the context of the Euro crisis, you have plenty of extremely educated and seemingly knowledgeable neo-liberal officials who make regular pronouncements with dry and technical language to drive entire countries into the ground. And the reason they can get away with it is because they have very little democratic legitimacy (which they don’t need with the current system) and they *don’t* have to make their case in front of an electorate.
All of this to say that there is a very real abuse of the so-called dispassionate and technical “expert” in today’s political environment.
Wassamadda, the experts keep shooting you down? Too many preconceptions? Not enough data? Letting your prejudices color your expectations?
He would like the experts a lot better if they agreed with him.
Cripes! The usual moan is that politicians are making policy according to the latest opinion poll or focus group – the rule of the non expert par excellence..
Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to experts was interesting. She did not hide behind them as George W Bush did but, rather, listened to them only if they had been proved already to agree with her, no matter what the topic.
Later she would assert and appear quite convinced that she had listened to all sides of the argument.
In Britain the politicians are overriding the experts re neonicotinoid pesticides and CCS, to the detriment of our bees and thus our agriculture.
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Okay, while there is a lot of bullshit in there, the opening contains a nugget of truth:
That dogwhistle happens all the time to progressives and the left, in the form of calling real progressive policies “unreasonable” or telling us that “there isn’t political will” or other bullshit that amounts to “oh, shut up, that will never happen, you know nothing”.
And it goes pretty damn deep. If you read into the OMFSM ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT NEW WORLD ORDER rhetoric, you’ll find nuggets of truth in the quotes from David Rockefeller where he talks about this “new world order” and pretty much says that the world should be run by rich people like him because only rich people like him understand enough about the world to be allowed to run it. If you read Lewis F. Powell’s The Crisis of Democracy, what you find is that the “crisis of democracy” was too much democracy, that Powell (and by extension the Trilateral Commission that published his screed) felt that if the social movements of the 1960s were allowed to keep pushing the result would be utter chaos because the ignorant rabble would be running things.
It’s so goddamn disappointing to see that amazingly correct opening lead to the drivel that followed =/
Ten years ago we invaded Iraq. Our governments and most of the press assured us that it was absolutely necessary to do so. The Very Serious People were unanimous in agreement.
What can we conclude from this? That they were ignorant of the evidence which was obvious to everyone else, particularly the UN inspectors in the field? They couldn’t have been; perhaps they were privy to super-secret special evidence the rest of us didn’t see. It’s an inescapable conclusion that they didn’t think about it very hard. In fact, they didn’t think about it at all.
The Very Serious People decided what to think, and to tell other Serious people what to think, according to their neighbors’ positions. They took their place in line: I’m to the left of X and to the right of Y. They’re not like Krugman, who isn’t serious because he thinks for himself and doesn’t hang out with the policy makers. Actually knowing things is beside the point; it’s all about having the right attitude.
What a pathetic excuse for an essay! “For many complicated historical reasons, politicians no longer feel they have the moral or electoral authority to make judgements or decisions” and on his planet the sky is bright pink at noon.
“and so they outsource their authority to scientists and other researchers” and geoducks nibble his gonads. Is he seriously suggesting that scientists derive their authority from politicians?
“They call upon these people to provide them with authority”
No, he’s actually supposing that people actually in authority attempt to validate their authority from the elites he reflexively discredits.
“to provide them with a good, strong, peer-reviewed justification for taking a certain course of action, often a course of action they had already decided upon but felt too morally denuded to push forward.”
“Morally denuded?”
Somebody made them take off their clothes and made fun of them? Someone stripped them of their strictures and mocked their scruples?
Alethea H. “Crocoduck” Kuiper-Belt @7
You’re right, I was conflating “our science policy should include investigating X and Y” with “any investigation which gives a result that’s politically undesirable will be discarded.” I was specifically thinking of how the NRA lobbied Congress to get legislation passed forbidding the CDC from publishing gun death statistics.
I am not familiar with this author and cannot comment on his overall thesis. However, I don’t think the expert/non-expert in politics debate is that straight forward. For e.g., in India, a general trend among right wing media and a lot of the affluent middle class is to assume that all politicians are essentially stupid and we should instead rely on scientists and industry leaders. (Remember, in a lot of these conversations, CxO’s and successful business people are considered to be experts!). This sounds eerily close to the Randian view of governance.
The other thing is that, we assume there are individual experts in certain subjects who automatically are capable of taking better decisions. But, that evidently is not true. The expertise of science is not represented by one person, but the continuing dynamics of its process.
It is extremely important that public policy should be informed by expertise and supported by evidence. It is inevitable that policy decisions will have an effect on the enterprise of science; in most countries, a lot of fundamental science (at least) is funded by public money. The problem is when we conflate this requirement of interaction with specific individuals who may or may not have “expertise”!
What he is talking about is the well-known phenomenon of “policy-based evidence-making”, but unfortunately, being BO’N, he gets the problem with it arse-about-face, and blames experts for the fact that politicians like to use them as cover – normally by distorting their actual conclusions – to introduce unpopular courses of action.
Of course, the notion that one could run a country of 50, 300 or 1000 million people on the basis of the unreflective prejudices of whoever bothered to turn out for a vote is absurd… Well, run a country successfully, that is…
BO’N wrote a piece for the Daily Mail about welfare cuts. The Daily Mail introduced him as “leading leftwing thinker” – each word totally false about Brand O’Unreal. He’s more sellable as renegade leftist than as contrarian libertarian.
He claims on his blog that ‘He made a speech’. Hardly, it was simply an opening comment on a panel of four guests.
The panel discussion – ‘Is science the new religion?’ – also featured Robin Ince (English comedian, and science lover), Jeff Forshaw (Prof of Theoretical Physics, Manchester), Helen Czerski (Physicist and oceanographer).
As the discussion progressed, it got more and more heated, and O’Neill sot some serious stick from the audience of over 100, and even more from the excellent Robin Ince, who vehemently and aggressively disagreed with O’Neils inane rantings. It was much deserved in my view, as his long and rambling and tedious diatribes were in stark contrast to the concise and logical comments by the other panel members. The more I listened to his obscurantist bafflegab, the less I understood his points ironically. He tended to use about 20 words where just ‘several’ would suffice.
The good professors Dawkins and Krauss were both in the audience, and both asked decent questions of him, as did several members of that audience, non of which he answered satisfactorily, in my view.
It was great sport actually, and a surprising hour or so. He really did get his come-uppance I;m pleased to say, and people left the room somewhat shocked at what had occurred. There were several speakers during the rest of the conference that made thinly veiled insults to O’Neill in their talks!
To be honest, it was wonderful to hear a nut so pleasingly and thoroughly crushed by scientific and logical minds, as well as several audience members.
Oh, and he writes for the Daily Telegraph.
‘Nuff said.
Robin Ince, who was on the panel with him, discusses O’Neill’s blather here:
http://robinince.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-fascism-of-knowing-stuff/
As I consider the people in congress or the members of the houses of parliament there is precious little expertise to be seen. Ergo, we don’t have a problem. Would that the politicians would seek expert advice. Just another brendan strawman attack….
Thanks for the eyewitness account, mole. I know several people who were in that room but they’ve all been too busy to provide further details!
You are most welcome. It’s only sketchy at the moment I’m afraid, as I had only just arrived back when I posted this, and was rather ‘jaded’ shall we say from the event! And it’s more of an ‘earwitness’ account too, as I was at the back of the room. Although, I could certainly feel the crackling atmosphere and anger at times.
There was in fact a second or two when i was beginning to feel almost sorry for him as he was clearly outnumbered, out-thought, out-argued and intellectually out-manoeuvred. But that feeling didn’t last that long in fact. Just until he opened his mouth again really…
Al
Politicians who do not possess the requisite background and intelligence to speak of climate change matters should be prohibited from doing do. Un/misinformed opinions are valueless and only muddy the waters of knowledge. We need factual, relevant information and insights, not senseless rants like we saw about CO2 from Michelle Bachmann, or from Joe Barton preaching a godly flood that proves global warming isn’t man-made. Other countries are making a mockery of our political system and I fully understand why.
Check your knowledge privilege?
Hold it the wrong way up and he’s appealing for managerialism.
“There was in fact a second or two when i was beginning to feel almost sorry for him as he was clearly outnumbered, out-thought, out-argued and intellectually out-manoeuvred.”
You are a stout fellow mole and a very good-hearted animal. But do not waste your sympathy on Brendan O’Neill. Outnumbered, out-thought, out-argued and intellectually out-manoeuvred is his normal state and he sees nothing wrong with it. He makes his living by saying and writing outrageous things and pissing people off. But he is not able to actually defend his positions with reason or facts. A waste of space, as they say, and to be treated accordingly.
cheers. Oh, and keep a brace of pistols in your belt – the weasels and their allies are coming.
Well, that was a rhetorical point really, I in fact felt nothing for him but contempt.
And, despite your kind advice, I feel I would not need such archaic items of ordnance, as I would much prefer to rely on pointed sagacity and intellectual acumen to do the damage.
Either that, of just punch his fucking lights out…