89. Experts Trilemma 🔗

The expert’s trilemma

Express doubt you feel and get lynched now

Express certainty you don’t feel, turn out wrong, get lynched later

Express certainty you don’t feel, turn out to be right, get celebrated, be expected to be right forever about everything on pain of lynching

A layperson is an idiot who expects to sustain supreme confidence about everything forever without ever learning anything new, by rewarding or punishing others for being right or wrong.

Expertise is the capacity for cultivating systematic doubt about an area of knowledge and responding skillfully to it. Trafficking in certainties is mostly a game for children. For adults there are no certainties, only bets of varying risks. tweet^[1]

No the problem is never taking responsibility for the risks of life and always trying to externalize risk to others. A layperson is not defined by degrees or depth of knowledge, but refusal to participate in epistemic risks individually or collectively. tweet^[2]

Mutual accountability between adults where everybody has a stake and could be wrong in ways that hurt others is great. Accountability as a clumsy theater for pursuing vendettas, or denying responsibilities for risks you externalized, not so much. tweet^[3]

The experts vs laypeople war has been going on for 25 years now. The new dynamic is the rise of people willing to parlay a tiny bit of rightness into careers of self-righteous populist alt-expertise. Basically riding third leg of the trilemma to profitable grifts while they can.

The recipe is simple and is basically shorting the majority expertise market. Take contrarian positions on a variety of things, if one pays off, ride the resulting popular acclaim as long as you can, and get out just before your luck runs out and they turn on you.

This is why being a contrarian heretic is such a popular thing. Especially if you can buy your own bullshit long enough to feel self-righteous about it and make compelling rabble-rousing speeches. It’s method acting.

This is why I have started evaluating thought leadership entirely by the quality of the followers. If you mostly attract zombie mooks it’s a clear tell that you’re parlaying the third leg of the trilemma into an epistemic bubble.

I used to mainly hold the the grifter alt-experts responsible for pumping up the internet of beefs and rallying mooks to their banners. I’m starting to shift the responsibility to the mooks themselves. People get the “leaders” they deserve.

Another tell is that good-faith experts find interacting with laypeople burdensome because they find the weight of the trilemma to be too much. The only way to win is to not play. They vastly prefer discussing their doubts with peers to packaging false certainties for the public.

The grifter expert by contrast, will eagerly seek public validation, and attempt to massage narratives of their own never-ending rightness to sustain them. You’ll almost never hear them speculating aloud about stuff they’re uncertain of, asking non-rhetorical questions, etc.

They’ll also actively avoid seeking peers with whom they can usefully process doubts. Too much of a threat to managing a self-certain psyche to expose your doubts to even friendly, curious scrutiny. Instead they are more likely to form cabals of shared certainties. Ie religions.

Good builds in this reply thread tweet^[4]

I was also calling this phenomenon entrepreneurial expertise, but venture expertise is perhaps better. It’s more investment in a portfolio of ideas than in building out an idea product. Either way, bad model for cultivating “expertise” tweet^[5]

If you’re wondering why, you might have startup-derangement syndrome. If you’re more interested in “customers” in a “market” for a “truth product” than in actually understanding a topic, you’re going to fall victim to this. Traditional experts are not immune (cf TED talks)

I mean think about it… while the masses might be affected by the products of expertise for better or worse, they’re not the target audience for expert knowledge. Sure the knowledge itself should be open to all willing to do the work to access it, with or without credentials…

… but actively seeking to package it (and not in an appropriately caveated pop-science/sci-comms way) for their consumption in order to claim their incompetent support as some sort of social proof of rightness that you ride to riches. That’s bad karma.

Productizing expertise for mass consumption has all the moral hazards and fragility risks of financialization. If you’re an expert with entrepreneurial ambitions, make a product the masses can actually use out of it.

Yep. Ortega was the first to notice a lot of this stuff. tweet^[6]