Thread by @yhazony

A head of government who consistently believes his intelligence briefings isn’t fit for the job. Any capable executive knows that expert advisors are wrong much of the time, blinded by professional groupthink and the usual human stupidity.

https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1202017519898415105

One of the worst things about the liberal, university-educated claque that runs nearly every profession today is their almost complete incapacity to be skeptical about the opinions of professionals and experts.

Being able to retain a significant measure of skepticism rather than ceding control to expert advisors is a minimum for being able to run your own life. No sane person would take major steps advised by lawyers or doctors without getting more opinions.

And in academic disciplines the situation is much worse. Most disciplines are dominated by a single paradigm. Mostly no one enters the discipline unless they are willing to accept the assumptions the discipline thinks are unassailable (when normally they aren’t).

This means that when you talk to an expert from the discipline, you aren’t really getting the judgment of a free-thinking and intelligent person. You’re just hearing a highly educated person thoughtlessly repeating what the whole herd is saying.

The same is true in government, where the different bureaucracies develop their own assumptions which get entrenched and turned into orthodoxies. In the good scenario competing agencies despise one another’s assumptions and give the president or PM conflicting views to consider.

But in the bad scenario—which is what we see in the US, UK, Europe, and Israel—all the different agencies stop competing and despising each other, and instead start unthinkingly repeating the same unchallenged assumptions.

When this happens, if you run into a political figure who just believes what the stampeding herd of experts are saying—dump them as fast as you can. The only hope of getting sensible answers is if the political leadership distrusts what he’s hearing.

In Hebrew Bible, every time you have 350 or 400 prophets saying the same thing, you’re supposed to immediately understand that they’re probably wrong. They’re just copying one another’s words, not doing the hard work of getting to the truth.

Same is true here. Whenever 350 or 400 professors or media commentators or foreign policy experts are all saying the same thing, you should immediately get the sense that what they’re saying probably isn’t true.

We need more political leaders who can resist the stampeding herd of liberal experts. It’s a sorry day when the media criticize an elected official for challenging expert opinion—as though that’s a bad thing.