Thread by @mccormick_ted

Some were surprised that culture-warriors who began by attacking humanities disciplines in the name of science ended up as Covid-deniers.

But it only makes sense that people who want history without historians would also prefer science without scientists. The issue is expertise.

In both cases there is a widespread belief that the accessibility of "information" (online or in textbooks) obviates the need for academic research.

In both cases there is a failure to consider where that "information" ultimately comes from, and what kind of work it rests upon.

I think a similar naiveté about the kind of "information" past research yields and its fixity across contexts (be they disciplinary or social) plagues some of the more flawed instances of interdisciplinary research that have come in for criticism recently (e.g. portraits/trust).

In this latter instance, the researchers responsible -- specialists in their own fields -- should know better.

But in essence both feel free to treat other people's areas of expertise as matters of fixed, portable knowledge; only their own is a site of complex, dynamic research.

I'm reminded of this every time a student tells me they read such-and-such piece of research to get the "information" and left it at that. Learning a discipline is learning that information is often less than half the story; method, approach, argument are how we create knowledge.

More and more, I see the purpose of my teaching as conveying this -- conveying not information so much as its limitations; doing away with the idea that knowledge is fixed set of propositions rather than a limitless process of bringing ideas and methods to bear on sources.

It seems paradoxical that a revolution in accessibility -- a good thing -- should reinforce and popularize such antiquated ideas as that complex disciplines boil down to collections of facts or bodies of content. But in some cases it has undoubtedly had this effect.

And in political context it is easier to see why -- as with the Republican who thought Ken Burns videos could replace teaching, the idea that learning is just acquiring information lets conservatives and centrists (and techno-utopians) argue that expertise is superfluous.

We are arguably seeing some results of this thinking right now, in "public health" policies that pay scant (or wildly inconsistent) regard to directly relevant medical expertise. This example is glaring right now, but we have seen other instances and will surely see many more.

As others have said, *critical* engagement with expertise is vital. This is not an argument for technocracy. The political process of weighing the findings of specialists against other relevant concerns is inevitably and rightly part of using knowledge in any democratic context.

But imagining that one becomes an expert by watching Ken Burns or YouTube isn't.

Culture-war criticism of academic work generally fails to leave any basis for making that distinction, because it begins from the position that academic experts as such are ideologically tainted.

Shallow interdisciplinary appropriations of disciplinary work -- which I differentiate from collaboration, and from genuine attempts to learn about the state of another field -- needn't be politicized in this way; but they often treat the other discipline as fundamentally "easy".

And to that extent, they effectively deny that the other discipline is a locus of expertise in any real sense at all.

Why consult experts in a given field if anyone can do it? And if you didn't bother to consult them, isn't it because you saw no need, no expertise worth having?

And so what begins as bad history ends as bad science. In the short term, this is bad for historians and scientists and experts of whatever stripe.

But if you think that knowledge matters, and if you see it as a process, you may find that in the long run it's bad for everyone.