Thread by @JeffreyASachs

I have a serious allergy to this sort of thinking. Maybe it's because of rank self-interest (always a possibility!), but I genuinely think a big reason has to do with the Iraq War.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1448776650943045635

It's become popular these days to say that the "experts" were wrong about the Iraq War. That's not how it looked at the time to me. To me, it all just depends on which experts you were listening to.

I can recall, back during my undergrad days when the war was just starting and I was beginning to study Arabic, how all of my teachers and all the people whose books I was reading were vehemently opposed to the invasion.

I won't bore you with links to the endless Letters to the Editor, op-eds, thundering speeches, petitions, expert testimonies, etc. from those days. You can root around through MESA's website if you want. You'll find them.

You'll find a similar raft of experts coming out in opposition to the Libyan intervention and the folly of nation-building in Afghanistan. I'm not making this up. They were really, really loud and very, very consistent. Also, they were right.

And right not in a stopped-clock kind of way, but right in the "Here are specific reasons why the US government's assumptions are wrong, here is what will happen if we go ahead anyway" kind of way.

Now, I'm NOT saying that these academic experts have *always* been right. Far, far from it. I'm trying to explain a personal psychological fact about myself, i.e. why I am less skeptical of expertise. I also am saying that a great deal rests on whose expertise gets recognized.

Throughout the first and most crucial years of the WoT, there was enormous pressure in the media to *not* recognize the expertise of academics, and to instead privilege the expertise of think tanks, generals, politicians, and activists. That didn't work out so well.

And so, for perfectly understandable but wholly unacceptable reasons, many of the people hoodwinked back during those early years are now insisting that EVERYBODY got it wrong and the problem is one of expertise itself. I remember it differently.

Again (because I anticipate caterwauling), I am not saying credentialed experts are always right, that being a PhD makes you smarter or better at predicting things or anything like that. Those are all sociological questions well above my pay grade.

But I do want people to understand that while the Iraq War was probably more responsible than any other recent event for hollowing out the public's faith in expertise, that is largely due to the media's failure to recognize where expertise truly lay.

I think the response to this is that we now have both more facts and more falsehoods-masquerading-as-facts. That doesn't necessarily erode the case for expertise.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1448781772972564485