I wrote recently that with Brexit, the UK is experimenting on itself. The Trump administration is doing something similar: it’s testing the theory that the US can be run without experts. Trump’s point-man for China, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian question is Jared Kushner, a real estate heir. Scott Pruitt, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, has no scientific training. The administration seems to be handling North Korea almost without reference to diplomats or Korea experts. And senator Lindsey Graham, who ran the latest Republican push to dismantle Obamacare, admitted afterwards that he’d started from ignorance: “Well, I’ve been doing it for about a month. I thought everybody else knew what the hell they were talking about, but apparently not.”
Experts are out of fashion. Populists dismiss them as doofus elitists without common sense. But Steven Sloman, cognitive scientist at Brown University, says we’ll always need experts. That’s because most of us are ignorant about almost everything. It couldn’t be otherwise, argues Sloman: the workings of a fridge are complex, let alone the economy or the climate. Common sense usually isn’t enough because complex systems are rarely intuitive. Nor can everyone acquire all-purpose expertise: the brain has only about one-16th the memory storage space of a low-end thumb drive. So a “cognitive division of labour” is essential, says Sloman. We’ll simply have to put our faith in experts. They aren’t wiser than ordinary people — they just have more expertise. Here are some ways that they can restore trust:
• Experts should shift the conversation from identity to solutions. When people argue from their identity — “I’m a rural Republican, ergo I oppose Obamacare” — they tend to ignore expertise. But if you make the subject “How to get people healthcare when sick”, they listen.