Not All Experts Are Equal: Why We Must Distinguish Practitioners from Activists

From pandemic missteps to economic forecasts gone wrong, the public’s trust in experts is crumbling. But the term ‘expert’ itself may lead to unearned trust.

TLDR: Public trust in "experts" has declined—but the term itself is too broad and misleading. We wrongly lump together practitioners, analysts, and activists. Practitioners operate in the physical world with proven methods; analysts work with models and data; activists often push ideologically-driven agendas. To restore trust and avoid bad policy, we must distinguish between these groups and calibrate our trust based on method, track record, and truth-seeking intent—not titles.

In addition to my AI-focused newsletters I am hoping to share some additional ideas and thoughts on AI as well as other topics that interest me. Hopefully, you’ll find them interesting as well.

One topic that has come to the forefront today is experts, how the public has lost their trust in expertise, and the implications of that loss. This has been discussed in depth in Thomas Nichols’s The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters and numerous articles and blogs.

Nichols’s list of experts includes a wide array of disciplines, such as public health officials, diplomats, economists, scientists, professors, doctors, engineers, military officers, intelligence analysts, and others. Nichols argues that, while experts are partially responsible for some of the loss of trust due to their own mistakes and errors, other factors such as anti-intellectualism, the rise of the internet and social media, "fake news” journalism, and consumer-focused higher education are the main culprits. This in turn has led to bad policies, mistrust in institutions, vulnerability to conspiracy theories, populism, and the average Joe/Jane thinking they know as much as the experts (see cartoon below).

“Experts” is too broad a category and thus misleading

The “expert” issue came to mind for me in political consultant Bruce Mehlman’s Age of Disruption substack article, Nobody Knows Nuthin’. Mehlman is one of the best analysts I’ve come across and I highly recommend Age of Disruption and his quarterly deep dives into political trends.

That said, the last section of Nobody Knows Nuthin’ got me thinking about “experts” (section shortened by taking out the graphs below).

“Ignorance may be bliss but it usually makes for terrible policy. We ignore experts at our own peril. Vaccines prevent disease, climate change is real and those who live by conspiracy theories may die by them, literally or politically…

So what? Expertise is real. It matters. Everyone prefers an experienced surgeon, airline pilot, plumber or auto mechanic. Yet too often experts appear to lack humility, empathy or a “sense of responsibility for America” (Peggy Noonan, “When Establishments Fail”). Business leaders, politicians and academics face a rebuttable presumption of elitism that can only be overcome by persistence, humility, authenticity and showing up. All trust is local.”

The sentence “Everyone prefers an experienced surgeon, airline pilot, plumber or auto mechanic” is an oft-repeated point online in support of expertise and brings me to the crux of my argument. To wit, when we include airline pilots, surgeons, plumbers and auto mechanics with public health officials, economists, journalists, and professors, we are making a categorization error by mixing the groups together.

Practitioners, Analysts, and Activists

Airline pilots, surgeons, plumbers, auto mechanics, and similar professions deal with the physical world, the here and now and perhaps the immediate future. They are focused on either carrying out a task (getting a plane from A to B) or solving a problem (removing a tumor). They are usually working with well-tested knowledge based in reality. We should call this group of professions “Practitioners”.

In contrast, public health officials, economists, journalists, professors, and intelligence analysts use events, theories, trends, and data to model the world, predict outcomes and make recommendations based on those inputs. We can call this group “Analysts” if they are practicing their craft in good faith and seeking to truthfully model reality as best they can.

However, oftentimes people in these disciplines are not seeking truth but instead practice activism, with their recommendations built less on data and reality and more on their world view and ideology. Because they do not seek truth, their models replicate reality poorly and their perspectives and recommendations are faulty.

This is why 100 economists said Argentinian president Javier Milei’s policies would destroy that country’s economy, yet Argentina just posted almost 8% growth and cut inflation from 25% to less than 3%.

It’s the reason intelligence analysts claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, leading to the invasion of another country in the Middle East.

It explains why in 2020, dozens of epidemiologists signed off on mass protests despite lockdowns—an inconsistency that revealed values trumping science.

Rather than refer to this people as “analysts”, they would be more accurately be classified as “activists”.

The table below further illustrates the distinctions between groups.

Of course, some individuals straddle categories—an economist can act as a neutral analyst or an activist, depending on their methods and incentives. However, to simplify, practitioners solve physical problems in real time. Analysts use models to understand complex systems. Activists promote ideologically driven agendas, often under the guise of analysis.

• Practitioners: Apply tested methods to solve physical problems (e.g., pilots, surgeons).

• Analysts: Use models and data to predict outcomes and advise decisions (e.g., economists, epidemiologists).

• Activists: Advance recommendations rooted more in ideology than verifiable evidence (e.g., ideologically driven policy researchers).

So What?

By mixing up different types of people who should inspire different degrees of trust, we fool ourselves into trusting everyone labeled as an expert. We must calibrate our trust in different specialists by understanding their motivations and methods. We must evaluate ‘experts’ not by their titles, but by their epistemology—are they accountable to reality, or just committed to a cause?

In a world drowning in data and ideology, what we need are fewer slogans about ‘trusting experts’—and more discernment about which experts to trust.