Do We Need to "Stop Trusting the Experts"?

(As RFK, Jr. Urges)

Did you know that de-icing planes makes them more likely to crash, not less? It’s true. The de-icing chemicals currently at use at major American airports contain a highly corrosive compound, argonic acid, that literally eats away at plane wings. Last year, planes that had undergone regular de-icing were 3.4 times more likely to crash than planes that had not. Meanwhile, repeated studies have shown that ice cannot damage plane wings. Ice, after all, is water, and there is nothing more harmless than water. It is time for the federal government to step in and put an end to the dangerous practice of de-icing.

Hopefully, readers will recognize that the preceding paragraph is pure, arrant nonsense. Argon, to start with, is an inert gas that cannot form compounds under normal conditions—there is no such thing as “argonic acid.” The statistic about plane crashes was made up, and the chemical properties of water ice have nothing to do with the threat it poses to plane flight, which comes from drag, weight, and loss of lift, not from any chemical interaction.

But if the paragraph sounded, at first read, at least plausible, there is a reason. The public sphere today is full of claims that sound exactly like it, most prominently on the issue of vaccines. Just this past week, President Trump spouted off about the dangers supposedly posed by adding alum to vaccine shots (a long-standing practice that helps provoke the needed immune reaction). There is absolutely no scientific evidence for his claim, and removing the alum could cause disruptions that would leave millions of American children facing deadly pathogens without vaccine protection.

It is easy—and correct—to say that we should trust scientific experts rather than our Ignoramus-in-Chief, who has no scientific knowledge whatsoever and gives credence to his conspiracy-theory-addled HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. But distrust of experts has a long pedigree in American society. Our democracy relies on the principle that what most voters lack in expertise they make up for in a “common sense” that allows them to pronounce on matters of public interest. It is a principle that encourages ordinary people to question the authority of experts in many different realms—even their physicians’ medical decisions (something the pharmaceutical industry encourages through its ubiquitous prescription drug advertisements). Our history, meanwhile, is unfortunately replete with examples of experts who gave horrifically bad advice, from the doctors who prescribed cigarette smoking as a cure for irritated throats, to the foreign policy professionals who confidently predicted quick victories in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kennedy himself summed up the long populist tradition in an interview he gave recently—to Tucker Carlson, naturally. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he declared. “We were told, don’t do any investigation yourself, just trust the experts, [but] trusting the experts is not a feature of science, it’s not a feature of democracy, it’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism… it’s one of the burdens of citizenship to do our own research…”

Kennedy does have a point, albeit a very small one. No expert deserves total, blind faith. Experts are hardly immune from error, incompetence, corruption, and groupthink. Total faith is indeed an attribute of religion, not democracy. Unfortunately, Kennedy sees no alternative to total faith other than total suspicion. Instead of assuming the experts are always right, he assumes they are always wrong. Challenge them. “Do your own research.”

This stance is an absurdity. In modern society, we cannot help but trust expertise, virtually every second of every day. We rely on experts to keep our air and water clean, our food safe, our utilities reliable, our computers functioning. We don’t routinely challenge the expertise of the people who design and maintain our elevators, our household appliances, our bicycles and cars, our clothing, our medications, our phones—or the equipment that de-ices our planes. To live in suspicion of all expertise, all the time, is not a path towards responsible citizenship, as Kennedy argues. It is a path towards insanity.

Furthermore, to challenge expertise, you need expertise of your own. Kennedy himself implicitly acknowledges this point when he goes off on his various rants. He doesn’t claim to have done research himself on the relationship between circumcision and autism, for example. He has dug up obscure articles by alleged experts which happen to align with his own views on the subject. The fact that these authors are outliers or (often) cranks, and that the vast majority of genuine experts in the field reject their conclusions, only reinforces his sense of certainty. In the worldview of total suspicion, when the vast majority of experts concur it is ipso facto evidence of groupthink, or conspiracy.

Yes, expertise requires oversight. But in the real world, as opposed to the paranoid fantasyland of Kennedy’s imagination, that oversight can only come from flexible, carefully designed professional structures that deploy experts themselves to monitor and verify the work of other experts. These are structures that take considerable time and resources to construct. They cannot be replaced by a random guy with a PhD and a theory, still less by laypeople armed with nothing but suspicion.

True, even the best systems of oversight and expertise can fail. During the COVID pandemic, they did so repeatedly. The MAGA right has enormously exaggerated the COVID failures, mixed in its own witches’ brew of conspiracy theory, and used the result to condemn expertise in general, as Kennedy did in the interview with Carlson. But reputable scholars such my colleagues Steve Macedo and Frances Lee have examined this country’s pandemic record in a sober and serious fashion, and issued very critical judgments.

But let’s be precise about what failed during COVID—for instance, in regard to the disastrous decision to keep schools closed for more than a year in many parts of the country. What happened was not the failure of expertise in general, but rather the suspension of normal systems of oversight under conditions of extreme emergency (remember that COVID ultimate took the lives of over 1.2 million Americans) and political turmoil. Faced with the overwhelming public health crisis, the expertise of pedagogues, whose assessments of the potential harm caused by extended closings could have been weighed against the dangers of resuming in-person instruction, was simply sidelined, ignored. It did not help that the MAGA right so quickly politicized the issue, so that for many liberals, any questioning of the closures looked like a concession to the forces of darkness.

As noted, the temptation to embrace total suspicion remains strong, so it is important to keep in mind a couple of points that can help immunize people (so to speak) against it.

First, it’s crucial to remember that having confidence in expertise doesn’t mean thinking that the experts are always right. As every scientist knows, experiments don’t always work, and they often give erroneous or misleading results. Theories are frequently disproven. Expertise is not infallibility. It’s a process, driven by trial and error. “Believing in the science” doesn’t mean taking what scientists say at any moment as holy writ—the scientists themselves don’t do this. It means believing in the process and accepting that what is seen as truth today may look like error tomorrow.

And second, expertise is necessary because the real world is a complicated place. Total suspicion denies this complexity and insists on radical simplicity. It caricatures the elaborate, sophisticated process by which genuine experts arrive at (tentative) conclusions as a black and white story of corruption and conspiracy. And it substitutes its own radically simple conclusions for the complex expert ones. The point is always to find a single smoking gun—a single culprit to blame. If rates of autism have risen, the reason must be vaccines—or , now, apparently, Tylenol (total suspicion does not demand total consistency). Whereas a genuine expert might begin to tackle the issue by trying to compile a full list of all the factors that might have influenced the rate change – including paternal age, new diagnostic criteria, environmental toxins, etc.—Kennedy and his ilk simply fixate on a single, simple factor that has a surface plausibility, and refuse to consider alternatives.

This practice of total suspicion is the quintessence of unreason, and it’s dangerous, especially when adopted by the most powerful men in the country. If Trump and Kennedy push their idiotic line on alum in vaccines, American children could die. And is it such a stretch to believe that someone could develop a suspicion of de-icing? All I can say is: take me off that plane.

A note of acknowledgment. Much of this column takes inspiration from the work of Sophia Rosenfeld, especially Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard University Press, 2011) and Democracy and Truth: A Short History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).