I'm just saying -- devaluing "experts"

So here I go again, off on a tear after a skeet from an academic who is blinded by the light and tries to present all experts as equal, hoping to elevate liberal arts experts to the same level with STEM and trying to scare us into supporting them by scolding us for devaluing “experts”.

Well, if you’ve been reading my blog, you know what I’ve said about experts. This is a long post but it summarizes a couple dozen of other posts.

There is a Supreme Court definition of expertise.

a/ If you have published papers in periodicals for peer review, had your approved dissertation published as a book, if you do basic or advanced research, or teach or advise in an accredited university (some colleges and universities are not accredited), and have been involved in your field for some time post-doctorate, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

b/ If you have worked for years in a field with a recognized professional structure, especially if it has things like CEU requirements, you can testify in court as an expert in your field.

All others who testify must have their testimony supported by data from, you guessed it, expert witnesses.

The problem is the path to expertise.

With b, there is a clear path. If you work continuously in the field you gain expertise. If you get all your CEUs as prescribed by your profession, you get exposed to the latest information. If you don’t get fired, you probably know what you’re doing on the job.

For a, it’s more of a problem.

STEM has a clear progression of training, publication, and involvement in the field that creates, maintains and increases expertise. This includes fields usually listed in the liberal arts department that draw heavily on STEM data, such as archaeology, psychology, and sociology.

The rest of you, I don’t want to hear any complaints about getting devalued.

Your professors and advisors have exposed you to things that detract from your expertise. They may not take you seriously if you don’t follow along with what they say, a clear authoritarian situation. This includes teaching you jargon and making you use it in your papers to prove that you run with the in crowd.

Another facet is pipelining. I’ve talked about this many times and identified papers that produced nonsense conclusions due to lack of a 360 degree perspective on the subject.

Pipelining has another problem. It steers academics into ignoring important issues and writing what I think one writer long ago called “the 350^th abridgement of English history”. I’ll give you a for-instance. One author in England in the 70s gained notice for writing about feminism. But before twenty years passed, she transitioned to writing about the same old white male power brokers everybody had been writing about for 200 years. It’s the same thing as people continuing to write about the Kennedys when every last thing that could be said has been said, and somebody had to defend against a plagiarism accusation because there are literally no more new phrases that a writer can use on this subject.

If you are in these liberal arts fields, when was the last time your advisor or peer review said rewrite your paper because you use Fallacy X? How do you know your paper doesn’t use Fallacy X? Or Y? or whatever? On my blog I blast a paper that uses four different fallacies, and then I give the punchline that the author has a university job teaching. If your peers let you get away with using fallacies, then you have no business claiming expertise because your peer reviews are worthless.

But I have other provocations, as Elizabeth Bennet told Mr Darcy, you know I do. Or at least you know if you’ve been reading this blog.

Academics who have no STEM content in their work may fail in epistemology. Not only are they supposed to use the correct jargon, they are supposed to use the correct sources. I mean academically correct, not necessarily factually correct. When was the last time your advisor told you to do a review of the literature with an eye to publishing about the debunking of past publications in your field?

Anything can be debunked at any time after publication. If you do not check into the debunking of books or their sources, you risk your reputation as an expert on using bad data.

If your advisor or department is pushing you to use AI, PUSH BACK. In the last couple of months two reports exposed that in both science and law, use of AI to write papers has put out false results. Tens of thousands of papers and legal documents published in the last two years have been retracted not just because of bad data, but also because of mythical sources. Lawyers have been disciplined by the American Bar for failing in their duty of care. Reputations have rightly been ruined.

You cannot follow the fashion without risking your reputation for expertise, and AI is one more fashion you cannot afford to follow.

And then there’s my own field, languages, especially ancient languages. As I wrote on my Greek thread, every grammar of Classical Greek is worthless. I won’t repeat the details.

It’s also true of Biblical Hebrew. The only existing text that uses Dr. Cook’s dissertation as a basis, is worthless because the authors made it “non-confessional”. That means they violated the First Law of Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Theory by stripping out every piece of information which ties the language to the culture. It’s bowdlerization, and so I told the author who posted on Researchgate.

And I’m finding the same thing for Arabic. In my Greek blog I used the term Grenglish for trying to force Classical Greek into the mold of English, the way Dionysius Thrax forced it into the mold of Latin 2000 years ago. Haywood and his admirer Price did the same thing and I call it Arglish in my draft write-up of what I’ve learned. William Wright from the 1800s is the only author to admit that Arabic is an aspectual language like all the ancient Semitic languages. But all of them are stuck on morphology and fail to use context to explain meaning. Which is what my write-up is trying to correct as far as I can tell what the meaning is.

But it’s not just the ancients. I tried to find decent grammars of Slavic languages like Polish and Czech, and they all falsely describe the languages in terms of tense, not aspect. Yet the grammar of Russian I used 50 years ago in my first class accurately explains aspect. The people writing about world languages do not know what they’re doing and have no claim to be called experts.

You cannot beatify somebody as an expert just because they are part of academe. Their work has to be re-evaluated against relevant new information. A philology (feh) paper on the Indo-European languages from a few decades back claimed that they originated in the Middle East. How many people in language departments rewrote their work on the history of the people who used specific languages when the Human Genome Project revealed the truth – that the Indic languages developed in and around northeast Anatolia, near but not in the Caucasus Mountains? How many historians have done it?

Your body of work stands only as long as new data, perhaps from outside your field, does not debunk it. If you say “I don’t understand that stuff”, I have two answers for you.

You are dooming yourself to being debunked. It’s like that movie The Perfect Storm when George Clooney turned off all the technical inputs about the danger he was in, because Michael Ironside hurt his masculine fee fees. By the end of the movie I had no respect for that character and you will not earn my respect by following suit.

You are rejecting life-long learning, a preventative of dementia. So not only will you wind up debunked, you will wind up senile.

And yet STEM has its own problems. The number of posts or skeets I’ve seen about how to rehabilitate science with the public all betray a total ignorance of reality. I’ve written about this too, but basically it has two factors.

a/ The Enlightenment Era myth that because you expose people to information, they will not only learn it but also remember it and shape their lives around it. There are people closely related to me who went to the same schools who prove that this is laughably incorrect.

b/ The fundamental blindness to the change of influences on youth after elementary school. Parents do affect their children’s schooling after elementary, discouraging them from taking STEM and also from pursuing lifelong learning. Even parents in STEM do the latter, as if their need to pursue CEUs has nothing to do with their children.

If you were taught, or are teaching your kids, that once you’re done with formal education you’re done, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

And it’s so easy with the Internet that it’s literally a shame how many people literally haven’t learned anything since they left formal schooling.

Where are the polymaths of yesteryear? Where are the polymaths of tomorrow? Shit, where are the polymaths of today who can tell AI to go fuck itself because it’s wrong or uses mythical sources?

They’re not in academe, not even in STEM. Otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing these mass retractions.

So don’t ask me to rely on academics as experts. They are mortals, they are subject to a thousand conflicting influences, and way too many of them aren’t capable of good epistemology.

I’m just saying….