SHORT VERSION

JB, 2016: Epistocracy?

Them, 2016: Tetlock proved experts know nothing! There is no reason to defer to experts. We should trust the masses. Also, if we have epistocracy, governments will claim to have special, hidden knowledge so they can push the masses around.

JB 2020: Jesus, the major models calculating the fatality rate of COVID-19 used data with severe selection bias. Seriously, we learned in, like, week 3 of methods classes not to do this kind of thing. When are they going to start using proper statistical methods so we can get a proper estimate? Also, shouldn’t be concerned that, e.g., Neil Ferguson has a long track record of overestimating the dangers of past diseases by many orders of magnitude?

Them, 2020: Shut up! We should all defer to the experts! Policy should be imposed without consulting the people. There is no need to get proper data or present that data to the people. We must trust the epidemiologists, even when we see them making basic errors in stats. Also, governments probably have secret data they aren’t sharing with us.

LONG VERSION

Between 2016-2018, I did a sort of world tour for Against Democracy and its many translations. In that book, I argue there is a distinction between technocracy (having a narrow band of experts engage in mass social engineering) versus the forms of epistocracy I defend (in particular, enlightened preference voting in what is otherwise parliamentary democracy).

I argued voters are not merely ignorant and misinformed about of basic political facts (a fact which nearly everyone grants), but also ignorant or misinformed about the social sciences needed to evaluate those facts. I presented evidence that most voters’ views about political science or economics contradict the low-hanging fruit consensus ideas among political scientists and economists.

I also argued that voters’ economic ignorance has horrible consequences. For instance, democratic antipathy to open borders causes at least $40 trillion a year in losses, and probably more like $100 trillion, losses borne mostly by the extreme poor.

More sophisticated critics would commonly respond by citing Tetlock on experts. Tetlock, they said, proved that experts are very bad at making predictions. Therefore, they said, there is no reason to defer to them. (Nevermind that this is a misreading of Tetlock’s work.)

Oddly, though, as I read through people’s Facebook statuses or have debates with them about the bad data behind the current shutdowns, I find these same people saying that we must defer to the epidemiological experts.

It’s utterly bizarre. When I say, “Here are 3000 highly sophisticated economic studies over a hundred years, performed by economists of all different ideological bents, all arguing X, but the people think not-X,” lots of political scientists and philosophers responded by saying, “Yeah, you can’t trust the so-called experts.” When I say, “Obviously, testing for current infection and mostly/entirely testing people who present themselves as sick introduces a severe selection bias, which means the resulting case fatality rate is not a good estimate of the infection fatality rate,” they say, “Trust the experts. Where’s your degree in epidemiology?”