How Much Failure Is Too Much?
The Expert as Human Sacrifice
“Experts” as a class evoke a polarized response. Defenders of expertise will say that the anti-expert crowd promotes populist ignorance. Critics will say that experts are self-congratulating gatekeepers, corrupted by bias and self-dealing. “We gave the experts a chance, and they failed.” Alternatively, critics of expertise will say the concept is undemocratic—everyone should get a say in matters of public importance, not just the credentialed class. The discourse around expertise doesn’t cut neatly along a left-right political axis. But we might say that expertise is a kind of centrist or technocratic ideal that draws ire from all who stand against “the managerial elite.”
Whenever there is a great public fiasco, we find two general responses in the discourse. One response is to want to scapegoat the experts; another is to say that the experts have learned some kind of lesson and should be rewarded for “failing better” (Beckett) or in Consultantese “failing up.”
Expertise comes from the Latin meaning one who has finished trying or completed a trial. Expert and experiment are linked. So you might say that both stances are interpretations of the experiment. One sees the expert as the experiment—the expert got it wrong, and now should be fired. The other sees the expert as the one who ran the experiment; the expert got it wrong, but the negative knowledge they achieved is worth something. Since transmitting that knowledge is expensive and difficult, we need them around. Their failures are part of the resume.
Silicon Valley’s Start Up Culture tends to valorize failure; it’s fashionable for prestigious professors to tout lists of their fellowship and job rejections. Yet when it comes to leaders of legacy institutions, the vibe flips. Now, the sentiment is that positions of power are sinecures. “Out with the old, in with the new.”
Why are we inconsistent about who we reward for failing?
What kinds of failure do we tolerate? Isn’t a sentiment of anti-expertise a kind of intolerance of failure? How many strikes should leaders be given before they are out? Or does it depend on the stakes? And what does failure mean in a (tragic) context in which any decision the leader makes will be seen as wrong? It seems, in such cases, that anti-expertise is more cathartic and symbolic than anything else, firing or forced resignation or banishment a domesticated form of human sacrifice intended to appease the angry gods.
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Expertise without self criticism is the issue. The true expert is always looking to prove his knowledge false and therefore can constantly increase the scope and power of the knowledge.
One of the complaints of the non expert is that experts are always changing the advice making them either idiots or liars when the opposite is actually true. If it was left to the masses the earth would still be a flat plate with a cement cupola holding the night sky. Because we can see more as we explore our viewpoint must change and the true expert is all about this change.
The covid crisis has highlighted this problem of false expertise and it’s danger very well. One of the pillars of the anti expertise movement is mask wearing and Dr Fauci and the CDC view early on that masks were not essential for the common public until they turned out to be very essential. Because of the “flip flop” the anti exers have used this to demean and devalue all of the mitigation responses. As an expert in bio weapons and other weapons of mass destruction I can say that many of us experts felt that for the average citizen wearing a mask under the conditions we thought were extant, mask wearing might become a problem that protected little or not at all because of the lack of proper fitting. But because we are experts as soon as data started to show otherwise masks became very important and part of the protective protocols to be used to combat this pandemic. Despite this many still complain that their human rights are being violated despite this being no more problematic for most people as wearing a shirt in a public restaurant (which people do not seem to want to kill over).