Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:13:14 GMT
There was a time, not too long ago, when experts were important. If you had a physical problem, you went to a doctor, whom you knew personally, and whose expertise you trusted. They would consult with you from a position of expertise on the best possible options moving forward and you would respond accordingly. You wouldn’t tell them that you had the same expertise as them, you wouldn’t accuse them of lecturing you. You would understand that their training in a unique field gave them far deeper insight into something, and you would ask questions and seek their advice. Similarly, if your car had a problem, you took it to a mechanic, whom you knew and trusted, and they would consult with you on the best options moving forward. In both these and in all similar cases, you would not have to follow the advice of the expert, but you would at least acknowledge their expertise and exercise your own personal autonomy by making your own choice based on their clearly informed advice. Specialization was an acknowledged part of human society since no-one person can have training in every area.
One problem with specialization, though, is that it is open to abuse. Experts can not only make mistakes, but they can also from time to time shape their feedback to the public in a way that benefits them. Thus, the car mechanic can say that you need to pay them thousands of dollars for a major overhaul when, in fact, it’s not entirely necessary. Similarly, the doctor may demand unnecessary tests because in a country where medicine is controlled by finances, it may financially benefit their practice to run unnecessary tests. So, there’s no question that expertise has the potential to be open to abuse. The appropriate response to potential abuse should be to set up systems in which experts are held accountable. The inappropriate response, which is a response that we now increasingly see around the world, is the denigration and marginalization of expertise.
During the original Brexit campaign, a pro-Brexit politician was asked what he thought of the fact that so many expert institutions had shown that Brexit would be terrible for the United Kingdom. His response, which was chilling but which perfectly captured populist sentiment across the world, was “We have had enough of experts.” When he said that, I think that every expert in every field around the world shivered a little because it’s something we have all seen. It’s why infectious diseases are coming back at a startling rate around the world, particularly in countries where they had been all but wiped out – because of the hubris of individuals who believe that a ten-minute Google search informs them as much as it does someone who trained for years. Google particularly creates this problem, by the way, because it remembers what websites you like and then shows you more of the same in the future. In other words, Google is tailored to confirmation bias. People are far more likely to find information that agrees with their preconceived ideas, and thereby consider themselves experts because when they consult globally, they only see that which agrees with them.
But the problem isn’t just confirmation bias, it’s also the lowering of publication standards. In the past, to have a letter printed in a newspaper was an extraordinary achievement because it would have first been vetted for its intellectual merit. Now, the only vetting process that happens online is that posts are removed if they are offensive. Otherwise they can literally say whatever they want, whether backed up by data or not. What has happened in our society is that in the opening of global communication, everyone has been given an equal voice in public. The blogger and the scientist, the doctor and the ten-minute Google searcher, all have equally loud voices. Experts are treated with suspicion, partly because their expertise makes people with no expertise feel inadequate. “Who are you to lecture us…?” they ask without a hint of irony. In a bid to strip down hierarchy in our society, we have also inadvertently torn down experts by accusing them of being elitists trying to protect their own safe spaces. Real democracy is now seen as being where everyone has an equal opinion, instead of what is should be, which is a state in which everyone has an equal vote. One person, one vote is not the same as one person, one truth. Within a generation, everyone has become an expert, in their mind, whether they actually are or not.
This leads to very serious problems. Not only has it led to a health crisis and deaths which were easily preventable in the case of vaccines, but it has also led to the continual despoliation of our planet and the now irreversible anthropogenic heating which will forever and irrevocably negatively affect all life on earth. The halfwit and the scientist are given equal platforms in public discussion for the purpose of apparent balance, as though their levels of expertise were balanced. This actually takes humanity backwards. It totally contradicts the value of education as the notion that we can build on that which we have previously learned.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that the less you know, the more likely you are to be convinced that you are an expert, is becoming increasingly apparent everywhere we look. Whereas experts tend to not speak in certainties because they understand that many issues are complex, fake experts speak in absolutes and mock experts for their prevarication, suggesting that it is a sign of uncertainty, and thus lack of expertise. Because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who know less speak louder on the topic about which they know so little and the result is that they end up negatively influencing others. The voice of expertise has been replaced with the shout of ignorance masquerading as expertise. Where experts in the past were respected for their specialized knowledge, nowadays everyone demands that their beliefs be respected because to not do so would be to disrespect their personhood. Democratic politics, which is where we all have equal rights, has become confused with democratic epistemology, which is where everyone’s opinion is held to be equally valuable. If you disagree with someone who knows nothing about a particular issue but who pretends to, you become accused of being arrogant, disrespectful or elitist because it’s easier to attack an expert than it is to have your views changed by their expertise. Tom Nicholls, author of the book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017) explains that American culture is hardwired to rebel against any sort of elitism except for in one area – sports. There, he notes, Americans think that a natural sorting of top people from everyone else – a separation between amateurs and professionals – is totally socially acceptable. But in terms of academia, this is no longer the case.
To share an example, in a recent email exchange, someone lambasted me for teaching Psalms on Shabbat mornings. He wrote that the Psalms were Christian and that they weren’t Torah. I explained that they weren’t Torah (unless we understood Torah as being the entire corpus of Jewish literature, in which case they were), but they were definitely part of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and just because the Christian community finds them relevant too doesn’t mean that they’re no longer relevant to the Jewish community. On a weekly basis, this person filled my inbox with Christian commentary on the psalms, much of which I found pedagogically nauseating. He insisted that a synagogue should not be teaching anything involving Psalms, even though I explained that they are part of our Kabbalat Shabbat service. In response, he said that he didn’t understand how the Psalms could be part of Jewish liturgy. And it didn’t matter what I said, it didn’t matter that I explained that they’re in Hebrew from our Bible, that they’re in our Shabbat service, that reciting Psalms at differing times was a profoundly Jewish ritual – to him the Psalms were Christian. He was certain he was an expert. He didn’t ask, he told me what was authentically Jewish or not. In my mind, it was like someone telling me that bacon is kosher just because the Christians say that kashrut is no longer relevant. And what was fascinating was that as our discussion progressed, he shifted from calling me “Rabbi Neil” to calling me “Neil.” At no point could he accept that as a Rabbi I might have known more about the Bible than he did. By the end of the discussion, he couldn’t even refer to my title because that would have to acknowledge his ignorance in this matter. I found the whole conversation terribly sad because people today have become so invested in their being right that they have become deaf to expertise.
Part of that deafness, as I said before, is because of the flood of uncontrolled information. As Tom Nichols writes, “The flood of information that confronts the average person is like the proliferation of restaurant chains and fast-food outlets. It might look like Americans have more dining choices, when in fact they're eating themselves to death with a steady diet of cheap, easily available junk.” But because systems today are so staggeringly complex, those who simplify things due to ignorance seem to be better-informed, where the opposite is, in fact, true. Junk information spews out from the radio, the TV and the internet in quick, catchy soundbites that appeal to ignorance by confirming it.
The Jewish community is not immune to this difficulty, especially Reform Judaism. For thousands of years, Judaism has been profoundly hierarchical, and interpretation depended on experts who informed the people that their authority had been given to them by God. As Reform Judaism formed, though, it gave permission to everyone to interpret our tradition as they understood it. Instead of “Judaism says,” Reform Judaism encouraged “My interpretation of Judaism says…” and it validated personal autonomy. What it didn’t do, though, was make everyone an expert on Judaism, but that’s how it is all too often understood. Sometimes this religious relativism leads to real issues and sometimes it can be wondrous. Our Shabbat morning study group is a wonderful expression of a healthy balance of expertise. Some members are more expert on history than I am, for example, so I let them answer the questions on historical dates, or thank them for correcting me when I make a mistake in that area. It doesn’t threaten me that I don’t know everything about Judaism. But when someone says that the Psalms are Christian, or as we once heard, that the Torah is a profoundly feminist document that demonstrates early Israelite belief in the primacy of a Goddess, the group understands that when I respond with “I’m going to disagree with you there,” I’m backed by expertise. Thankfully, no-one in that group then replies, “But who are you to tell us how to read the Bible?” because in that group we all understand that supporting widely differing readings of the Bible doesn’t mean that every single reading is valid. In my previous community, I even had someone adamantly insist that belief in the Christian Bible is perfectly possibly as a Jew, and that my reading of the text, which was my subjective opinion and not a reflection of expertise, was intolerant in saying otherwise.
Reform Judaism struggles with Rabbinic authority. Where Judaism of the past relied on absolute truth, Reform Judaism is based on relative truth, except when something is absolutely wrong. That’s a very difficult position to maintain. That actually puts Reform Rabbis in an invidious position, not just regarding textual interpretation but about all areas in which they have some level of expertise. Surprisingly regularly, people tell me what Judaism is and what Judaism isn’t, or what is Jewish and what isn’t. They don’t ask – they tell me because apparently my expertise in Judaism, based on decades of study, is irrelevant. And this, I think, is because people have lost the art of listening and being open to learning. It’s very difficult to be humble enough to say, “This disagrees with what I have always thought, please teach me otherwise if you know more about this than I do.” But that is the essence of community – opening ourselves up to dissenting voices and being able to appreciate differing areas of expertise. I’m not an expert in making challah, I’m not an expert in feminism, and while I’m trying to learn, it doesn’t threaten my ego to admit that I’m not an expert in those areas. It doesn’t threaten me that I might still make mistakes in the area in which I have some expertise. The underlying message of our Shabbat morning study group is that we each have differing levels of expertise in differing areas and that’s okay. Honestly, I wish more people could come to that group just to see how real community works. I wish more aspects of the Temple modeled themselves on the same dynamic.
The healthiest community is the one in which differing people appreciate the expertise of others and use it to help themselves and the community grow. The healthiest community is one in which hubris gives way to humility, where we all acknowledge that we have much to learn and that it’s healthy and important to learn from others. May ours be such a community in every area, and let us say, Amen.
One problem with specialization, though, is that it is open to abuse. Experts can not only make mistakes, but they can also from time to time shape their feedback to the public in a way that benefits them. Thus, the car mechanic can say that you need to pay them thousands of dollars for a major overhaul when, in fact, it’s not entirely necessary. Similarly, the doctor may demand unnecessary tests because in a country where medicine is controlled by finances, it may financially benefit their practice to run unnecessary tests. So, there’s no question that expertise has the potential to be open to abuse. The appropriate response to potential abuse should be to set up systems in which experts are held accountable. The inappropriate response, which is a response that we now increasingly see around the world, is the denigration and marginalization of expertise.
During the original Brexit campaign, a pro-Brexit politician was asked what he thought of the fact that so many expert institutions had shown that Brexit would be terrible for the United Kingdom. His response, which was chilling but which perfectly captured populist sentiment across the world, was “We have had enough of experts.” When he said that, I think that every expert in every field around the world shivered a little because it’s something we have all seen. It’s why infectious diseases are coming back at a startling rate around the world, particularly in countries where they had been all but wiped out – because of the hubris of individuals who believe that a ten-minute Google search informs them as much as it does someone who trained for years. Google particularly creates this problem, by the way, because it remembers what websites you like and then shows you more of the same in the future. In other words, Google is tailored to confirmation bias. People are far more likely to find information that agrees with their preconceived ideas, and thereby consider themselves experts because when they consult globally, they only see that which agrees with them.
But the problem isn’t just confirmation bias, it’s also the lowering of publication standards. In the past, to have a letter printed in a newspaper was an extraordinary achievement because it would have first been vetted for its intellectual merit. Now, the only vetting process that happens online is that posts are removed if they are offensive. Otherwise they can literally say whatever they want, whether backed up by data or not. What has happened in our society is that in the opening of global communication, everyone has been given an equal voice in public. The blogger and the scientist, the doctor and the ten-minute Google searcher, all have equally loud voices. Experts are treated with suspicion, partly because their expertise makes people with no expertise feel inadequate. “Who are you to lecture us…?” they ask without a hint of irony. In a bid to strip down hierarchy in our society, we have also inadvertently torn down experts by accusing them of being elitists trying to protect their own safe spaces. Real democracy is now seen as being where everyone has an equal opinion, instead of what is should be, which is a state in which everyone has an equal vote. One person, one vote is not the same as one person, one truth. Within a generation, everyone has become an expert, in their mind, whether they actually are or not.
This leads to very serious problems. Not only has it led to a health crisis and deaths which were easily preventable in the case of vaccines, but it has also led to the continual despoliation of our planet and the now irreversible anthropogenic heating which will forever and irrevocably negatively affect all life on earth. The halfwit and the scientist are given equal platforms in public discussion for the purpose of apparent balance, as though their levels of expertise were balanced. This actually takes humanity backwards. It totally contradicts the value of education as the notion that we can build on that which we have previously learned.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that the less you know, the more likely you are to be convinced that you are an expert, is becoming increasingly apparent everywhere we look. Whereas experts tend to not speak in certainties because they understand that many issues are complex, fake experts speak in absolutes and mock experts for their prevarication, suggesting that it is a sign of uncertainty, and thus lack of expertise. Because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who know less speak louder on the topic about which they know so little and the result is that they end up negatively influencing others. The voice of expertise has been replaced with the shout of ignorance masquerading as expertise. Where experts in the past were respected for their specialized knowledge, nowadays everyone demands that their beliefs be respected because to not do so would be to disrespect their personhood. Democratic politics, which is where we all have equal rights, has become confused with democratic epistemology, which is where everyone’s opinion is held to be equally valuable. If you disagree with someone who knows nothing about a particular issue but who pretends to, you become accused of being arrogant, disrespectful or elitist because it’s easier to attack an expert than it is to have your views changed by their expertise. Tom Nicholls, author of the book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017) explains that American culture is hardwired to rebel against any sort of elitism except for in one area – sports. There, he notes, Americans think that a natural sorting of top people from everyone else – a separation between amateurs and professionals – is totally socially acceptable. But in terms of academia, this is no longer the case.
To share an example, in a recent email exchange, someone lambasted me for teaching Psalms on Shabbat mornings. He wrote that the Psalms were Christian and that they weren’t Torah. I explained that they weren’t Torah (unless we understood Torah as being the entire corpus of Jewish literature, in which case they were), but they were definitely part of Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, and just because the Christian community finds them relevant too doesn’t mean that they’re no longer relevant to the Jewish community. On a weekly basis, this person filled my inbox with Christian commentary on the psalms, much of which I found pedagogically nauseating. He insisted that a synagogue should not be teaching anything involving Psalms, even though I explained that they are part of our Kabbalat Shabbat service. In response, he said that he didn’t understand how the Psalms could be part of Jewish liturgy. And it didn’t matter what I said, it didn’t matter that I explained that they’re in Hebrew from our Bible, that they’re in our Shabbat service, that reciting Psalms at differing times was a profoundly Jewish ritual – to him the Psalms were Christian. He was certain he was an expert. He didn’t ask, he told me what was authentically Jewish or not. In my mind, it was like someone telling me that bacon is kosher just because the Christians say that kashrut is no longer relevant. And what was fascinating was that as our discussion progressed, he shifted from calling me “Rabbi Neil” to calling me “Neil.” At no point could he accept that as a Rabbi I might have known more about the Bible than he did. By the end of the discussion, he couldn’t even refer to my title because that would have to acknowledge his ignorance in this matter. I found the whole conversation terribly sad because people today have become so invested in their being right that they have become deaf to expertise.
Part of that deafness, as I said before, is because of the flood of uncontrolled information. As Tom Nichols writes, “The flood of information that confronts the average person is like the proliferation of restaurant chains and fast-food outlets. It might look like Americans have more dining choices, when in fact they're eating themselves to death with a steady diet of cheap, easily available junk.” But because systems today are so staggeringly complex, those who simplify things due to ignorance seem to be better-informed, where the opposite is, in fact, true. Junk information spews out from the radio, the TV and the internet in quick, catchy soundbites that appeal to ignorance by confirming it.
The Jewish community is not immune to this difficulty, especially Reform Judaism. For thousands of years, Judaism has been profoundly hierarchical, and interpretation depended on experts who informed the people that their authority had been given to them by God. As Reform Judaism formed, though, it gave permission to everyone to interpret our tradition as they understood it. Instead of “Judaism says,” Reform Judaism encouraged “My interpretation of Judaism says…” and it validated personal autonomy. What it didn’t do, though, was make everyone an expert on Judaism, but that’s how it is all too often understood. Sometimes this religious relativism leads to real issues and sometimes it can be wondrous. Our Shabbat morning study group is a wonderful expression of a healthy balance of expertise. Some members are more expert on history than I am, for example, so I let them answer the questions on historical dates, or thank them for correcting me when I make a mistake in that area. It doesn’t threaten me that I don’t know everything about Judaism. But when someone says that the Psalms are Christian, or as we once heard, that the Torah is a profoundly feminist document that demonstrates early Israelite belief in the primacy of a Goddess, the group understands that when I respond with “I’m going to disagree with you there,” I’m backed by expertise. Thankfully, no-one in that group then replies, “But who are you to tell us how to read the Bible?” because in that group we all understand that supporting widely differing readings of the Bible doesn’t mean that every single reading is valid. In my previous community, I even had someone adamantly insist that belief in the Christian Bible is perfectly possibly as a Jew, and that my reading of the text, which was my subjective opinion and not a reflection of expertise, was intolerant in saying otherwise.
Reform Judaism struggles with Rabbinic authority. Where Judaism of the past relied on absolute truth, Reform Judaism is based on relative truth, except when something is absolutely wrong. That’s a very difficult position to maintain. That actually puts Reform Rabbis in an invidious position, not just regarding textual interpretation but about all areas in which they have some level of expertise. Surprisingly regularly, people tell me what Judaism is and what Judaism isn’t, or what is Jewish and what isn’t. They don’t ask – they tell me because apparently my expertise in Judaism, based on decades of study, is irrelevant. And this, I think, is because people have lost the art of listening and being open to learning. It’s very difficult to be humble enough to say, “This disagrees with what I have always thought, please teach me otherwise if you know more about this than I do.” But that is the essence of community – opening ourselves up to dissenting voices and being able to appreciate differing areas of expertise. I’m not an expert in making challah, I’m not an expert in feminism, and while I’m trying to learn, it doesn’t threaten my ego to admit that I’m not an expert in those areas. It doesn’t threaten me that I might still make mistakes in the area in which I have some expertise. The underlying message of our Shabbat morning study group is that we each have differing levels of expertise in differing areas and that’s okay. Honestly, I wish more people could come to that group just to see how real community works. I wish more aspects of the Temple modeled themselves on the same dynamic.
The healthiest community is the one in which differing people appreciate the expertise of others and use it to help themselves and the community grow. The healthiest community is one in which hubris gives way to humility, where we all acknowledge that we have much to learn and that it’s healthy and important to learn from others. May ours be such a community in every area, and let us say, Amen.