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In my local Slate Star Codex WhatsApp group, one guy recently advocated for technocracy over democracy, arguing that our society would function better if educated experts made all the decisions. I strongly disagreed, arguing that a) expertise in a given empirical field doesn't qualify you to make normative decisions - these are separate magisteria; and b) within their own narrow domain, educated experts may have a more accurate model of how the world works than the lay person, but educated experts are also disproportionately likely to endorse a range of deluded beliefs that most uneducated people do not suffer from. When pressed for examples of what deluded beliefs I was thinking of, the first I offered was "the idea that the delta in athletic performance between males and females is narrow enough that it can be fair for a trans woman to compete in a female sporting event".
Unsurprisingly, some people in the chat pushed back and insisted that there was no way this belief was a delusion, thereby proving my point.
They already do make all the decisions. Democracy just frequently changes which group of elites chooses the experts make the decisions.
The problem for your friend's question is, what's his better way to choose the elites who choose the experts? And how do you give that group power? The elites could just choose a next group of elites, but I don't really want mad king Elon. Probably there's a group of capable leaders who, if chosen to be absolute rulers, would do a lot better than democracy. Look at how advocating for monarchy has gone for Moldbug - he's been reduced to asking the Trump admin to do the coup. I don't want Trump, or Elon, or a coalition of right-wing power brokers including Trump Jr and Tucker, to choose the next king, personally.
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What if the word "fair" is actually normative? It seems everyone in the groupchat attempted to defend it under (b) but if someone said it belonged to the separate magisterium of (a), wouldn't you need another example?
While obviously the word "fair" is a normative word, my intuitive understanding is that the answer to the question "is it fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events?" is pretty much entirely determined by the size of the delta in athletic performance between males and females. No one argued that it was a category error to include "it is fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events" under the heading of "factual delusion", they simply disputed that it was in fact a factual delusion. One person said that, rather than segregrating sports by sex, we should segregate sports according to the things for which sex is a proxy e.g. bone density, T-levels etc., which just sounds like a sex-segregated league with extra steps.
As I expected, your groupchat was treating it as a factual matter, which is a real shame. Even worse, the one person suggesting to autistically use proxies is either deluded about transwomen, or is just too cowardly to point out the obvious.
If your goal was to prove a point to them then maybe the use of a political example was unwise.
Well the entire point I was making was that Western educated people are systematically politically biased in ways which give them a predictably inaccurate model of the world, and that this model of the world is systematically inaccurate in ways quite different from the model used by the modal uneducated person. Pretty hard to make my point without using specific political examples - it's a fundamentally political assertion.
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That's certainly a delusion, but a bad example because it's political, not one held by experts. If athletic coaches held this belief, it'd be a better example.
Many experts serving on governing bodies for their respective sports support trans women competing in the female divisions.
It's really just left-wing elites, "intellectuals" included, which isn't strange given the political bias of universities. What they have in common seems to be a very social kind of ambition, they seek social power, and at the same time they're vulnerable to conformity and group delusions (and all other unfortunate instances of social instincts, like bullying, thinking that the likelihood of a statement being correct is a function of how many people present agrees with it, and assuming that a statement is likely to be wrong if the speaker isn't liked by the community, etc)
In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you. The ivory tower intellectuals are completely unqualified in improving the world. I wouldn't even describe them as intelligent, but I will have to admit that they're generally knowledgeable. They vastly overvalue education. Experience is much more valuable
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No true Scotsman! Or perhaps who watches the watchers (ie who gets to pick who is an expert)
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