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I think stock markets, commodity markets, corporate and contract law, insurance, banking, accounting, and thousands of individual facets of modern economic practice and culture are technically complicated and quite important to the functioning of the modern economy? And they're definitely built and maintained by "experts". (Some of) the field of economics, too, is quite relevant to modern business, and also has a lot of experts.
Other social systems are important too! Courts / the law, for instance, are kind of a core case of "thing maintained by experts", they're the highest authority and last resort conflict-resolvers, and the entire system only works because lawyers and especially judges being inculcated into taking the law seriously by the last generation of judges and lawyers.
The easiest way I've found to loose faith in the justice system is by talking with your so-called 'experts'(Lawyers, Law Enforcement) in their actual field experience.
I imagine it's similar in other fields, as well.
I mean, the US justice system has problems. The South African justice system also has problems. Not the same problems. Is it so informative to discuss issues or lost faith generally? The US justice system mostly works, and you can tell because you don't have to bribe police every time they pull you over and you don't have your business seized by the state when it gets too big. Collapsing all grievances into a vague sense of 'everything sux' isn't useful
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Experts do not determine who buys or sells stocks and commodities. That is the free market. Economic experts are clearly not able to predict the functioning of the market, as they constantly make utterly wrong predictions. Steve Keen has made a strong case in Debunking Economics that many of the basic models that are used, are not actually valid unless you unrealistic preconditions are true. In reality, we also see that companies do not in fact hire economists to set their prices, but use other methods, like trial and error, because that beats the experts.
It seems to me that the functioning of the financial markets is largely a matter of trial and error as well. For example, the subprime mortgage crisis involved "experts" developing the innovative idea that if you bundle low quality mortgages, they suddenly become the most reliable assets to hold. Only after people starting defaulting on their mortgages and the bundles were proven to not be triple-A quality, did the "experts" suddenly realize that the triple-A status was a delusion.
When so-called "experts" are not in fact able to predict whether their solutions works in practice, then we cannot trust their claims on that front.
I'm referring to the people who design the market mechanisms, and design the laws to adjudicate disputes within them, and (a thousand other things). Those are, obviously, experts.
Consider the chief economist at google, who they hired to design their advertising auctions, among other things. Amazon also has a chief economist. Microecon is actually a strong field with good theory and empirical work!
I think this is a really stupid dispute in general. A lot of so-called "experts" are absolutely awful, and this includes quite a few economists, most psychologists and social theorists, and so on. But a lot of experts are just smart people who exist in useful intellectual and practical traditions and contribute a lot to society. Does it even make sense to condemn both in the same way?
These were largely not designed top down by experts, and where they were designed top down by experts they quickly failed and were modified by those in the field. That's one reason the law is such a mess; the "design" layer is still there in the statutes and regulations but it's been modified by case law and custom so often that looking at that doesn't give you a real picture of how things work.
Motte and bailey - motte is "top-down designed by experts", bailey is "designed by experts". Yes, experts aren't Yahweh himself who writes the inerrant Law in an instant. But many experts did intentionally design the systems, and then, yes, as in every other field, modify them when they seemed to fail. Just like mechanical engineers do. The Chief Economist at Google was, in fact, hired due to his deep understanding of specific areas of microeconomics, and used that knowledge to design (of course in an iterative way!) google's ad auctions, which was very profitable for google. I entirely fail to see how this is different from hiring a mechanical engineer. I think the general distaste for "experts" is incredibly confused - some of them are bad, but they're not all bad, aside from in fields like psychology or social science - and that's just those fields being bad, not experts being bad.
You're missing the point. We are told to "trust the experts" when they make their predictions. However, when the predictions are at best guesses that need to be validated in practice, then we objectively cannot "trust the experts."
If the media and politicians would honestly tell us that these opinions are imperfect and cannot just be assumed to work, I would have no problem with that. But of course they don't say that, because they use the 'expert opinion' as a way to win debates and project power.
Arguing that some experts can be trusted more than others just proves my point that the generic implicit or explicit demand to "trust the experts" is wrong*. In fact, it allowed the fraudsters to hide behind those that do better. In debates, if you question how experts are presented to us, the defenders will invariably point to the better experts, rather than adopt a nuanced position where some experts are better than others.
After all, the nuanced position is not compatible with the power games being played.
* For example, I almost never see a justification being given for why a certain expert is any good.
I am not defending "Trust The Experts" as said by people on covid. (But I am not convinced that the, uh, non-experts (?) would've done better averaged over a large number of scenarios) I am defending the enormous value of the group of people the "experts" generally refers to!
From above:
Depending on the field somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3ths of the 'experts' are 'systemically' using their discipline, effort, and intelligence to be productive and useful.
My original comment:
Which I stand by! The experts are wrong a lot, but the question isn't if you trust them, it's who to trust when or how to figure out yourself how to do better. The former is quite hard and the latter is even harder.
I see it constantly? You're appealing to an apparently omnipresent media or discourse, and more accurately specific segments of it you take issue with. Which media, which discourse, etc? I agree that a lot of it has very big deep problems, but I think a combination of a vague 'it' / 'them' being criticized and a lack of appreciation for the positives of the system leads to critique that doesn't really mean anything.
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