Science, elitism and democracy

Elitism, anti-intellectualism, the problems of the internet and democracy, the need for less reliance on "science advocates", why more politicians and scientists should be more like Boris Johnson, and lots and lots of cats.

If your basis for "anti-intellectualism" is, "anyone who disagrees with the consensus on anything", then we're all anti-intellectuals. And yet... if you're going to say things like, "we've had enough of experts", or "experts said the Titanic was unsinkable" to justify your ideological beliefs... then yes, you are being anti-intellectual - the vast majority of Six Day Creationists do seem to be willing science deniers; Flat Earthers are science deniers by definition.... You can harp on about the Titanic or continental drift as much as you like, but the fact is that the vast majority of ideas which seem like utter bollocks are indeed just utter bollocks.

The internet is a great and terrible thing. Everyone can have their say, every opinion counts, every voice can be heard. The problem is that even the true idiots get their say as loudly as people who've studied issues for decades, expert opinion is not given any extra weight, every voice must be heard no matter how utterly stupid it is. Simply by tail-end-of-the-Gaussian effects (a small fraction of any population always believe arbitrarily ridiculous things), we now have to listen to people who really aren't worth listening to, as though open-mindedness were always a virtue in any circumstance. It isn't. And depending on who you believe, we must either not allow anyone to say anything offensive at all, or we have to allow people to make death threats for any reason (woe betide any who say we should find a middle ground between the two !); perhaps most dangerously of all we can't call out people's stupidity or disrespect them because "that's offensive" - even when what they're saying is dangerous and deserves to be shot down. The democratic process is being perverted to an absurd absolute.

Fortunately, public perception of experts may not be as bad as it may appear if you spend much time on the internet where the anti-intellectuals are given an undeservedly loud voice. In at least some circumstances, experts are still more trusted than any other group. Maybe the reason that public opinion contrasts strongly with the expert consensus is because the expert voice is drowned by politicians, media commentators, and other enthusiastic but malevolent interest groups. The media may over-report experts who go against the consensus in an entirely legitimate (but extreme) effort at impartiality, or, far worse than that, because of inherent media bias. Hence trust in experts may not be all that low, it's just that the experts aren't being reported accurately or completely.

I Don't Own You

We've gone and got ourselves into a right pickle. Anyone holding even a single non-mainstream opinion is derided as an "anti-intellectual", while anyone who ever says "anti-intellectual" is seen as part of the "establishment" or worse, the "elite", a snob bent on telling people what to think in order to keep the plebs/old people/the great unwashed in line.