Trusting Expertise

I think that American conservative trust in mass media is a sub-issue, underneath a broader one. Which is how much trust they put in institutions and expertise in general. Educational, governmental, scientific, etc. Being raised Young Earth Creationist and imbibing a constant diet of Rush Limbaugh & Co. I'm very familiar with the posture of skepticism towards institutions. But I've moved away from that posture because I’ve come to believe it's generally powered by three inaccurate epistemological presuppositions.




First, is naïve realism: the idea that what we perceive is what is unquestionably real. How we interpret it must be how it is. One of the really cool things the scientific process (and institutions) has taught us is that our natural intuitions are very often shockingly wrong. (It’s very unintuitive that we are on an oblate spheroid spinning a thousand miles an hour.) When scientific institutions DO misfire, it's generally when the theories reinforce our intuitions. (phrenology, race science, etc.) And importantly, because the scientific method actively encourages challenges, (admitting all the normal barriers to this that every human institution has) over time it has become better at producing an accurate picture of reality.




The second presupposition that powers institutional skepticism is that if an institution produces a result/theory/interpretation that I disagree with, it implies cultural or political capture. Those institutions must be held captive by advocates of those cultural/political ideas. (Anthropogenic climate change, biological sex, Covid/vaccine/mask science, all the various sciences that operate with evolutionary theory as critical or foundational to the work, etc.) I think it’s important to think this through. If it just so happens that every institutional pronouncement I disagree with is assumed to be the result of capture or bias, and every institutional pronouncement that I agree with is a sign that the institution is not captured or biased… that probably means something. That probably means I’m cherry picking.




The third presupposition is powered by Dunning-Kruger Effect. Yeah, I know, the actual study by these researchers is imperfect, but the colloquial understanding and mental model is, I think, worth preserving. We have ALL experienced this in ourselves or others. The less a person knows about a field, the more they assume they’d be good at it, or that all that’s required is common sense to do the job. (See: Monday morning quarterbacking, men answering surveys that they think they could actually defeat a lion in unarmed combat, people assuming anyone can write a novel, etc.) But one thing I’ve learned from research on virtually every topic or field I’ve looked into is that the deeper you go, the LESS intuitive it is. The more wrinkles and nuances there are. I am HUMBLED, not confirmed in my assumptions. So I resist taking very strong stances on topics when the consensus of a field lands on a pronouncement that feels wrong to me. Especially when it sounds ridiculous. That’s my cue that I’m missing something important. (Usually the prerequisite education on the matter.) It’s an invitation to encourage curiosity to look into why people would come to that conclusion. The natural human impulse is to write them off as crazy. I reject that impulse and have learned so many fascinating things as a result.




So when it comes to the sub-topic of “mass media” I’ve got to wonder what that even means today. Fox News is the most watched news channel in the US, and has been for 20 years. Are Newsmax and OAN “mass media”? What about all the conservative talk radio shows? I think this poll suffers from an idea frozen in time; back when Fox and Rush Limbaugh were starting out. It was the liberal goliaths of the major networks, vs the scrappy underdog Davids. But the whole ecosystem is so fragmented and compartmentalized that these models don’t hold water any more.

But related to what I was saying about deference to institutions, there is a fact that needs to be understood to properly diagnose any news organization. That fact is that doing actual journalism: -the finding and compiling of facts- that costs a lot of money. It takes a lot of time. In comparison, it’s very cheap and much more profitable (especially since the internet) to sit in front of a camera and give your hot take on the “news of the day”. And that punditry, in most people’s minds, IS news. So it is not at all surprising that conservatives -who have a narrative of being the underdog David for decades- will equate Ben Shapiro’s culture war sermons with a report about tariffs from NPR as being fundamentally the same kind of stuff. They agree with, and like hearing from the talking heads that reinforce their worldview, and dislike hearing stuff that doesn’t. And importantly for this graph: they consider the stuff they agree with NOT “mass media”, and the stuff they disagree with as “mass media”. (This is not to say that liberals don’t suffer from the same human biases and epistemic weaknesses. Only that they have a different narrative framing their approach to expertise and institutions.)




Importantly, this says nothing at all about the difficult work of vetting new sources. Nor does it speak to the fact that the vast majority of us don’t have the insight or credentials to do so in the first place. So I don’t think this is a particularly powerful argument against political/cultural opponents. “Do your own research.” “Be careful who you believe.” “Stop listening to X who lies, and instead listen to Y, who tells the truth.” These are intellectual dead ends. Thought terminating clichés. Team sports.




TLDR: In general (with some exceptions) I choose to err on the side of believing experts in a field, rather than assume my biases and intuitions are better than people who have studied and practiced a thing for their whole lives. I do not trust anyone or anything 100%, including myself, because humans and the institutions they create will always be flawed. But the chances that experts will be correct about a thing that I am not an expert on is much higher than me randomly being right because I feel right.




So the debate unfolds like this: You say I’m a sheep who doesn’t think for himself. I say you’re blinded by arrogance and naive realism. Both of us are somewhere on a spectrum between these caricatures. But the epistemological approaches we take are significantly different.