Elitism. Is it really wrong?

Great Debates
1

I’m opening this thread not to dump on Bricker, but because I think this is an interesting thought, which I’ll start by saying I don’t agree with. I don’t want this thread to be about personal attacks, either towards Bricker, or to Trump or Clinton supporters in general. I don’t intend to focus solely on Trump (or Clinton) supporters either, but rather to have a more general debate about elitism. For the record, I highly respect Bricker’s views, but disagree with this particular post. I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to start this debate for the past few months, but I’m not personally good with words, and the way you (Bricker) express the opposing view in this post is quite brilliant, so I’ll take it as a starting point.

The claim here is that when somebody else claims “I know better than you and can prove it” rests on the definition of determining what’s best. Now it seems obvious at first glance that experts in any given field will know better than people that aren’t experts. For example, if I had a legal issue and Bricker was advising me about it, I would defer to his judgment since he’s a legal expert and I’m not. My training is in medicine, and when patients come to me, I provide recommendations based on knowledge that I have, which I gained from training that they didn’t have (assuming my patient is not a fellow physician). In that sense, I definitely “know better” than my patients do when it comes to medical decision making. Now there is another level of decision making where the physician, or another expert, doesn’t know better. Let’s say a patient comes to me with cancer. I would be the expert in recommending the “how to” of proceeding, but have no special standing on the overall decision making. By that I mean if the patient says “I want to be cured” I could recommend specific diagnostic tests to order and specific medications to take as well as a particular specialist to be referred to. On the other hand, if the question is should I be aggressive or seek palliative care, that’s a value judgment that only the patient can make.

So I’ve delineated two different levels of “best” as well as I can explain it. Here’s where my disagreement is. A lot of what we’re voting on in an election are questions that fall into the first type of decision making, not the second type. I think most of us, whether supporters of Clinton or Trump, want a better economy. And while economics may not be a hard science the same way that physics or chemistry are, I think that certain things can be shown to be correct and other things incorrect. Same way with things like international relations / diplomacy, climate change, military science, etc. If we can agree that these areas are not completely subjective, doesn’t it stand to reason that one side is probably more correct than the other? If so, what’s wrong with saying the “I know better than you, and here’s the proof?”

To bring things back around to medicine, let’s say that patient with cancer comes to and says the want to try Laetrile. Would I be wrong (although perhaps politically incorrect by putting it this way :p) if I told that patient, I know better than you, and Laetrile is not the proper treatment for your condition. Instead, I have the latest recommendations, as backed up by these studies, that treatment with a combination of drugs X, Y, and Z, along with radiation therapy, have been proven to have the best improvement in longevity for your particular situation. Here are some copies of the journal articles from JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine that prove it. Now if they said I’m trying to decide between palliative care and aggressive treatment and I don’t know which is best, that’s the second level. But if they say I want aggressive treatment, but then disagree with me on what constitutes the gold standard of medical treatment, that’s a different level. My argument is that a lot of political decisions are more like the latter than the former, and that they’re is in fact a best answer that an elitist can point to and say this way is better and I can prove it.

Where have I gone wrong in my analysis?

2

Please pardon any grammatical errors, including the final they’re which should be a there. As I mentioned, language and grammar are not my area of expertise :smack:.

3

No, but I’m afraid it would take too long to explain why in a way that you’d be able to understand.
Just kidding.

Elitism is fine (-ish) based on talent, but I have to admit I’m unclear on how one establishes elitism based on belief. I assume the cancer-treatment hypothetical has the doctor making recommendations based on evidence, as he or she understands it.

4

I agree that some things, such as abortion, are more about value judgements each individual person makes rather than a matter of expert opinion. There are other areas, however, like global warming, that are subject to expert opinion. Now yes, general you can argue that a few coal jobs in West Virginia are more important than the homes of everyone living at sea level, but I think most people would disagree with that. That’s what I mean by areas where expert opinion can be shown to be better than non expert opinion.

5

Well, for arguments about the natural world and what we expect the natural world to do (i.e. what happens when we burn coal? What could cause global temperatures and sea levels to rise? Are the two related?), then sure… there will be experts who have done research and studied data and who ideally can present their conclusions and how they reached those conclusions.

That doesn’t seem to be the nature of the discussion Bricker was having, which I gather is along the lines of “An individual is the best judge of what problems that individual is facing and what will address those problems - it is arrogant (elitist, even) for another individual to presume they know better what that first individual should do.”

Thing is, if one is confronted with a person who says: “I have no job and no health insurance. I voted for Trump because he’ll fix things, and the entire Republican downticket, too”, I think it is not too far-fetched to wonder if that person really understands what Trump and the Republicans are likely to do (based on what Trump says he will do and what Republicans have historically done), and that it may not benefit this person at all.

Similarly, “I’ve got no job and no health insurance. Hillary used an illegal e-mail server, so I voted Trump because I want to blow up the whole system and I have nothing to lose.” I think it is plausible to wonder if this voter has really thought things through.

The end result of what Bricker is claiming in the excerpt quoted in the OP, as best I can tell, is that nobody can criticize any else’s decisions under any circumstances, on the presumption the person making that decision had some critical piece of information that the critic did not. If my take is correct, or at least sufficiently correct, then I can’t support that idea in absolute terms because a lot of people do indeed make decisions that leave themselves worse off, with burdens they could have avoided or mitigated.

6

I’d actually like to argue that “a few coal jobs in West Virginia” won’t make even an inch of difference in the rise of sea levels and consequently won’t affect “the homes of everyone living at sea level” one way or the other, so why not let them have their jobs?

7

My interpretation was more that the individual person is making a decision based on his or her own values and beliefs about what is best for him or her rather than on what evidence has previously shown might happen if a particular policy is enacted. In other words, to continue my probably strained medical analogy, the decision a person makes when voting is more “should I go for aggressive treatment or palliative care” rather than “should I chose medications X, Y, and Z which are known to be effective, or medications A, B, and C, which aren’t effective.” I think that Bricker is arguing that people look at the decision on how to vote more like the former question than the latter. My argument is that deciding who to vote for should be approached more like the latter question, with a few possible exceptions such as abortion.

8

I’m not personally an expert in global warming, but I don’t think we should stand idly by and do nothing. If you’re arguing that the US can only do so much, I agree that without other major nations such as China and India in particular getting on board and moving past fossil fuels, we won’t be able to reverse the problem on our own. And in this particular case the solution I would go for (switching to nuclear fission power until wind and solar are far more developed) might rile up the left more than the right. But somebody has to take the lead, or the Greenland and Antarctica ice will eventually melt with disastrous consequences. I think retraining the folks that lose coal jobs to work the uranium mines instead of the coal mines and to work the nuclear plant instead of the coal power plant is one place to start.

9

Maybe my first response to your post is scientifically inaccurate, maybe it isn’t, I’m not a climatologist and couldn’t tell you for sure. The larger point, however, is that there are climatologists who do have expertise in the matter and whose recommendations should pull greater weight than people who aren’t experts in the matter.

10

Frankly I think this thread is a little incoherent as it conflates objectives and methods.
It’s true that you can’t really say “You should want this goal, not that one”.

But you can sometimes get people to change, or modify their goals, by proving that one of their premises is incorrect.
And of course you can give evidence to support one course of action over another.
None of this requires telling someone what they should want.

So for example, on the issue of transsexuals and shared bathrooms, none of us want people getting sexually assaulted, or guys getting their junk out in front of little girls or whatever. We can agree on that.

But the course of action that men and women bathrooms therefore simply need to be delineated in traditional fashion, can nevertheless be refuted by attacking several of the premises (e.g. “Everyone is born unambiguously male or female, and has corresponding male or female genitalia”) and methods (e.g. the assumption that the existing configuration of toilets prevents sexual assaults by somehow being a forcefield for men…rather than the simpler explanation that it’s a public space where someone could walk in unannounced at any time)

11

My apologies for conflating methods and objectives. I was trying to speculate as to Bricker’s underlying reasoning, and I could very well be incorrect in what I think he was trying to communicate. I think Bricker was saying that people vote based on objectives (values / knowing what’s best for myself) rather than method. My argument is that making a decision on who to vote for, in effect, is more about methods than about objectives. If the decision on who to vote for is about methods, then it is subject to expert opinions.

Let me try a different way to explain what I’m getting at. Let’s say that I’m having car trouble, and I’m deciding on which mechanic to take my car in to be serviced by. Mechanic A works at a reputable local dealership that is highly rated by the BBB and has good reviews. Mechanic A will charge $1,000 to fix my car. Mechanic B works out of his garage, isn’t certified, and previous customers have some not so nice things to say about his work. Mechanic B, however, will only charge $500 to fix my car. I choose mechanic B, and a week later the repairs fail and end up costing several thousand dollars to fix the original damage and extra damage done during a faulty repair attempt. In this situation I think another person would be fully justified in telling me that I in fact did not know better what was best for me.

12

I believe that Bricker was referring to the No True Scotsman fallacy. And I would agree that it’s a fallacy.

But as to the topic, I think it’s reasonable to say that all of us possess certain traits and lack other traits. It’s reasonable to say that, if you want to be an astronaut, you should be rock-solid under pressure and able to hold technical, scientific discussions. If you do not have those traits, you should not be an astronaut. You could try to be all Communist about it and say that every person should have equal opportunity to be an astronaut, if only they want it, but in terms of conserving resources, that would not be the best option. It’s not elitism, it’s accepting that life isn’t fair and we have to deal in real life.

What are the ideal traits of a President? This might be a bit of a judgement call, but I think there would be a broad consensus that they should be cool under pressure, care about the welfare of all members of the country, able to build coalitions, able to make smart hiring decisions, curious about the options available to solve problems, smart enough to understand the experts, and smart enough to weigh those options against all other considerations, outside the purview of that particular expert.

A person with those traits is going to be a minority of the population, and by that token you could certainly label them “an elite”. But given that one of the criteria is caring about the people, it would be wrong to call a person with these traits “elitist”. But certainly, they will have to make decisions that balance competing forces against each other, and everyone else just has to trust that the President has done so based on his greater abilities and exposure to more information than we have. So long as we have actually established a method to find someone with the specified traits, and delegated them the task of deciding for us what is right and what is wrong, it is beholden upon us to trust that the President is in fact right, even when we think he must be wrong.

That doesn’t make the President actually and unarguably right, but certainly it’s reasonable for them to make the sorts of decisions that the role demands and to feel justified in doing so. And that wouldn’t be elitism. It’s just filling the job role that they were hired on to do.

“Elitism”, given that it is a pejorative, is certainly wrong. That’s the definition of a pejorative. But professionalism, exceptionalism, and competence are good things, despite being synonyms of elitism. Requiring and expecting those are good. Figuring out ways to make sure those are in ready supply, in a candidate for the Presidency of the United States is not just reasonable, but necessary.

But instead, we look for people who we think will do what we think needs to be done, in the world, and we care more about having a final say in policy than we do in finding a method for making sure that the President is a caring, intelligent, and trustworthy individual such that we are unwilling to step back and forgo the idiocy of “democracy”.

13

Welcome to the club, the advice given to me on another forum, keep writing and expressing your opinion we will understand what you are saying if not we will let you know

14

In picking mechanic B you took a risk. If you had chosen mechanic A then the risk would have been paying $500 dollars more and getting nothing more in return. Each person has a different tolerance for risk as well as a different situation. Should a person who only has $500 get a high risk loan for the extra money or risk mechanic B. What if the person has a job that needs a car and if they don’t have it they get fired? Obviously there decision is different than someone who has a spouse with a working car and can carpool to work. There is no way to know what everyone’s risk tolerance is and what everyone’s circumstances are
Another example is payday loans. Some people want them banned because they have such high interest rates. But what if you need $1000 to fix your car or you are going to get fired from your job making deliveries and your alternatives are payday loan place or loan shark?
As a teetotaler I think booze is a horrible influence on society. All the thousands of people who die in DUI wrecks or are maimed. The hundreds of thousands of people who get in drunken fights and are hurt. They thousands who die of liver disease or other health problems caused by alcohol. By any objective standard Prohibition is obviously the right policy. Despite all of this it failed and no one in their right mind would want to bring it back. Not because we like liver cancer or children being killed by drunk drivers but because the trade offs are worse.
Every public policy has trade offs and it depends on your values and your level of risk acceptance as to what trade offs are acceptable. That is why we should decide as few things as possible through the government and in those things we should not be elitists.

15

You also have to trust that the other person is being honest even if they are the expert. And in the realm of political and monetary power there are a lot of reasons for the experts to work for their own interests. It’s natural to be skeptical and it’s natural to want even honest elites working in a constrained system.

Even dentists and doctors do unnecessary and harmful procedures for a $.

16

The problem with your line if thinking is that it assumes a solid consensus and that consensus is correct. That is not the case in many instances.

Take climate change to start. The IPCC says that for a doubling of CO2" Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)"

So the range goes from 1.5 to 4.5 as the IPCCs best guess. But…some experts believe that the lower value is way more likely (Judith Curry, and, now, James Lovelock who recently switched his position on AGW) and some believe the higher range is way more likely (I believe Gavin Schmidt from GISS and Michael Mann fall into this category). Curry thinks, last I checked, that the ECS is about 1, Schmidt thinks it is way higher. So, which expert do you choose? Keep in mind that if the lower range is correct, adaption and mitigation make sense from a cost perspective while if the higher range is correct then only a full on decarbonization project would do anything about the problem. (FTR, I believe that the lower range is most likely)

So, who do you believe? The policy you want to enact depends greatly on which experts you choose to believe.

You also bring up medicine. Well, there are problems in that area as well as I suspect you already know. Recently there has been a problem in medicine (and psychology and a few other areas) with reproducability. For example, some Amgem scientists decided that they need to reproduce some research. They tried to reproduce ‘landmark’ cancer studies. Out of 53 attempts, 47 could not be reproduced. Link.

Scientists at Bayer have found that 66% of their research based on published literature fails because the original research cannot be reproduced. Link.

So, relying on experts can be problematic, even for other experts in the field.

On to economics.

Economics is a big field with multiple theories, lots of unknowns and confounding variables. Do you think the Austrians are right? Or the Keynesians? Or the Chicago school? Marxism? Post-Keynesian? Stockholm? There are experts of all stripes, all with competing theories most of which can point to some success somewhere (and failures as well). So, which expert do you choose? The ‘consensus’? That changes, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly and as the consensus changes so does behavior. Which affects the theory…

To make it even more complex, on top of deciding which experts to trust while knowing that the experts are fallible, is the problem of values. Policy is going to be based on facts and values. Science isn’t concerned with values, it is concerned with facts and theories. How to apply those facts to reality is a value judgement. For example, if the ECS of a doubling of CO2 is low, which is more important, spending money to lower CO2 output that may have a small affect on the environment or spending that money to provide food/shelter to the poor? If the ECS of a doubling of CO2 is high, then the decision becomes easier but there is still a decision to be made. The question on the costs of mitigation vs. adaption is not an easy one and it is a value question, not a factual question with a correct answer.

In your OP you state:
A lot of what we’re voting on in an election are questions that fall into the first type of decision making, not the second type. I think most of us, whether supporters of Clinton or Trump, want a better economy. And while economics may not be a hard science the same way that physics or chemistry are, I think that certain things can be shown to be correct and other things incorrect.

I think, for the vast majority of policy matters, it is a lot murkier than ‘This is correct and this isn’t’.

Slee

17

Can we talk about voting and people who don’t vote? I would consider myself an elitist in this category. I KNOW that people who do not vote are wrong and that they should vote. I don’t have to be an expert in voting to know that.

18

I’m okay with low information voters not voting. It should be considered acceptable to recognize one’s limitations and decide ‘hey, I really don’t understand these issues well enough to know which candidate/views I should support, so until such time as I do, I shall abstain from making an uninformed decision.’

19

Not sure how relevant this is but the thread is reminding me of this lecture by Phil Pliat.

Even if you’re empirically correct, does making the opposition feel like a fool a hill you want to die on?

20

Only the mediocre think elitism is wrong :smiley: