Article Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge

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Election day Nov 4, 2025 didn't help the negative perception. Countless experts, at the start of multiple television networks coverage and online social media channels, got it all wrong as they predicted Kamala Harris prevailing. Cherry-picking one survey and argument after another to back up their pre-existing bias. And essentially a repeat of the proficiency of experts displayed in 2016, indicating that they were incapable of even learning from the past. The optimistic audience of MSNBC was so devastated by the latter's bogus build-up over the months preceding, that ratings plummeted massively afterward and have not recovered. They were promised a victorious Harris by MSNBC, and instead garnered the darkest scenario they could imagine.
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Why don’t people trust experts? Understanding vs. knowledge
https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com/...st-experts

EXCERPTS: Trust in experts is going down, down, down, and I want to think about why. Here’s a couple of representative charts.

[...] Some of this is understandable. On the one hand there are high-profile accusations of fraudulent research, and on the other there are experts prone to pontificating about topics outside their expertise. Those are reasons to question specific experts, though, not reasons to doubt experts in general. So what gives? Here are some ideas.

Option 1: experts are wrong a lot Kenny Easwaran recently argued that option 1 is the right explanation. People don’t trust experts because they are frequently wrong. In fact—even though this is counterintuitive—they make mistakes about their own areas of expertise much more than outsiders do...

[...] Option 2: experts can’t predict for shit. Economics Nobelist Paul Samuelson famously wrote that “Wall Street indices predicted nine out of the last five recessions.”1 Complex systems like the market are mathematically chaotic and generally unpredictable, but that doesn’t stop people from trying...

[...] Option 3: expertise isn’t about having the truth; it is about understanding. The idea I want to defend is that we should stop thinking about expertise in terms of experts having the truth, but instead in terms of their understanding. Understanding is not the same thing as knowing. There are two key differences:

Understanding comes in degrees, knowledge does not.

Knowledge requires truth, but understanding can come from false models.

Degrees of understanding. Knowledge is a yes or no deal. Either you know a claim or you don’t know it. Understanding isn’t like that; you can have more and less of it...

[...] Knowledge requires truth. You can’t know something if it is untrue—you might believe it, but you can’t know it. That’s not how understanding works. False models can be extremely helpful for understanding.

[...] Possessing the truth is not the sign of expertise. Possessing understanding is. And, like understanding itself, expertise comes in degrees. The finer-grained your understanding, the closer to the truth (even if not there yet) you are, the more you are an expert. Noticing that a model is idealized is not a reason to distrust experts using it. But I think that’s exactly the mistake people make... (MORE - expects)

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Why don't people trust experts, anymore? Aside from the specter of career self-interests ever looming as a background menace, being more concerned with facts than upholding current "fashionable nobility" trends might help restore confidence. When it comes to facts versus ethical concerns or personal activist beliefs in that area -- guess which often dominates.

Having political slash socioeconomic fetishes that motivate one can lead to compromised results, just as religious fetishes are infamous for causing that. They're both a subset of ideology, which itself seems to ultimately revolve around human fixations with morality, or all the quarrelsome and conflicting multiple prescriptions that our large-brained primate species outputs in that department. The latter preoccupation is invented, whereas the status of an objective reality is not.
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Did USAID really save 90 million lives? Not unless it raised the dead.
https://reason.com/2025/07/24/did-usaid-...-the-dead/

INTRO: "Is [the U.S. Agency for International Development] a good use of resources?" James Macinko, a health policy researcher at UCLA, asked in an NPR interview this month. "We found that the average taxpayer has contributed about 18 cents per day to USAID." That "small amount," Macinko estimated, had prevented "up to 90 million deaths around the world."

Macinko was referring to a study he coauthored, which was published in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. In addition to estimating that USAID programs had saved 90 million lives from 2001 to 2021, Macinko and his colleagues project that if the Trump administration's USAID cuts continue through 2030, an estimated 14 million people could die who otherwise would have lived.

In the same NPR story, Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease mathematical modeler and health economist at Boston University, gushed about the study. "Putting numbers to the lives that could be lost if funding isn't restored does something very important," she said. "I like [the study's] statistical approach; it was really well done and robust."

To the contrary, the study's statistical approach was poorly done and not at all robust. But you need not be an economist or a mathematician to recognize that its results are absurd. The authors failed to apply common sense to the numbers, and so did reporters at NPR, the BBC, the Associated Press, NBC, and other news outlets that amplified the study's findings... (MORE - details)

[Magical Realist]

An expert is someone who knows everything about something, and understands nothing about everything else.