StoryTime: Revenge of the Expert Inexperts
Billionaire Elitists Wage a Narrative “Anti-Elitism” War on Democracy (and Expertise)
When it comes to a government makeover, Elon Musk is flying by the seat of his pants, and treating us like his personal diaper.
Cuban Missile Crisis? “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”
What happens when we believe the branding stories of people who confidently feign expertise but really have none—people who are objectively inexpert? And what happens when we give them the power to actually implement their inexpertise?
We’re watching the answer being written in real time as Elon Musks’s DOGE tadpoles wiggle their way into one federal agency after another. The headlines are full of said minions doing really dumb stuff, justified by an overarching narrative of fighting wokeness and “waste, fraud and abuse.”
But the most dangerous expert inexpert of all is Musk himself, a billionaire who confidently proclaimed that homelessness was a “lie” and a “propaganda world.” And when it comes to government cost cutting, not only is he just as clueless, he makes 1990s corporate hatchet man “Chainsaw Al Dunlap” look like a cub scout.
Musk is a typical inexpert, with an overconfident brand story that his expertise will save the world. In reality, he has no idea what he’s doing, except that it makes him excited enough to jump up and down. This exchange with Moly Jong Fast is emblematic of Musk’s cluelessness and inexpertise in the work of government.
Does America Have a Cultural Bias Toward Unconscious Ignorance?
LiteralMayhem took on the question of inexperts in power way back in 2010 during the first Bush administration, with an article titled “Tyranny of PR’s Expert Inexperts.”
That piece was prompted by White House spokesperson Dana Perino admitting that she panicked over a reporter’s question about the Cuban Missile Crisis, because she didn’t know what that was. Perino said:
It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure… I came home and I asked my husband. I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.'
As we pointed out: she was the spokesperson for the “leader of the free world!” (As she unceasingly called her boss.)
It was a shocker that she could ascend to such a high position while knowing almost nothing about a defining moment of the Cold War and 20th century geopolitics: the anti-communist counterinsurgency mission (Bay of Pigs Thing) that set the stage for a nuclear showdown (the Cuban Missile Crisis) with the USSR within paddling distance of Miami Beach.
And yes, it’s easy to be snarky and petty in calling out small errors made by powerful people, but when we’re talking about the leadership team at the helm of the richest, most powerful nation on Earth, one is permitted to have high standards. After all, this is supposed to be meritocracy.
For example, the White House should know the basics, like the names of countries and how to spell them. In the case of one of their deportation spats, they misspelled Colombia as “Columbia.” In the case of an invite to an event with Keir Starmer, they gave his title as “Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” Except that the Republic of Ireland has been an independent nation since 1922 and only Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.
Our cultural drift toward putting inexperts in power has been happening for decades. Here is a much smaller example from 2005. But small as it is, it may be even more useful in terms of cultural anthropology: pointing to the kind of world we were heading for, even back then.
Consider the anecdote of a 22-year-old computer science undergrad from Stanford who went to work for the elite management consultancy Boston Consulting Group in order to boss around people who actually do—and have done—real work for a living.
Mo believes his consulting gig is more lucrative, rewarding and imaginative than a traditional tech job. He characterized his summer programming internships as ‘too focused or localized, even meaningless.’
‘A consulting job injects you into companies at a higher level,’ he said. ‘You don't feel like you're doing basic stuff.’
Good grief. As I said back then…
A 22-year-old should be doing basic stuff. Most of the world turns on “basic stuff.” Most people spend their lives doing, thinking, making, and buying basic stuff. And you don’t get to boss people around until you’ve done some basic stuff yourself.
You’re not entitled to being “injected” into anything at a high level until you have enough real-life experience to understand the kind of basic stuff that millions of people are working at day in and day out. Because that basic stuff has value.
And yet, here we are, watching DOGE kids with no life experience—some of them literally teenagers—hack apart the federal government and boss around skilled people, all in the name of operationalizing anti-wokeness and a billionaire’s many conflicts of interest.
One could say that Musk and his child army may be expert at certain things. They certainly *know what they’re doing* in a very narrow sense: i.e., giddily overseeing the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the U.S. government, as explained in a scary-funny post by Paul Krugman, in which he describes DOGE’s m.o. using the very same euphemistic language SpaceX used to describe how their rocket blew up.
But the DOGE kids and their leader have zero idea *what* they’re doing. They’re clueless as to the consequences of their actions, because they have no idea what those agencies and departments are for, what those people actually do, why we have them, and what value they deliver to the nation. Worse: they act like it’s a badge of honor that they don’t know and don’t care.
In a fascinating article, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) took on the deeply philosophical question of How to Cover Stupidity (Including Our Own)—“a concept that lies at the heart of much journalism.” The piece summarizes different theories of ignorance and quotes one expert explaining that “unconscious ignorance” is…
‘… particularly dangerous to democracy because it combines a lack of knowledge with the arrogant belief that one already knows enough… Unconscious ignorance undermines the foundations of democratic debate, trust in science, and respect for knowledge,’ Carofiglio said, describing it as an attitude that poisons public discourse and fuels misinformation.
Smell like Musky DOGE to you? Whatever limited expertise got you into power is the only expertise you need, and it’s more valuable than all the knowledge of the so-called experts you’re overseeing. Borrowing from communications professor Paul Elliott Johnson, of the University of Pittsburgh, we can call this power “tautologically self-authorizing.”
But how could such ignorance be continually elevated to the halls of power, unless America itself actually has developed a refined taste for this kind of stupidity? (The word “stupidity” is used here intentionally. See below.)
America’s Dunning-Kruger Culture: A Cult of Arrogant, Pathological Ignorance?
The entitlement to power we’re seeing among inexpert people goes hand-in-hand with something we will explore next week: the glorification of all things “uncurated.”
There is no such thing as an “uncurated” online experience, but that notion is all the rage today. Online media users tell themselves a comforting story that avoiding official, professional curation puts them in closer touch with the truth—i.e., direct, socially networked information is somehow more authentic and trustworthy than what comes from evil institutions.
A good example is when Musk recently celebrated Grok AI’s takedown of the online tech publication The Information, which Grok called “legacy media” and biased by the “interests of funders and editors.” (No, as the owner of X, he didn’t evince any irony in celebrating that BS, when X and xAI are beholden to him as funder and chief algorithm editor.)
He was gleeful that Grok positioned X as the go-to source for unpolished, “unvarnished,” “unfiltered” news and truth. According to Musk, it’s the very lack of curation, and straight delivery of “reality” from the “people living it,” that makes X “trustworthy.”
The comforting story of “uncurated” information is that there’s no expertise needed in anything, other than one’s own life experience. This glorification of socially curated truth is a direct manifestation of Isaac Asimov’s famous observation from his 1980 Newsweek article A Cult of Ignorance (1/21/80)…
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nourished by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is as good as your knowledge.
DOGE kids don’t have to take the time to analyze and then empirically prove “woke” or “waste, fraud and abuse” before wielding the axe. They can just make those things so by claiming them, and then acting accordingly (or maybe their actions tautologically prove their truth).
The American “cult of ignorance,” in Asimov’s words, lines up perfectly with Gianrico Carofiglio’s notion of “unconscious ignorance".”
It looks suspiciously like a manifestation of the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias whereby inexperts overestimate their skill. In a sense, we’ve been acculturated with a national over-confidence that’s Dunning-Kruger-esque—i.e., the Manifest Destiny and assumed “American exceptionalism” embedded in our culture push toward an overestimation of our national and individual expertise and competence. We tolerate this stuff because it’s deeply embedded in who we are.
SIDEBAR: Here we need to correct two mistaken beliefs about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The first mistake is thinking that the self-overestimation side of the effect applies only to stupid people. It actually applies to us all. And it’s probably even more dangerous when smart people do it.
The second mistake has to do with that graph you see everywhere about the acquisition of knowledge moderating the Dunning-Kruger effect. That graph actually applies to research done by David Dunning and Carmen Sanchez titled “Overconfidence Among Beginners: Is a Little Learning a Dangerous Thing?” (Helpful video here.)
Applied to Elon Musk’s DOGE adventures, the Dunning-Sanchez graph might look like this:
The point is that super smart people operating outside their wheelhouse can tell themselves a dangerous story that not only are they good at what they’re doing, but that the people who are telling them they’re being idiots are themselves the idiots, because they are the expert, and everyone else is not (even when they are).
According to the CJR article, that’s what “stupidity” looks like. According to theorist Olivier Postel-Vinay…
… stupidity transcends ignorance because it operates even in highly informed individuals, who remain ensnared by rigid beliefs.
Broligarch brainiac and ketamine enthusiast Elon Musk is expert at having big ideas, as well as building high-performing companies, and creating markets for products and businesses yet to be mainstream (give credit where credit is due).
He’s also super good at leveraging government subsidies for growth and profit, blustering and bluffing his way to success when his businesses are failing, and swooping in to capitalize on the inventions of others to enrich himself and prove his own intelligence.
But he’s currently falling victim to a habit of overestimating his skill and remaining ensnared in that rigid belief.
INTERMISSION:
Noahpinion blog offers a very good summation of why we underestimate Elon at our peril. The man is super intelligent and highly driven. True. He certainly isn’t intrinsically dumb by any objective measure. And Noah Smith is right when he observes that we’re the idiots if we think we’re doing anything to deter DOGE by sniping at Musk and calling him “stupid” on social media:
Over the past 15 years, mass social media has replaced outside reality in many people’s lives, so that things that happen on Twitter/X feel more substantial than things that happen in the streets… Maybe saying that Elon has a 110 IQ makes you feel like you beat him in your little online fantasy world, but out there in the actual world, he is still ripping up your national institutions at breakneck speed.
And that is precisely the point: a man of undeniable, world-striding intellect is using his awesome scale of corporate, social, and media power to do really stupid stuff—in our view. At the very same time, he has his own vision for what he’s doing, and in that view he’s a brilliant and heroic savior.
We’re watching, in real time, the collision of those two world-defining narratives.
To us, outside his bubble, the world Musk is creating “at breakneck speed,” and the role he envisions for himself in that world, look like a society ruled by pathology (i.e., pathocracy)—given that Musk’s governing style manifests arrogance, bullying, hypocrisy, a thin skin, and a titanic lack of compassion.
Unfortunately for us, and the rest of the world, the arrogance of ignorance we see in Musk and many others running the Trump 2.0 Show, is a key feature of “pathocracy,” in which people with personality disorders occupy positions of power. According to an article in Psychology Today, such people are often…
… brutal and cruel, intensely self-centered, and lacking in empathy… [they] feel that they are superior to others and have the right to dominate them… [and] which means that they are able to ruthlessly exploit and abuse others in their lust for power.
Pathocracy itself is an institutionalization of unconscious ignorance.
Most puzzling of all, however, is that a rationalist like Musk completely rejects empiricism: the idea that government reform should be based on analysis and evidence—i.e., before you undertake to change something, you need to hear from the experts on the ground struggling with the problem so you get some good ideas about how to fix it. Just like he did at Tesla and SpaceX when they were bedeviled by really tough problems.
It’s quite fair to say that by completely dismissing experts, and automatically assuming they’re the idiots just because they have a government job, he is making himself look stupid and pathological. (In great example: The Long Memo has a great rundown on the stupidity of Musk demanding that the U.S. exit all international organizations, starting with NATO and the UN.)
When it comes to a government makeover, Elon is flying by the seat of his pants, and treating all the rest of us like his personal diaper.
NOW, BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING:
What Elon Musk is NOT good at, and knows fuck-all about, is government.
The management context and expertise he brings to his new role is what he perfected in his previous roles: a command and control structure aimed at disruption. While that ethic may work in a tech company, it’s inadequate on its own, and sometimes even wildly inappropriate, in the realm of public governance. Yet, Musk has unlimited confidence that his unpolished, unvarnished, unfiltered, inexpertise in government is precisely what qualifies him to feed great swaths of official Washington “into the wood chipper,” to use his own words.
In fact, this kind of arrogant inexpertise can be found ravaging the world in many places, on many topics, often by techno-elites. Paul Krugman calls out Silicon Valley tech investor David Sacks for his expert inexpertise. Asks Krugman:
Are tech bros even more arrogant and ignorant when they make pronouncements about the federal budget than they are on other topics, or does it just seem that way to me because I know something about the subject?
In the UK, which is currently mounting the world’s most robust pushback against the AI tech oligarchy, academic Helen Beetham offered an exhaustive and terrifying article on the boneheaded AI policy decisions that amount to spreading the public’s legs to AI behemoths, for promises of maybe a dinner afterward, or at least a small tip.
Much of the government’s decision making revolves around inexperts defying the input and advice of actual experts and the UK’s real-world experience indicating that AI applications in a public setting haven’t yet worked.
… if you want to discover the public benefits of a new technology, you need 'qualitative, relational and experiential understanding from both publics and professionals'. That is, you should listen to people working in the system who understand the problems and bottlenecks that ‘AI’ is meant to solve.
You should listen to people on the sharp end of the service that ‘AI’ is supposed to improve. (And perhaps, just as an aside, productivity isn’t the only purpose of the public sector). But the AI Action Plan strikes through woke nonsense of this kind. In its drive to ‘rapidly pilot and scale’, the real stakeholders are not the ‘people’ at all, but the technology companies.
(To see what a thorough analysis and takedown of bad AI policymaking looks like, her article is a must-read.)
The economist Mariana Mazzucato wrote a piece for The Financial Times ripping global consultancies for making a hard-sell on AI in education, a huge global revenue stream, for “having no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in.” Per the article:
Consultancies and outsourcers ... know less than they claim, cost more than they seem to, and — over the long term — prevent the public sector developing in-house capabilities.
The Antidote Is Something America Abhors: Humility
The antidote to inexperts ravaging everything? According to theorist Gianrico Carofiglio, it’s embracing “conscious ignorance,” which is…
… an intellectual humility that helps us recognize our own limitations while remaining receptive to the knowledge of others.
That common refrain dates back to Socrates’ assertion that, “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” And Darwin’s belief that: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” And Bertrand Russell’s summation: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
There are plenty such quotes to be found, and they all make similar endorsements of humility. Carofiglio says that uncertainty and humility push us toward dialogue, “which is precisely the opposite of polarization.” And it’s that dialogue that brings forth knowledge and helps us develop expertise, unlike those who remain “ensnared” by rigid overconfidence in their inexpert beliefs.
Unfortunately, humility is in short supply in pathocracies.
Further down in Asimov’s piece, he argues that the crux of the problem is larger than mere anti-intellectualism: it’s an inbuilt American tendency toward anti-elitism. In a modern context, the label of “elitism,” he says, gets applied to “anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around.”
As for the elite anti-elitists of Asomiv’s day, he lampooned George Wallace, whose excoriation of “pointy headed professors” was unironically met “with a roar of approval from his pointy headed audience.” Asimov bluntly observed (as relevant today as when he said it in 1980) that…
As soon as someone shouts ‘elitist’ it becomes clear that he or she is a closet elitist who is feeling guilty about having gone to school.
So, let’s be clear: “expertise” and “elitism” are NOT the same thing. Elitism intrinsically asserts inter-personal superiority. Expertise does not; it asserts greater knowledge but does not assume to be another person’s better.
Yet, branding all experts as inherently “elitist,” works to the advantage of fake populist politicians. Today’s right-wing—comprised of elitist anti-elitists—uses an anti-expertise strategy to neutralize people who might have the knowledge and authority to speak truth to power and force accountability. These are well-heeled millionaire and billionaire elitists—many of whom attended elite institutions of learning—decrying elitism while asserting their own elite status as a right to rule, and lighting populist nationalism on fire to burn down democracy.
Asimov’s notion of American “anti-elitism” also serves as a helpful rubric under which we can lump all our current anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-Establishment, anti-expert animus, as well as the populist obsession with “uncurated” information as the only way to get to a real, authentic truth.
Anti-elitism is the tree trunk from which all those other branches grow. Unfortunately, Asimov’s prescribed solution might be beyond our national reach. He writes:
I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like ‘America’s right to know’ and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning. [emphasis original]
The combination of humility, and a democratization of expertise, won’t likely work in a country where public education is being dismantled for being government “indoctrination?” Where books are burned and banned. Which, by the way, calls into question how we’re supposed to build a “knowledge economy” in a nation where expertise is reviled. One recalls the adage commonly attributed to Thomas Edison that…
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
One could rewrite that adage for a knowledge economy (as well as for a democracy requiring an informed electorate) by saying…
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is frumpy, pale, reads a lot and looks like brain work.
America’s anti-elitist right-wing represents an uprising of expert inexperts come to make America great, in their own image. They’re leading us in exactly the opposite direction of Asimov’s call toward a democratization of learning and expertise. Why? Because there is enormous political utility in the de-democratization of expertise. And anyway, their intrinsic superiority actually makes learning moot, not just for them, but for us too. As put by Peter Thiel, tech billionaire and JD Vance sponsor:
For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand. (“The Education of a Libertarian”, Cato Institute, 2009)
(And by the way, if you want to know where people like Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison want to take us—the uneducated body politic—have a look at the vision of their guru, techno-elitist Curtis Yarvin, who wants to replace “the existing Constitutional system with a privatized state structure akin to a corporation, with a monarch-like figure at the top modeled after a CEO.”)
It’s going to be a long, difficult road back from that, if such a thing is even possible. What’s clear at the moment is that those who stand opposed to the anti-elitist elite ruling class don’t have their shit together, at all.
What’s needed is a ground-up effort to empower learning and revalue expertise of all kinds—an aggressive narrative war of our own to prove the relevance of expertise not just for the nation as a whole in some abstract way, but to individual voters deciding whether to elect competent experts, or elect inexpert demagogues who make us feel confident and invincible in our “unconscious ignorance.”
In this example, ProPublica celebrates experts doing sophisticated work in name of basic protections for society: protecting kids from tobacco, reducing mortality among babies and pregnant mothers, and keeping donor organs from getting lost.
The pro-democracy, pro-competence coalition needs to show real people, doing real stuff—yes, even basic stuff—that is indispensable to the basics of life, the basics of liberty, and the basics of running a big messy country in which we each all have a stake in the outcome. If possible, that includes creating a sense of wonder, humility, curiosity and a love of learning.
Don’t let the phony anti-elite elites drum competent experts out of public life, such that their faces end up on a proverbial milk carton.
Defend and celebrate the experts. Put them on podiums and in commercials. Give them ribbons and awards. March with them in protest. Fight for expertise. Champion it. Scream it from the parapets. Expertise matters!
Here’s some people doing it! You can too! Join them!
Democratize expertise in a way that is unavoidable.
Shove every-day, rank-and-file expertise down the throats of the anti-elitist elitists, and stop letting them bludgeon democracy to death with their cynicism. Make real Asimov’s ambitious call:
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like ‘America’s right to know’ and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.
(A little fire in the belly from the “expert class” please! With perhaps a wee bit less sanctimony.)