by Kacey Y » Thu Feb 08, 2018 9:44 am
The cultural turn against expertise is really multi-faceted. You'd think it would be all extreme political/cultural fringe movements, but it's also directly tied to DIY communities too. The difference is that in those communities there's an open acknowledgement that there are people with master level knowledge and skill, but that they should openly share it for free and not be gatekeepers. Where as in the fringes on things like science, it's mostly just a general distrust of any outside authority, with the implication or outright expression that they're lying and trying to swindle, control and mislead people at worst or that the experts are just their own opinionated fringe that insist on saying their beliefs are facts.
I have such conflicting feelings on the subject in some regards, because I have and have made money off self taught skill, as well as skill/trade that was directly taught to me by an expert and I also value delegating specifically skilled work to experts. I know how to build and have general construction knowledge, but outside small projects, I hire contractors and builders to work on my home. I record and mix music myself, but I have it professionally mastered. I have done professional graphic design work, both freelance and as part of jobs I've had, and I've done my own album artwork and I've hired people to do it. I have a basic respect and reverence for science and medicine, but I'm also skeptical of statistical based studies or behavior psychology papers that are assembled from data mining. However, I don't think any of this is what goes on in government with the anti-science stances. I firmly believe it's straight up "I support an economic agenda and the implications of this would hamper/harm that, so I reject it, because it seems like it won't immediately kill me to do that, but it will immediately benefit my agenda". There might be a heavy dose of self delusion involved, I think at best it's an attempt at willfully ignoring something you don't want to know about.
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