Sam Harris

When we're going into a new area where we're not experts, we're fairly alert to the possibility that we don't, it's not as simple as things seem at first, and we don't know how our tools translate to this new area.

We can be fairly circumspect, but we're also, because we're well-educated and we're pretty quick studies, we can learn a lot of things pretty fast and we can begin to play a language game that sounds fairly expert, right?

And in that case, the invitation to do your own research, right, is when times are good,

I view as an invitation to waste your time pointlessly, right?

When times are good.

Now, the truth is times are not all that good, right?

And we have the ongoing public display of failures of expertise.

We have experts who are obviously corrupted by bad incentives.

We've got experts who perversely won't admit they were wrong when they in fact are demonstrated to be wrong.

We've got institutions that have been captured by

Uh, political ideology that's not truth tracking and this, this, this whole woke, um, uh, encroachment into really every place, you know, whether it's universities or science journals or government, or, I mean, it's just like, that is, that has been genuinely deranging.

Um,

So there's a lot going on where experts and the very concept of expertise has seemed to discredit itself.

But the reality is that there is a massive difference.

When anything matters, when there's anything to know about anything, there is a massive difference most of the time between someone who has really done the work to understand that domain and someone who hasn't.

And if I get sick or someone close to me gets sick,

You know, I have a PhD in neuroscience, right?

So I can read a medical journal article and understand a lot of it, right?

And I, you know, so I'm just fairly conversant with, you know, medical terminology.

And I understand its methods.