Episode 156: Oliver Traldi discusses political expertise
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What is the difference between true expertise and social status as an expert?
Hello and
welcome to Elucidations, an unexpected philosophy podcast. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Joseph Diller. And with us today is Oliver Traldi, postdoc at the James Madison Program at Princeton University and visiting assistant professor at the University of Tulsa Honors College. And he is here to discuss political expertise. Oliver Traldi, welcome. Thank you for having me. So the first thing I always like to talk about when I'm talking about experts with people is like the difference between actually being an expert, i.e. actually understanding stuff well and knowing things versus like being talked about as an expert or claiming to be an expert. So I wonder if we could just sort of like get on the table. At least when I talk about being an expert, I'm talking about like actually knowing stuff as opposed to like claiming to be an expert.
Is that also how you tend to use the term or?
Yeah. So I am. I tend to use the term in both ways, which is probably a little confusing. So I have, you know, when I talk about political expertise, I'm drawing on both a sort of public conversation about experts and an academic literature in epistemology about the nature of expertise. So in epistemology, when we talk about experts, we're generally talking about people with a lot of knowledge in some domain. people with a good track record, people with true beliefs, or people who are rational or have some sort of understanding. There are all these epistemic states that are valuable, that we consider valuable, and somebody who has them with a domain is what an epistemologist normally means by an expert.
Then, in public conversation, when we talk about experts, we're usually talking about a sort of expert class, maybe somebody with a certain kind of credential, Or somebody who goes on maybe some sort of talk show and there's like below their face it says expert in this or expert in that. Or somebody puts expert in something in their Twitter bio. They gave a
really exciting talk and their startup got seed funding.
Yeah, exactly. Maybe they do a TED talk or something like that. One of the questions is how these two categories relate to one another. And as a matter of maybe social engineering, how we can make sure that there's more overlap. Or as a matter of individual rationality or individual decision making, You know, how we can decide which of the latter we can trust, which of the sort of credentialed experts we can – we're rational in treating as the sort of experts in the epistemological sense.
Okay. But we're allowing then that somebody could actually be an expert but maybe not have any credentials. Maybe they're just a hermit who's practiced something and they're really good at it or something like
that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think the notion of expertise doesn't have built into it any, like, any specific source of one's beliefs, right? So it could just be, you could be a mathematical savant, right? Right, yeah. Could be an
expert in mathematics.
Matt Damon
or whatever.
Exactly, yeah. I was thinking of Ramanujan, I think. Yeah, the actual. Yeah, the actual, yeah, the one who's. Goodwill hunting. Yeah, who's discussed in Goodwill Hunting. But, yeah, I think he's an example. Right. You know, the kind who, like, sets the piece of paper on fire after proving something that you could never do your whole life. That part was an impulsion. A technical term for that is a really mean expert in epistemology. No, but so, yeah, I think we would allow an epistemology that that's an expert. But in a social discussion or a discussion of the cultural nature of expertise, we would probably not call that an expert. They don't have any credentials. You know, they don't have any platform. So when we think about expertise in politics...
We're sort of trying to do both at the same time, right? We're sort of trying to participate in both conversations at the same time.
What would be like the world's simplest, most straightforward example of somebody who's an expert in something?
Yeah, so I think the best examples are the – and it's also part of the case for expertise.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the difference between true expertise and social status as an expert?
0:08–4:40
2
How do philosophers define expertise in epistemology versus public discourse?
4:40–10:39
3
When does a topic become political, and what makes someone a political expert?
10:39–16:37
4
Why is genuine political expertise rare and hard to identify?
16:37–22:57
5
How should we decide which experts to trust in everyday decisions?
22:57–27:56
6
What is the proper way to respond to conflicting expert opinions?
27:56–33:42
7
How do incentives, branding, and self‑promotion affect the credibility of political experts?
33:42–39:01
8
Is earnestness more valuable than formal qualifications in politics?
39:01–42:48
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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Episode 151: Witold Więcek discusses statistics and academic research