Don’t throw the expert out with the bath water

Douglas Murray, Dave Smith, and the Burden of Intellectual Integrity

Douglas Murray’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, where he exchanged blows with comedian-turned-geopolitics expert Dave Smith, generated quite the controversy.

The role of experts, expertise, and personal experience was one of the topics of disagreement, and one remark Douglas made gave me a lot to consider. How should we treat the opinion of people who comment on things they have never directly experienced?

I think it’s worth reflecting on it as a way to refine our epistemological filters. Our information diet matters. But carefully selecting what we we feed our minds is only the beginning of the process. Even trusted sources deserve scrutiny. We should hold everything to rigorous intellectual standards.

Image sourced from the JRE show YouTube thumbnail, with minor edits.

At one point, Douglas remarked that Smith has a lot to say about faraway Gaza, all the while comfortably seated in his U.S. armchair. The comedian refers to Gaza as an “open air prison” with Israel having instituted “blockades” around it without ever having visited the place. Douglas, on the other hand, has been there—at considerable personal risk—and seems to imply he can better comment on the situation.

I’ve been wrestling with this. It sounds like an argument from authority—after all, you can understand how a place works without having ever set foot on it. And yet, Douglas’s remark just feels right. Is it possible to square the two?

David Deutsch’s idea of humans as universal explainers suggests that we don’t need to visit a place to understand it. No one has ever been on the surface of a star, yet astrophysicists know every detail of their inner workings as nuclear fusion furnaces. Likewise, it’s impossible for us to travel back in time to WWII Germany or 1860s America, yet we can make clear moral judgments on antisemitism and slavery.

So why did it intuitively feel right when Douglas called out Dave Smith for opining on places he never took the time to visit?

I think the difference between the astrophysicist understanding how stars work and Dave Smith talking about Gaza lies in how they guard against errors in their explanations.

An astrophysicist’s understanding of a star comes from a robust process of conjecture and refutations. She guards against errors in her mental representation by devising experiments that test her predictions.

How does Dave Smith guard against errors in his understanding of geopolitics in the Middle East? I don’t know. Visiting the place would be a good starting point, though.

Of course, the astrophysicist does not personally run experiments to verify every part of the explanations she relies upon. She only does that for the new predictions she makes. In great part, she trusts that those whose explanations she builds on have applied the same rigor.

Likewise, it’s possible that Dave Smith built his understanding entirely on trusted primary sources. I don’t know. The point of this post is not to discredit or validate Dave Smith—history will do that for us. I’m just trying to sharpen the epistemological razor I apply when listening to a conversation like that.

So, does the fact that Dave Smith has never been to Gaza discredit his contribution to the conversation? Is one allowed an opinion on the conflict only if they have visited? Of course not.

But I feel there’s a difference between discussing a topic at a dinner party with friends and opining about it when millions of people are listening. We should always be intellectually honest, but the bigger the audience, the more intellectual due diligence we should apply.

Nassim Taleb argues that to have an opinion, one has to have skin in the game. From Antifragile: “If Fat Tony had an opinion, he felt he needed, for ethical reasons, to have a corresponding exposure.”

Comparing a war correspondent journalist like Douglas Murray with Dave Smith, it seems clear who has more skin in the game.

If Douglas were to write factually incorrect articles, one after another, his reputation as a journalist would be shattered. Dave Smith can basically say whatever he wants and then play the “I’m not an expert, I’m just a comedian” card.

Douglas’s incentives are to be as truthful as possible. But Dave Smith is an entertainer. His incentives are to be as engaging as possible. One would hope he’s also seeking truth, but it’s hard to deny that he operates in a playing field where the more controversial your opinion, the more eyeballs you get.

And this segues to an important point on discourse, which Neil Postman raised four decades ago in his incredibly prescient Amusing Ourselves to Death: Political Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

What happens when discourse becomes entertainment? The incentives inevitably shift from holding conversations with intellectual integrity to keeping the audience engaged. Is it a surprise, then, that we see so many comedians like Dave Smith becoming prominent voices on current affairs?

When listening to a podcast conversation like the one between Joe Rogan, Dave Smith, and Douglas Murray, it’s crucial to ask whether it’s meant to be discourse or entertainment.

We need to be wary of shows that want to be both. As Postman writes:

I raise no objection to television’s junk. The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.

During the show, Dave Smith challenged Douglas by citing COVID-19. “The expert class hasn’t done a great job. […] I will put my track record against any of the expert class on Covid. So should I have just shut up, should I have just shut up by opposing lockdowns, by opposing vaccine mandates.”

The lesson that Joe and Dave seem to have taken from the pandemic experience is that if official experts cannot be trusted, then the only alternative is to listen to self-taught people whose credentials come in the number of hours of podcasts they have recorded on a given topic and who don’t call themselves experts despite very much acting like they are.

As Konstantin Kisin points out:

The great trick being deployed here is to allege that experts can’t be trusted while relying on a different set of experts. On Ukraine, the non-expert Smith is using the ideas of people he considers experts like John Meirsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. On WWII, the non-expert Cooper deploys the arguments of people he considers experts like David Irving. And so on and so forth. “All opinions are valid and should be given a hearing!” scream the people whose entire media diet is made up of people who only push their preferred perspective.

Many experts might have left us down, but that does not make anti-experts suddenly trustworthy.

The criteria for considering someone trustworthy should be the quality of their explanations and what they are doing to identify their errors. You can record hundreds of hours of podcasts or publish thousands of pages and still be completely wrong.

If discourse was as “simple” as astrophysics, where we can conjecture theories and verify their predictions, then navigating it would be straightforward.

Alas, whenever people are involved, everything becomes more complex.

Which is exactly why we need to keep our minds sharp and ask questions. But not the “I’m just a comedian asking questions” kind of questions.

We need to ask “how do you know what you know?” “what have you done to make sure it’s right?” and “what are your incentives for sharing this opinion?”

---

This post began as a conversation with my dad, who I can always trust to offer a grounded take on current events. Thanks, Dad!