While the big Brexit kerfuffle was going on I was struck by the amount of motivated reasoning and sheer wishful thinking on both sides of the argument. The pandemic is now also throwing up a ton of both things. What is even more marked is the part played by claims to expertise. I have concluded that this reveals a widely shared understanding of what it is that experts do and what expertise consists of that is simply incorrect, and that this misunderstanding explains why so many debates are fraught and unhelpful. (The other big problem is the innumeracy and lack of understanding of elementary statistics and probability of so many people, which John Allen Paulos pointed out many years ago).
The common perception is that there is clear unambiguous truth that you can find if you know enough, are skilled enough, and dispassionate enough not to be swayed by your interests - those three things make you an expert. So the idea is the experts do their thing and come up with factual accounts that politicians and voters then apply normative judgements to (but informed by the neutral knowledge the experts have provided). The reality is that the experts are engaged in a Popperian process of critical reasoning so what they are putting forward are hypotheses that are subject to creation or disproof and which acquire lower levels of tentativeness to the extent that they are discussed, engaged with and tested. That's a completely different model. It means that public debate and indeed expert debate should be understood differently and have a different quality.
For one thing it isn't a matter of competing truth claims where one is right and others wrong, in many cases. rather you have lots of truth claims, all of which are tentative to some degree. The process of argument and investigation is meant to reduce the tentativeness of some claims and increase that of others and also to show how that process reflects the impact of things that have happened during the discussion. As I say, it's a Popperian process. One thing that would help would be to have much more gambling or discussion of these matters in terms not of absolute truth or falsity but the odds that the informed person is willing to offer. If backed up by money, even better.
