If you have a plumbing problem, you’re probably going to call a plumber, because a plumber has specialized plumbing knowledge and also practical experience with plumbing-related tasks.
Of course, in this day and age, you could always do your own research — YouTube has no shortage of instructional videos that can help you address minor issues on your own. Still, most of us have limited interest in developing full competency in these tasks, and as the complexity of the problem increases, so does the benefit of availing yourself of this division of labor.
In addition to their expertise, plumbers and other members of the building trades also typically have, in my experience, non-expert opinions that are quite different from the opinions of my social circle, and also different (albeit less extremely so) from the opinions of the median American.
The building trades are a dramatically more male-skewing group than the general population, for starters. They have below-average formal education, but also above-median incomes. And the upshot is that the average plumber is more politically conservative than the average American, so if you ask plumbers about politics, you’re probably going to hear some right-wing views in response.
Most of the time, this is not relevant, because you’re probably going to ask a plumber about plumbing, not politics. Sometimes, though, these things intersect. There’s a push to get people to switch to electric heat pumps, away from gas or oil-fired furnaces, which is driven in part by decarbonization concerns. And you hear a lot of skepticism of heat pumps, often based on outdated information or older technology, from HVAC professionals — skepticism that blends real professional insight with aspects of self-interest, and also just generalized politics.
You also see this when business executives talk about economic policy. On the one hand, CEOs and investors have genuine economic insights that it would be foolish to ignore. But they also tend to have right-wing views and don’t do a great job of distinguishing the two.
And in the other direction, you see it in the overwhelmingly left-wing skew of academic experts — not just in the humanities, but among scientists and others with invaluable technical expertise.
In theory, a person has their technical insights and they have their political opinions, and these are often separate issues. But from climate change to Covid, we spend a lot of time thinking and arguing about policy issues that have an important technical dimension. Real human beings don’t, and probably can’t, hermetically seal off their technical knowledge from their values. If a community of experts has diverse values, you can pretty easily triangulate where the real expertise lies by seeing what the experts agree on despite their other disagreements.
But when the community of experts all share very similar values, and those values diverge significantly from the broad public, the stage is set for clashes and, ultimately, a crisis of confidence in expertise.
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