Kurt Schlichter: "Why Are All The Experts Such Dopes?"

This is largely right, and I've said such things several times.

The main caveat, of course: they're not all dopes--not by a damn sight.

A paradigm example: high-energy physicists.

The real experts--the good experts--aren't any dopier than anybody else...and are, in fact, almost certainly less so. About their actual area of expertise. More on that caveat below.

But there are several problems:

First, as one of my colleagues suggested to me a year or so ago--with respect to science, anyway--it's not science that's dopey, it's "science communication"--which is a thing. E.g.: science journalism. 

But that's not the whole story.

From the perspective of a layperson, anyway: the science/expert bureaucracy is dopey. E.g.: funding of science and other expertise.

And: it's dopey largely because it's been taken over by the progressive left. And the progressive left politicizes whatever it touches. See, e.g.: education.

Also: many experts (including many scientists) have themselves become politicized, and have politicized much of their actual discipline and research/scholarship. 

My guess: the more public-facing and not-actually-scientific/expert-ish the fringes of expertise/science become, the more politicized/dopey they become. That's to say: science communication/journalism is probably the hardest hit--but the rot does permeate toward the core. From my perspective, lots and lots of people--even smart, knowledgeable people--are being sucked into the progressive left worldview. Even more people are allowing themselves to be willingly sucked into it just to stay out of trouble. Another group hasn't been sucked in, but remains silent about the problem--again, because they don't want any trouble. Mainly: they don't want a scarlet letter 'R' pasted onto them.

Two of the main problems, one of them mentioned by Schlichter: 

(a) Many disciplines and pseudo-disciplines are bullshit; they're mostly about topics about which we don't have any actual, substantive knowledge. They're mainly the realm of what we can loosely call mere opinion. E.g.: much of the humanities and social sciences. Including: grievance studies.

(b) Many experts in legit fields where actual knowledge is acquired now make pronouncements outside their actual field of expertise while pretending to speak with the authority their judgments have within their field. Just one recent example: the WHO and CDC making pronouncements about "stigma"--in particular the alleged "stigma" associated with using place-of-origin and place-of-discovery names for viruses and diseases. 

The conservative rejection of expertise (as I've claimed before) is better described as a rejection of pseudo-expertise.

That's all I got.