How did Expert Mode start?
Thinking again about the 20th century dark age, following up on previous item about politicians being forced to accept Expert Consensus instead of facts. Conclusion of that item was somewhat complicated.... the Experts are usually wrong and occasionally right. Observed facts are always right. If you want to be right, simply ignore the Experts and follow facts. On the rare occasions when the Experts agree with you, congratulate them for accidentally approaching the truth.

"Listen to the experts" is blessedly starting to recede from popular attitudes, at the same time when Satan, the ultimate and absolute Expert, has taken over all the mechanisms of government and culture in US/UK/EU. (Thanks, Ralph.)

When and how did Expert Worship start?

The when is clear and precise. My grandparents (born 1900) trusted their own observations and souls, and they were mostly right. My parents (born 1925) trusted the experts, and they were mostly wrong. My hippieshit generation (born 1950) continued trusting experts until very recently.

How did the GG see it? My parents began with the "superstitions" of previous generations. They rebelled against those "superstitions" by following the Educated Experts, and by becoming Educated Experts themselves. Most likely they were fooled by the Experts into seeing this change as a rebellion, just as we hippieshits were fooled into seeing our rigidly orthodox and robotically obedient behavior as a rebellion.

My father often talked along those lines. Everything that had been settled or designed by "superstition" (ie experiment), from diet to exercise to childbirth to breast-feeding to spanking to teaching to morality to front porches for Christ's sake, must be ruthlessly discarded and replaced by New Scientific Methods. Fortunately these beliefs were superficial and verbal, and he ran his actual life in the old experimental way without noticing that he was "superstitious".

So the breakpoint was just after WW2, but it's not clear that the war itself caused the break.

FDR solved problems without experts. He had his 'Brains Trust' but didn't use them. He listened more closely to farmers and businessmen and just plain people. He experimented constantly, revising his approach until it worked. Result: Everything worked.

[Sidenote: If you keep trying until it works, it will work. This is so fucking tautologically obvious that it should be the ONLY way we ever do things. Why isn't it?
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Later answer: Oh. I get it. We ARE doing it that way, but the official definition of it works is different from the sane one. For government, it works means Goldman receives more trillions. Thus every government action works perfectly, because every government action increases Goldman's cash flow. When an action fails to increase Goldman's cash flow by at least a trillion, government tries something else.]

Truman switched to Expert Mode in government, but I don't think that was the springboard for the broader change. I don't have an answer yet, so I'll just leave this question and come back later.

= = = = =

Seen on a broader time scale, the above sequence is itself an experiment by the people in general. We tried Fact Mode, then decided in 1945 (but WHY?) that reality didn't work. So we tried Expert Mode, and we're currently in the middle of deciding that Expert Mode doesn't work. Sliding back along the timeline, WW1 was equally destructive, and it led us to QUESTION the official certainties of that time. Why didn't we retain that attitude vector, which was only 25 years old in 1945? Why did we suddenly decide to follow one specific set of available experts, instead of questioning even more certainties?

Can't blame TV for this. TV wasn't common until 1955, and didn't master the art of injecting toxic sludge until 1970.

Labels: 20th century Dark Age, Emersonian justice

  ¶ 2:56 AM