We’ve discussed before the expansion-team effect. For newer readers, this is when a sport, like soccer, is gaining in popularity, the enthusiasm leading to the creation of new teams, like those in the States.
The new teams are seeded with a few aging veterans, once great but now fading in glory. The remaining players are gathered from those that couldn’t make the cut in the extant leagues, with a few here and there being fresh to the system.
Though one or two surprises are discovered in the new teams, they are not as good as the older, more experienced ones. It’s hard for them to catch up, too, because the top money still goes to the classic league. And also for the obvious reason that there’s only so much top talent in the world.
Nothing wrong with that. Fun can still be had in these lower tiers.
But imagine the expansion team effect became mandated, or at least officially encouraged everywhere. In order to be considered a good person you must play on a soccer team. Accordingly, teams spring up everywhere.
They can’t all be above average, and indeed the more teams there are the lower the average quality. At least half of the players will be terrible. Even the quality of the top teams can suffer because of the increased bureaucracy necessary to handle all these teams. Monies that would have gone to the elite are instead spread out more widely.
Well, we could go on with the analogy, but you get the idea. The same thing happened with expert certification, i.e. university “degrees”.
From the few elite universities, we now have many. To be considered a good person you must have a “degree” from one. Bottom-tier good people have just a BA or BS, which is no longer an indicator of quality because of the expansion-team effect.
It should come as no surprise that even those teaching kiddies their ABCs have to have “Masters”, whereas in the olden days even “degrees” weren’t needed. That’s inflation for you.
Not everybody has to have a PhD yet to be considered worthy. Still, to be an expert and be quoted on TV once must be a PhD. The expansion-team effect worked its erosion here, too. A PhD now is not the same as it was, and the value can only go lower the more that are awarded.
Not just in number, but in the range of fields. Even “Studies” fields give PhDs. Even “Education”! Soon, everybody will have to be called “doctor”.
Because there are so many more experts, it’s easier to find one to say what you want him to say. Government in particular has made use of this ability, staffing bureaucracies with experts galore, all of whom think they, and especially their unassailable thoughts, are worthy because they have been certified.
Which brings us to midwits, which we’ve also seen before. Browsing The American Sun leads us to this: “Weaponising Midwits in the COVID-19 War on Civil Society“, an article which has a most succinct definition of midwit.
It refers to someone who is smart enough, for example, to manage to obtain a college degree but who is not capable of really understanding what they’ve learned or what they’re trying to learn in another discipline. This, however, is coupled with an absolute assurance on their part that what they’ve been told by some progressive authority figure is unquestionably true and “smart” and that it’s “dumb” to challenge it.
Experts are midwits in positions of authority.
That author goes on—as we do in our book subtitled How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe—to describe how midwits run around screaming “believe the science!” and the deleterious effects this has.
We see this everywhere: “America’s self-anointed virus experts and social-media giants are silencing doctors with contrarian views in an apparent effort to shut down scientific debate.”
Big Tech fingers their own experts—easy to find because of the expansion-effect—and uses these experts’ pronouncements to censor views which go against “the” science. There’s a bit of feedback here, where expert views influence the beliefs of our oligarchs and rulers, but the process starts out with money seeking out desired opinions.
Experts gave us masks (more on the CDC’s hilarious study tomorrow), and those idiotic floor stickers showing us how far apart to stand. One inch over the line will kill you dead.
We experience a plague of experts. Nothing can be done without their okay. Listen to this hag below describe how experts say not burning books is bad.
The Star’s @EVYSTADIUM with the latest on the Dr. Seuss controversy. 6 books have been discontinued due to racial discrimination. But how about those in libraries? Follow us @TikTokCanada: https://t.co/sQJEjDo9Vl
Read @DanicaSamuel story here: https://t.co/lhmykIIVwD pic.twitter.com/N7prj7I00u
— Toronto Star (@TorontoStar) March 4, 2021
How did she find these experts? Easy: they volunteer themselves, flooding the information pathways hoping for recognition.
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PEOPLE WANT THIS. SO GIVE IT UP. IF ENOUGH CARED, SOMETHING WOULD BE DONE. NOTHING IS DONE, THEREFORE, PEOPLE WANT THIS. Adapt and be quiet. You LOST. Stupid won.
We did lose. I for one welcome our nose ringed masters.
“Plague of Experts”. Perfect
I like the term “midwits”. I used to call them “people educated beyond their capacity to think” but midwit is more succinct. 🙂
These were words of warning from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from over 45 years ago:
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/words-of-warning-to-america-september-1975/
I believe they now apply to US as a people, no longer the U.S. as a country
“We, we the dissidents of the USSR, don’t have any tanks, we don’t have any weapons, we have no organization. We don’t have anything. Our hands are empty. We have only a heart and what we have lived through in the half century of this system. And when we have found the firmness within ourselves to stand up for our rights, we have done so. It’s only by firmness of spirit that we have withstood. And if I am standing here before you, it’s not because of the kindness or the good will of communism, not thanks to detente, but thanks to my own firmness and your firm support. They knew that I would not yield one inch, not one hair. And when they couldn’t do more they themselves fell back.”
Uh, anyone with a bullring piercing is not a serious person.
They are some type of carny or circus freak.
That’s an excellent article. This is key:
“As such, the essence of midwittery is not so much based on level of intelligence as it is the willingness to commit oneself to believing oftentimes false propositions based on progressive psychological and/or ideological convenience.”
We all have fun with the Grug/Genius vs Midwit Bell Curve meme, because it’s a snappy way to convey the idea, but I think there’s a third dimension that’s not easily captured by IQ score, which is herd instinct; the tendency to adopt prevailing social taboos as one’s own.
The majority of people are driven by the fear of being out of step with the prevailing moral vision of a society, however defined. If a particular social morality is relatively virtuous, then most people will signal virtue and condemn vice. If, on the other hand, the prevailing morality is to believe obviously absurd things, then they’ll signal absurdity and condemn realism. This herd response is found in people of all intelligence levels.
The Midwit Problem is a peculiarity of WEIRD societies, which exalt technical expertise and “complexity” (rather than, say, piety or charity) as the keys to high status. The people we call “midwits” would be conformist moral scolds in any social arrangement, but just as water takes on the shape of its container, they would take on any moral vision whatever.
Thought this is an appropriate antidote to midwittery :
“Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”
? Richard Feynman
We once had an excellent solution to the common scold.
https://imgur.com/smBguw2
Specialized people in every area are necessary. That´s not the problem. The problem is that not so many decades ago, intelligence was a vaster, more complex concept, diversity regarding interests was encouraged, and the elite specialists were not only that. And when they were, less focused, broader intelligences were in charge. But now, specialists are microscopes pointing at a tiny portion of the whole spectrum of variables. And of course, there are no less focused, broader intelligences in charge yet…
The Covid era is the perfect example of this: you got mediocre leaders who are very glad to delegate their actions (and their consequences) to “experts”. And the experts know nothing about anything that´s not their field of expertise. So you got a world at whose helm there are people who exclusively care about the only variable they know. They use every resource available to get a particular outcome relating that variable, and don´t give a shit about anything else. So if they to have to mask, confine, destroy, silence, to get a “0”, or a “25”, at a particular time limit, they do it. The irony is that they don´t get to affect positively their variable, but they dramatically affect the other ones.
Like William F. Buckley, I’d rather be governed by 2000 randoms chosen from the phone book (or perhaps these days we’d go with 2000 frog anons on Twitter) than by the midwit striver class that dominates government and corporate bureaucracies everywhere these days.
I read that horrid thing. The inmates are running the asylum.
An expert is someone who knows more and more about less until he knows everything about nothing (and nothing about everything).
Also relevant the midwittery of experts is the Peter Principle, where people are promoted to their level of incompetence.
re.: Evy Kwong and Dr. Seuss: Well, at least Drag Queen Story Hour isn’t threatened, so long as the Drag Queens avoid reading Dr. Seuss.
Check out the definition of “pole turtle”.
Every so often out in the midwest you may come across a turtle high-centered on a pole. The turtle did not put itself there and has no idea of how to extricate itself from this quandary. It was simply elevated beyond its abilities by someone else.
Wait! What??
How are we supposed to know what to do without Experts? How are we know Right from Wrong without Experts in Right & Wrong?
How will we know what to eat? where to go? what to drive? and how cold our bedrooms must be in order to save the earth, save the polar bears, save Miami, and little Greta?
I mean, thinking for myself is haaaaaarrrrrd! Makes my head hurt. And it hurts that much more if I’m required to actually, like, do research and stuff. It’s so much easier just to find an Expert to tell me, you know, whatever!
I wrote my Congresswoman the other day to tell her Mask Mandates must end. She replied that she’s depending on the Experts to say Stop or Go, so there. I challenged her to an Expert-Off, seeing her Experts and raising her my own. I’m waiting to hear. Presumably she’s checking with her Experts to come-up with a response.
At least that’s my Expert Guess.