The internet has provided us with an abundance of information. Never before did we have the opportunity to get the information we needed. Beforehand, everything was to be related to experts. If you wanted to fix your toilet, you had to call an expert. If you wanted to know if you were sick, you went to the only doctor in your village. If you wanted to know the value of an object, you had to go to a banker. Nowadays, that has changed. A simple search on Google and all the answers are in front of me. Because of this, I was able to fix my toilet last week. Did not need a plumber. Yay, internet!
However, it seems that this also has other consequences. On the internet, everyone has the opportunity to become an expert. I do not mean this in the practical sense. I mean that people can be regarded as experts by other people without having the necessary credentials. Before the Internet, you had to systematically study to achieve the privilege of being an expert in a certain subject. This is no longer necessarily the case. Now people can give someone expert status by watching them and following them on social media, even though they might have no idea what they are talking about. On the topic of plumbing, people will figure out the charlatans quickly. If their method does not work and my toilet continues to be broken, then it is obvious that that person is not an expert in plumbing. However, this becomes much harder in abstract topics such as politics.
Brian Leiter[1] has called this expert the epistemic arbiter or epistemic authority. Epistemic comes from the word episteme, which means knowledge. Then, this means the authority on a specific kind of knowledge. And that is exactly what an expert is. You trust what they say about their specific topic to be right because they have investigated it thoroughly. This does not mean that you cannot ask critical questions, but you allow that the expert at least knows quite a bit about the topic.
Many times, we need an epistemic arbiter to function. Nearly all of our knowledge comes from a certain expert. The things we learn in school are taught by teachers, who have studied the subjects and have the necessary expertise to teach us. The deeper we go in a particular subject, the more expertise one needs to have in a particular subject. If we are sick and we need medication, we trust that our doctor knows what kind of medication we need and we take it. When a referee in a sports game calls out a player for breaking the rules, we believe that the referee knows the rules of the game; otherwise, he would not have been a referee.
Before the internet, the media would select people to discuss a specific topic. On climate change, only the experts were asked for their opinion, because it is believed (most of the time rightly so) that the expert knows most about the subject. In that sense, it doesn’t matter what the average Joe thinks about it, since they know nothing of it. There was only that much screen time available as well. Nowadays, that’s different. Now, many people who know nothing about certain subjects are still weighing their two cents, and some of them are believed by a small group of people. Even worse, it seems that media companies feel like they need to platform these alternative opinions to ferment a ‘nuanced’ discussion.[2]
Take the example of Terrence Howard. He believed that he was inventing a new type of math. It has been highly disregarded. It was the ramblings of a crazy person and even disproven by many math experts.[3] Even so, Terrence Howard gets quite a bit of attention, even though his math is bogus, claiming that 1 x 1 = 2, which in ordinary math is quite impossible.[4] Another example is Steven Crowder weighing in on the topic of climate change, something 97% of climate scientists agree is influenced by human behaviour.[5] Still, people watch Crowder and think he is an expert on this topic. These people get debunked and quickly forgotten by the media. But in politics again, these opinions keep on proliferating. Ben Shapiro is still a popular conservative voice in America, even though more often than not, he does not know what he is talking about.[6]
In a sense, the internet has opened the marketplace of ideas exponentially. There is a plethora of voices that we can listen to, and every perspective and every point is taken in. When done well and critically, this is a good thing. Indeed, there are many situations where relying on an epistemic authority can be dangerous. Doctors, for example, have the responsibility towards their patients to give them the best care. But a doctor who gets a lot of money from a pharmaceutical company to test some risky medication and recommends this medication does not take on his responsibility as an epistemic authority. Or at the beginning of the 20th century, eugenics was a popular field in biology, and many racist scientists claimed that there was a proven genetic inferiority in non-white races.[7] Here, they also did not take on their responsibility as epistemic authority because their own ideological preferences took over. There are numerous examples where the blind faith in an epistemic authority can have disastrous consequences.
So how does someone become an epistemic authority? To understand this, we have to go back to ancient Greece. According to Socrates, one can only be an expert when one knows both the theoretical as well as the practical aspects of the skill. Someone very good at plumbing, for example, but who cannot share how he does it, cannot be named an expert. This person then might be highly skilled, but ignorant. The other way might be someone who theoretically knows how to plumb a toilet but has never done so in practice. He will be highly knowledgeable, but incapable. To discredit an expert is to undermine either their theoretical ability or practical ability. The current problem in an epistemic authority is then that the legitimations of expertise, such as a degree, are being heavily undermined.
Undermining expertise does not come without risk. And it hurts to see that even intellectuals have begun tearing down the system that produces experts in the field, calling the universities ‘rotten’.[8] Even though universities have in some sense deserved this critique, it is not without risk. When you disregard the system that produces experts, then who do people listen to when they need to know something? The easy answer is the competent person. Again, this is easy to perceive with the plumber. Either he fixes your toilet well, or he doesn’t. But what about the more scientific aspects, which require years and years of study? It would be disastrous to claim that people who have studied to become experts are, in essence, not. It only results in a fractionation of pseudo-expert groups. You could also call it an echo chamber. People will just listen to those who say things they already agree with. And if they don’t, they just have to find the person who will.
Just as a side note, but I deem this important, is that social media companies highly profit from this. Their algorithm is constructed so that it rewards the posts getting the most clicks, because those posts will bring in the most ad revenue, and then they can make more money. The posts that get the most clicks are those that are the most radical and extreme. This is not limited to political discourse but also to pranks or challenges.[9] This means that social media companies are profiting from the radicalization of human behavior. This has many ethical consequences. Facebook’s algorithm, for example, radicalized the security forces in Myanmar, resulting in the attempt to decimate the Rohingya.[10]
The problem is that many posts on social media are not curated as they are in traditional media. As Leiter argued, the gatekeepers in the media filter out the insignificant information. But that only works when there is some degree of trust in the system, which seems to be lacking. Many then turn to the internet for ‘better’ options, but many of these are not trustworthy. It is therefore ironic that many who no longer trust the experts then go to those who are inherently not experts. But maybe that’s the whole reason why they do it.
I do not have a clear answer on how to solve this. I do believe that there are two options open to us. The first is the responsibility of the expert to take up their responsibility and to try and debunk many pseudo-experts. The media should play a role here and should again curate the experts. But this can only go so far. Censorship should not be the goal here. Therefore, we also need to put responsibility on the consumers of media to be critical of their own views and the experts they believe. One big factor that would contribute to this ability of critical thinking is education, but damn it, that has not been doing all too well lately.
[1] Leiter, B. (2024). Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of Epistemic Authority. Daedalus, 153(3), 91–104. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_02091 Also: Leiter, B. (2022). The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America. Geo. JL & Pub. Pol’y, 20, 903.
[2] See for example the many Jubilee videos where one person (for example progressive) is surrounded by twenty others (far-right conservatives). It baffles me that Jubilee thinks that this would enhance nuanced debate. I believe that this is primarily for profit since extreme clips go viral and then produce income.
[3] See for example Neil Degrasse Tyson’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uLi1I3G2N4&ab_channel=StarTalk
[4] Another interesting read is this article: https://www.edpost.com/stories/terrence-howard-a-masterclass-in-pseudo-scientific-absurdity
[5] https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/do-scientists-agree-on-climate-change/
[6] I have read one book by Ben Shapiro: The Right Side of History. It was historically inaccurate and when a BBC reporter tried to call Shapiro out on this, Shapiro left the program. Link:
[7] See for example https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism and https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/
[8] See for example Jordan Peterson: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-our-rotten-rotting-universities
[9] Mr. Beast is a perfect example of this and has perfected using the algorithm to gain an enormous fortune.
[10] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/
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