One of the themes here has been the falseness of the great man theory of progress and the falseness of systems of meritocracy and expertise - mandarins, elites and the like - and stratified, exclusionary institutions. Earlier posts about James Surowieki, Scott Page and Lu Hong among others grappled with the deficiencies of expertise as we commonly think of it, suggesting that there are ways to overcome them with group approaches. Another thread is critical of the blunders of supposed experts who seemed unaware of information and relationships that were common knowledge among practitioners, and an intellectually crippling dismissal of the accomplishments of ancient people and native societies.

Though not explicitly dicussed there have been allusions to Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” It has been discussed on many blogs and I expect that you have already read a few reviews and comments about it. This Louis Menand review has been linked by others and is useful since it goes beyond Tetlock's narrow thesis that the predictions of political race handicappers and policy wonks are no better than ordinary folks or actuarial tables.

People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. . .

There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.

. . . people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes.

Read the article for a fuller discussion of Tetlock's ideas but for now hold the thought about the problems with expertise and experts in general. The interesting bit is more that seemingly ordinary people are pretty good than that experts are unclothed emperors. That concept is explored with vigor in Clifford D. Conner's 'A People's History of Science', reviewed here by Jonathan Weiner.

"GIVE thy heart to letters," an Egyptian father advised his son on a piece of papyrus more than 3,000 years ago, in the hope that his child would choose a life of writing over a life of manual labor. "I have seen the metal worker at his toil before a blazing furnace. . . . His fingers are like the hide of the crocodile, he stinks more than the eggs of fish. And every carpenter who works or chisels, has he any more rest than the plowman?"

Laborers are "generally held in bad repute," Xenophon wrote about 700 years later, "and with justice." Manual jobs keep men too busy to be decent companions or good citizens, "so that men engaged in them must ever appear to be both bad friends and poor defenders of their country."

Clifford D. Conner thinks this kind of snobbery has distorted the writing of history from ancient times to the present, because historians are scribes themselves and it is a clean, soft hand that holds the pen. . .

Even the great scientists honor the great. "If I have seen further," Newton wrote, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." At the same time, Newton also stood on the backs of "anonymous masses of humble people," as Conner says, "untold thousands of illiterate artisans." An accomplished army of the anonymous bequeathed him their tools, data, problems, ideas and even, Conner argues, the scientific method itself.

Conner's book works best in the early chapters. Hunter-gatherers and early farmers domesticated plants and animals and gave us corn, wheat, rice, beef, pork, chicken, almost every kind of food we eat. They changed the world more than modern genetic engineers have done, so far. Pacific islanders navigated not only by the stars but also by wave patterns; lying down in their canoes, they could read the stars with their eyes and the swells with their backs. Anonymous blacksmiths added tin to copper and made an alloy that is much stronger and yet also more malleable than copper - bronze. Since copper and tin are rarely found together in the ground, the invention of bronze probably required a long series of experiments. Generations of experimenters sweated in the mouth of the furnace. Tough, trial-and-error, sometimes live-or-die work like this was gradually refined into the intellectual and rarefied pursuit we call science. The Greeks didn't invent science; they learned from the Egyptians, Babylonians and Phoenicians. And the Industrial Revolution could not have taken place in England without the work of brewers, salt makers, miners and canal diggers.

Many other examples can be cited, such as the formulation of Damascus steel, not duplicated until quite recently, and any number of agricultural skills such as soil analysis, weather prediction and ecological relationships. What is Terra Preta? We still don't know.

Conner laments the closing off of science to society, citing great accomplishments by amateurs such as Anton van Leeuwenhoek and John Harrison who were working stiffs who had interesting hobbies that they pursued obsessively and made big contributions to society.

I think that it is a phase, and that ICT is melting the walls so studiously erected by elites seeking to monopolize knowledge. As more libraries go online and the audience for books and papers grows I expect to see a resurgence in home brewed science by amateurs. Some have likened this to protestantism enabled by printing, growing literacy and cheaper books. The seemingly unrelated trends noted by some of a decline in the number of scientists and engineers being trained, and a decline of male graduate numbers may be an aspect of the tyranny of those soft handed scribes descended from Xenophon and their eons long disdain for more robust humans. The central characteristic they discriminated against wasn't so much the physical part as a way of seeing, knowing and working that differed from the verbal style of the talking trades.

Hackers are perhaps a foretaste. They have mainly been hacking computer hardware and software of late, but bio-hackers are on the horizon and nano-hackers aren't too far behind. The constraints of big science are being relieved and could move innovation out of institutional settings. Computing power is a large part of that. We all have super-computers on our desks now.

It's a crap shoot to try to see constellations in this random scatter of dots, but perhaps I'll do no worse than the experts by entertaining the notion that what we are seeing is the decline of modern monasteries - universities - as centers of innovation and education. It isn't that they are doing something bad or wrong so much as that they are simply becoming obsolete, and that their focus on indoctrination isn't so much an abdication of their responsibilities as adaptation to changing circumstances. It may be that fairly soon that is all they'll have left. They will, in effect, be monasteries pure and simple once again though the religion they practice is secular humanism. That won't last either, but it's a next phase.

That's a fairly timid dot connection exercise if we consider that those hackers might just hack themselves, vasten themselves and in effect become another species. Each individual might have in virtuality all of the facilities that support scientists in institutions, and more. The pace of innovation would quicken as well as becoming distributed, assuming that tedious physical reality was of ongoing interest.

Update:

Speaking of experts and distributed wisdom . . .

Unlike Wikipedia's populist emphasis on the collective wisdom of the masses, the new Digital Universe project will feature two kinds of content, that vetted by experts and other material which is not (and both will be clearly marked as such). The goal is to produce material that is accurate and authoritative for use in citations—a task for which Wikipedia is not currently suitable. Sanger and his partner Joe Firmage have already recruited several experts for the site, which they hope to launch early next year, and they are unapologetic about turning to professors for expertise. . .

The basic problem with the project is revenue; specifically, the lack of it. The vision for Digital Universe is for it to be both free of charge and free from advertising as well.

"The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet," said Firmage. "Instead of building it through Web robots, we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world."

It doesn't take a math major to see that Free Content + No Ads + Paid Experts = y, and that y is a value substantially lower than zero. How will Digital Universe pay the bills? Their initial payroll is being funded by the US$10 million raised over the last three years from angel investors; beyond that, the company hopes to earn funds by selling (wait for it...) branded internet access. More power to them, of course, but does this really sound like a viable business model for such an ambitious project? The men behind Digital Universe are already calling it "the PBS of the Web," which leads us to wonder if we can expect routine appeals to the pocketbook in the middle of Anne of Green Gables a peer-reviewed article on climate change when the necessary funds do not materialize. So perhaps it's not that different from Wikipedia after all?

This is in part a consequence of the John Seigenthaler Wikipedia scandal, but the basic tension has always been there. The current focus is on citation.

The goal is to produce material that is accurate and authoritative for use in citations — a task for which Wikipedia is not currently suitable.

I'll grant the authoritative part but accurate? Hardly. What you get is the party line. Sometimes that will be accurate but not always or perhaps even often. Those yearning for authority and certainty will continue to be frustrated since the vast majority of issues are still - will eternally be - open questions with provisional answers and pragmatic stances taken by those who have work to do.