I especially liked the London/Brexit examples (unfortunately, I’ve had to deal with the “police have no funds for theft” conversation too).
On the “experts as priests” analogy: I think it misses something important. Historically, priests (or the Clergy) had wide-ranging authority (religious, political, financial, legal) which is precisely why liberal societies built separation of powers. I guess I don’t perceive “Experts” as generalists in that sense. They’re people who’ve specialized in a narrow slice of the system, and ideally should only be deferred to within that slice.
What I’ve thought of before is this: maybe the deeper failure mode isn’t that we have “priests,” but that we silo experts so completely. Each chunk of knowledge is developed in isolation, with little incentive to situate it in the larger system. This produces blind spots and coordination failures, not because expertise is bad, but because it’s rarely built with systems-thinking or structured cooperation.
I loved the encouragement to remember our sense of agency rather than just feeling stuck!
I especially liked the London/Brexit examples (unfortunately, I’ve had to deal with the “police have no funds for theft” conversation too).
On the “experts as priests” analogy: I think it misses something important. Historically, priests (or the Clergy) had wide-ranging authority (religious, political, financial, legal) which is precisely why liberal societies built separation of powers. I guess I don’t perceive “Experts” as generalists in that sense. They’re people who’ve specialized in a narrow slice of the system, and ideally should only be deferred to within that slice.
What I’ve thought of before is this: maybe the deeper failure mode isn’t that we have “priests,” but that we silo experts so completely. Each chunk of knowledge is developed in isolation, with little incentive to situate it in the larger system. This produces blind spots and coordination failures, not because expertise is bad, but because it’s rarely built with systems-thinking or structured cooperation.
I loved the encouragement to remember our sense of agency rather than just feeling stuck!