When are experts not worthy of trust?

Author Justas Stankevičius

The mass media often emphasizes that a significant portion of the public does not trust experts. Distrust of experts is considered a lack of education so it is worth taking a look at the question when it is rational to disregard the opinion of experts. 

Experts as leaders of objectivity

The media call someone in the name of an expert who has academic or other affiliations of public recognition. These people are often used in response to public opinion in the absence of “who are you to disagree with an expert’s opinion?”. Often an expert position is the main part of his credit card rather than a more detailed part of the basics of his position, as the detailed basis does not fit into the duration of the mass media airtime. Therefore, the influence of experts on public opinion is based almost exclusively on trust. We can remember the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when the absolute majority of the world’s countries criticized the Chinese Communist Party’s blogs for controlling the spread of the virus. But among the critics, there was no World Health Organization that on the contrary was a full supporter of China: it was that in a country where it introduced travel bans going to China or what is fundamental and for no reason, it makes anti-globalization decisions. To what the World Health Organization as a health policy expert has led to the world we see for ourselves. This is a great example of where expert opinion can be formed by certain interests of people. We can find a bunch of such examples in history as well. “People who remember longer periods” who measure the objections of one expert to another or themselves and again reasonably begin to distrust the experts. Contradictory positions of experts can also arise from a lack of competence and a very difficult situation. An important aspect is that the support of media recognition experts which is considered almost always is perfectly connected with the economic-political elite. A good example is the Chernobyl accident. During the Chernobyl accident, experts lied about the scale of the accident and its possible consequences. And this is natural because the salaries of experts are paid from the budgets of state, international funds, or large corporations. This means that conflicts of interest on certain topics are inevitable. Probably the most relevant example of this is the “fact-checkers”. Project Veritas is a project that is designed to expose us to the various interiors of corporations that actual inspectors are politically pressured to filter out certain ideas and reject them when in a position of authority. They also revealed that Twitter applies machine training to automatically qualify Trump voters and delete their appointments or blacklist them, which limits the visibility of their posts on the Twitter platform. The fact that today’s mass media such as CNN with its content and political bias is getting closer to the Soviet-era or today’s Russian media. There are many examples to substantiate this when CNN narratives were deconstructed. “CNN’s own media coordinator”, Christian Sierra said in a private conversation that “everyone is trying to pretend that there is still something best for journalistic integrity. But at 9 in the morning the big boss Jeff Zucker calls you and tells you what to do under the devils”. From the explanatory clear conclusion that in cases where experts have a clear conflict of interest, then the distrust becomes manifestly justified. 

Marginalization of people who do not believe the experts

The marginalization of people who do not believe experts can be seen as psychological violence and an attempt to silence dissenting citizens as people marginalized by the mass media are isolated from the community and discredited. In other words, experts are often an instrument of propaganda On politically sensitive topics the expert’s opinion must be treated with a particular caution: propaganda and the marginalization of people who do not believe in experts must be expected in advance. Therefore, equating citizens who are skeptical with modern experts is sometimes not only unethical but also reminiscent of authoritarianism.