Can you contribute outside your area of expertise?
On authority, intellectual thugs, and whether Jesus and Paul Fayerabend are in disagreement
Most fields don’t like outsiders coming in and offering critiques, and I suspect the stated reason isn’t the same as the real reason. In the same way that everything is about sex, even if it isn’t about sex, I suspect all people have an automatic reaction when their authority is put into question.
It’s one thing when an expert in one area feels as if he’s equipped to comment on something else entirely. For example, you might critique Roger Penrose, a physicist, commenting on consciousness. More modern examples include Jordan Peterson jumping into the culture war, Trump getting into politics, and Eric Weinstein having opinions on nearly everything.
They claim that you need to understand a theory fully before you can critique it. In reality, being an outsider gives you an advantageous position from which you can see things for what they really are. Being an insider is what blinds you.
I’m being a little unfair. The expert generally has thought of and likely attempted many of the ideas that a fly-by-night intellectual might be exploring. The expert scientist may actually benefit from being within the walled garden since this will keep a certain level of amateur academics out.
Thoughts on thought thugs
The real problem with offering a critique is that you’re effectively a thug roaming through the night breaking windows. If you view the world as composed of information, it would explain why people often get just as angry about someone breaking their window as they do if you attack the foundations of their belief system. Of course you’re at an advantage. Nobody knows who you are. And of course you’re able to break in. Every belief system has fatal flaws.
A system that doesn’t have such flaws would have to be an axiomatic one. The best you could do in a critique of such system is to show that the empirical consequences of believing the axioms are terrible, or that the system is internally inconsistent.
According to Fayerabend, the scientific enterprise is itself dependent not only on proper methods of inquiry, but on competition with respect to the use of differing methods. He claims all theories are in some form of trouble or another. It would be more surprising if an outsider couldn’t find a flaw.
We need outsiders
In fact, in all things it should be easier to determine truth from the outside than from the inside. Law is premised on the idea that truth can be determined by a complete stranger who knows little about you. On this basis, we can even judge the legal system itself. And capitalism would be unworkable unless people could determine a high quality good apart from a low quality one.
As an outsider, you aren’t invested in any one solution as much as the experts who might be peddling various theories. It takes guts to peddle a theory, but if your income is dependent on your theory’s success, you will not be motivated to change your views when new information comes in. For this reason, academic tenure is extremely important. And if you can be kicked out of an institution (for almost any reason), then it’s always plausible that you were kicked out for your views and not for whatever the technical reason might be.
Intellectuals succeeding outside institutions, hardly threaten these institutions. Some universities are about 1000 years old, and the university system itself is very old. More likely, your challenges, if correct, will eventually get absorbed into these institutions. Even in this time of the internet, thinkers like Robin Hanson have figured it better to go back to school so that ideas they’ve developed outside of institutions can hold any public sway.
One of the real dangers of intellectual institutions is they can turn on the public.
If you prohibit outside thinkers, they may just go elsewhere, but outside of tenure lay other traps. You may find yourself swayed by what the market rewards. In an economic downturn, the incentive to sell yourself out increases. Conservative thinkers already have a pro-capitalist bias.
Christ vs. Fayerabend?
It’s possible conservative intellectual thought has suffered because they haven’t heeded Christ’s words. He tells us we cannot serve both God and money. He also warns that a house divided cannot stand.
The Catholic Church is the largest single denomination, and it benefits from this scale. Even if they are wrong on doctrinal issues, they benefit from their scale in the same way that secular intellectual institutions do. Eventually correctness is more important than absolute correctness at any one point. Catholics have Rene Girard, Ivan Illich, and others. Protestants, however, lack this kind of rich intellectual rigor. They spend more time spawning denominations rather that finding ways to stay united. Arguably, protestants point to what might happen if existing secular institutions took Fayerabend seriously enough. Instead of resolving differences, they would keep spawning new theories and scientific methods.
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