I try not to write about politics anymore, but I'd like to think the Aslan/Green exchange is about something bigger than partisan politics and represents a victory for anyone who thinks of themselves as one of the good guys.
Contemporary society has become so postmodern that it is skeptical of the very idea of expertise. When we hear an expert speaking on something, we think they're just one more salesman pushing one more product. Salesmen have facts and figures too, yet they always seem to omit those facts that don't support their desired end. Understandably, we've all gotten pretty cynical when someone claims to be presenting just the facts, ma'am.
What makes this three minute video so fascinating and important is that Aslan strongly asserts that we need to get over all that shit. This is the most vigorous, concise statement I've yet seen of what I'll call The Nate Silver Lesson. Remember when conservatives thought Nate Silver was not a witch but merely a partisan hack? How did that work out for them?
Experts exist. Plenty of very smart people spend their entire lives pouring through hundreds of thousands of pages of Ancient Greek, developing ridiculously complex statistical models, and doing a million other really cool things. The best part: they do so not to get over, but because they want to do the best possible job capturing reality, in all its complexity and messiness. They constantly ask themselves whether their biases could be compromising their ability to accurately depict reality, and they take steps to compensate for those biases. A worldwide community vets their work, and the vast majority of its members share the same commitment to presenting the world as accurately as possible. The resulting product that they put out is measurably more accurate than the ranting of some person who's on TV because s/he is entertaining or looks like what we think an expert should look like.
If the notion of expert seems less than robust these days, it may be due less to the failings of the experts themselves and more to the inability of society to distinguish real experts from people who can act the part and still say what the audience wants to hear, rather than the truth.
