“Expert” opinions from uninformed generalists

Alec Karakatsanis has a really excellent thread that is very much worth reading. It begins with this post; click the date to see the rest:

The New York Times has a small group of people with very similar conventional status quo politics but no serious qualifications and no expertise (mis)explain complex issues to millions of subscribers through daily and weekly email newsletters.

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) March 3, 2023

I see this as another example of the Dunning-Kruger effect: NY Times columnists who don’t know how little they know about some field, weighing in with assumed authority. Combine that with the fact that the NY Times is not a learning organization* and thus is incapable of course correction, and you have a big ship headed toward the rocks.

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* When Margaret Sullivan was Public Editor of the NY Times, responsible for speaking to editors and journalists with the voice of readers who complained about errors and bad framing in the Times, the editors and journalists (and opinion columnists) would listen to the complaints and investigate. But their investigation began with, and was based on, the premise that they themselves could not possibly be in error. Thus their ingenuity was exercised in finding the source of the problem somewhere else — anywhere else, really. What they inevitably came up with was that the readers had read it wrong, or that the reader simply did not understand the issues, or — though never explicitly stated but sometimes implied — the readers were complaining in bad faith. The editors, journalists, and columnists, however, never even considered that they might be at fault.