Nifty title, eh? Bet a paper with that title would get someone funding.

Okay, here’s the problem.

The further the modern world continues to grow, expand, specialize, and deepen, the more human knowledge is being applied than ever before. This knowledge covers an ever-wider scope of human knowledge, and the percentage of said knowledge that any single individual dwindles accordingly.

At the same time, these various forms of knowledge and understanding become more and more powerful, and have a larger potential and actual effect on the lives of individual citizens of democratic societies.

And every citizen of a democracy is expected to have an informed opinion on matters of public importance.

So as we progress, more and more issues of greater and greater importance require the very kind of specialized knowledge and understanding that eludes the average specialized citizen. The idea of an informed public making informed decisions is confounded daily by the inability of any one person to know enough to understand all the facts surrounding certain complex issues.

Take climate change. There are, at most, a million people in the world who truly understand the science behind climate change. There’s maybe a hundred million more who, like me, understand science well enough to get the gist of it.

The rest of the world can’t examine the facts and draw their own conclusions. We science types often think they should, but we should not fool ourselves into thinking that they can. They simply do not have the aptitude or the inclination, and we can sit on the sidelines shouting “But this effects us all!” all we like, it will not change this fact.

But say you are quite good at science, and can examine and analyze the facts despite being outside the scientific community dedicated to climate change.

What about nanotechnology? How about self-driving cars? How about economics? Politics? Law? International trade?

There might well be people out there who could know enough to have an informed opinion on all those matters and more, but they are a tiny minority of the population whose lives are influenced by them, and for the rest, informed opinion is impossible.

But what of education? Surely we can educate people on these matters! But the thing is, if you can’t evaluate the facts and draw your own conclusions, you can’t decide who to believe. Sure, experts can do what they can to inform the public, but without the ability to truly understand the subject, all experts are equal and therefore all expert opinions are equal.

And that’s how in the modern world, expertise gets treated like opinion. The existence of true expertise and hence true experts who should be trusted on matters becomes harder and harder to establish in the modern ultra-connected world, where no matter how honest and well informed an expert might be, there is someone with similar bona fides saying the exact opposite.

Therefore, it has never been easier to simply find an expert who agrees with whatever it is you already believe or are inclined to believe. Not even the rough democracy of expert polling can fight this phenomenon. Thanks to the spread of a kind of lazy paranoia, people are well equipped to declare that everyone who disagrees with them is part of a conspiracy to suppress the truth, and thus belief is maintained no matter how broad a consensus there is amongst experts on a topic.

As long as there is a single expert, however inept or corrupt, who agrees with you, the rest of the world is wrong. After all, everyone used to think the world was flat, right? (

So what we have is an ever increasing gap between what people ought to know in regards to important issues that have a deep impact on our lives and what it is reasonable to expect them to know.

There are the communicators, true. The various people in the chain of public understanding that can understand things well enough to explain it to people who are less specialized, and so forth down to the public.

But that only goes so far. There is an irreducible complexity to most subjects that no amount of simplification (or “dumbing down”) can solve. The average person will never grasp more than maybe one or two of these, in their areas of interest and/or expertise. Everything else will require simply taking someone’s word for it.

This goes against the very roots of democratic thinking. Democracy is inherently hostile to authority. The very idea of believing someone else without examining the facts oneself is considered to be, in a sense, a failure of one’s duty as a citizen of an individualistic, pluralistic society.

We are expected to make up our own minds. What exactly that means, nobody knows.

This conflict between what is required of us as informed citizens and the percentage of what effects on which we can actually be informed is a major paradox of modern life. And we all feel the effects.

Nutrition experts say one thing, then the other. Politician change beliefs like a supermodel changes clothes. People gravitate to news sources they can trust, which in modern terms means ones that will never disagree with them. Professional sophists are hired by shadowy powers to try to mold public opinion through obfuscation, misdirection, and emotional manipulation. And through it all, objective truth becomes more elusive than ever.

Unfortunately, I have no solution for this problem. It is not as if modern societies can have officially sanctioned experts, and even if they did, nobody would believe them. The very people who seem solid and reliable today might get their opinions changed by commerce or professional pressure tomorrow. The more an expert is trusted, the greater the incentive for their corruption.

And so we are back to simply deciding based not on the facts but on who seems trustworthy to us, and that will always have a lot more to do with whether they are likely to say something that upsets us than it does to whether or not they are telling the truth, or even know what the hell they are talking about.

If you have any ideas for solutions, please leave them in the comments.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.