This is a relatively famous New Yorker cartoon by Jason Katzenstein, depicting a generalization about male/female rhetorical styles. But it might as well be illustrating the way social and ideological media “democratize” (read: “devalue”) actual expertise.
A hyper-competitive, fast-moving media marketplace places a premium on “hot takes.” This is a two-part phenomenon. The competition for viewers and readers incentivizes reaching conclusions quickly, and reaching conclusions that are entertaining, controversial or otherwise click-worthy.
The quotation in the headline, from a song lyric by musician Bob Schneider, expresses the common human tendency to mistake confidence for expertise. Facing a glut of conflicting online proclamations, we don’t know who to trust. Our biases push us to trust those who seem competent, who express the most empathy with our situation, and who offer solutions that sound good to us. Anyone who has put a contract out to bid, and then hired the confident-but-faulty consultant/contractor has probably fallen prey to this phenomenon.
This same dynamic befalls people when they select their sources of politically-relevant information. Most policy problems are complex, and involve difficult value choices about which reasonable people disagree. For those subjects circumspection is a better indicator of wisdom than confidence about “solutions,” but the latter draws more eyeballs and clicks than the former. Beware of sources that feed you a consistent, palatable narrative. They are probably not telling you the entire story.
And if you search for news in an urgent rush, you will probably miss important parts of the story anyway. The glut of information facing today’s news consumers is one of the forces that some business consultants and psychologists credit with a measured decline in critical thinking in society.
But that decline is about behavior and habits, not our capacity for critical thinking. This skill may be atrophying, but it is not lost. It is a skill we can develop. In the constructed environment of the classroom, where professors can offer students grade-based incentives for thinking critically about problems, they are perfectly capable of doing so.
The challenge for people who want a deep understanding of the energy transition is to try to replicate the critical thinking habit outside of the classroom.
As delineated in chapter 5 of Climate of Contempt, the energy transition entails a litany of difficult tradeoff questions that we must resolve together in order to realize the considerable net benefits of mitigating global warming and its effects. But that task is much more difficult if each party’s loyalists retire to their separate and insulated information bubbles, where they each consume a steady diet of skewed information about the problem and about their political adversaries.
So, treat all confident proclamations of truth on social media as suspect. Anyone who thinks they have the solution to climate change or the energy transition probably doesn’t fully understand the problem. And if the solutions sounds really good to you, go find out their potential downsides. (Believe me, they exist.) The energy transition is rife with uncertainty about the techno-economic future. But the online world is full of voices telling their readers and viewers that the “best” policy choice is clear, and that achieving it would be relatively straightforward but for the ignorance and/or evil of policy adversaries.
They have the power of conviction. Don’t fall for that. – David Spence
