Elites vs Experts

Typology

Wokal Distance:

"The epistemic division of labor means that expert knowledge in society is diffused across a number of disciplines, and contained in a number of institutions. The knowledge for how to build an electric engine is possessed by some people, the knowledge required to maintain the electrical grid which powers such cars is possessed by a different group of people entirely. Society being what it is, the various knowledge domains need to be able to co-operate with each other in order to larger goals to be accomplished. A nice example of this can be seen in a city, where the co-ordination of electrical grids, pluming infrastructure, natural gas lines, the placement of roads and streets, the building of buildings, location of hospitals, and so much more must be co-ordinated in way that allows all these things to function together. This means that the various institutions that house experts in each area must work together.

This is where elites come in.

The role of experts in society is to have deep and thorough domain specific knowledge in a particular area (examples of this are doctors, lawyers, scientists, mechanics, farmers, engineers, and so fourth). The role of elites in a society is social co-ordination and consensus building in the service of accomplishing goals and achieving various social ends. Examples of elites are journalists, politicians, writers, public intellectuals, activists, CEO’s, government Agency Heads, etc).

Rob Henderson describes the difference this way:

“Elite talk is less about getting things exactly right and more about keeping people on board. Building consensus, projecting optimism, saying the kind of thing that motivates rather than scrutinizes. It’s not that one is better than the other—they serve different functions. Expert talk is for getting to the truth. Elite talk is for getting things to move…”

He continues:

“Knowing a lot about a specific subject makes you an expert. It qualifies you to make technical judgments in that domain. But that doesn’t automatically make you an elite. Elites aren’t defined by deep knowledge of one area—they’re defined by general social impressiveness. They move easily in leadership roles. People listen to them, not because of what they know, but because of who they are and how they carry themselves.”

There is a certain amount of cross-pollination between experts and elites, and many experts seeks to leverage their expertise in the service of becoming elites, and there are elites who began their careers as experts. That said, many experts never become elites, and many elites lack expertise. There is a sort of elite-expert spectrum: “At one end: the pure expert—say, a mathematician—does proofs all day and needs zero social skills. At the other: the pure elite—a politician, a CEO—who might not have much technical knowledge, but knows how to talk, how to read a room, how to get people on board.”

(https://wokaldistance.substack.com/p/dave-smith-douglas-murray-and-a-decade)