Somebody should do a search on the MSM’s use of the word “expert”, because even in the world of lefty non-MSM sources (The Atlantic, Vox, Slate, etc, etc) my observation is that use of the word in articles has become more frequent than from decades ago.

The reason for that is that as journalists have become poorer and less capable, the traditional path of asking questions and investigating things has fallen away and therefore had to be replaced by references to “experts” who lay down the law on the issue of that day – and who are then not questioned or investigated by the journalists because that would blow the whole scam scheme.

When was the last time you ever saw any explanation of how and why the “expert” is such. Qualifications? Studies made in that area of research? References by other academics and researchers? Past predictions and forecasts or opinions made and the success rate of them? Any “experts” referenced with an alternative view? In short: what makes them an expert worth quoting, especially when they’re often the only one?

And don’t think that this is just an MSM or personal anecdote or observation about many areas of life where the opaqueness and vagueness of things render the word expert a joke from the start – like economics and other social sciences. No, this includes ScienceTM, which has started showing a lot of cracks in recent decades, as the book Science Fictions shows in great detail. It was reviewed a couple of years ago here in NZ by Danyl Mclauchlan, himself with an MSc, We need to throw out a mindblowing amount of science and start again. He first looks at all the genetic studies through the 1990’s-2000’s that claimed precise explanations for obesity, violence (which has a NZ aspect) and other things – and how it was all revealed as bullshit by further, wider studies that showed there were so many factors involved, including other genes, that precision was a joke. Which leads to:

The highest-profile study, the results of which were published in Nature in 2015, chose 100 studies from three top psychology journals and tried to replicate them using larger sample sizes. Only 39% replicated successfully. Another study, replicating papers published in Science and Nature, the world’s most prestigious science journals, found a replication rate of 62%. And almost all replication studies, even when successful, found that original studies exaggerated the size of their effects. This problem is now known as the replication crisis. It’s sometimes referred to as “psychology’s replication crisis” which is rather unfair:

Very unfair given that reference to Science and Nature:

Ritchie cites an attempt by researchers at the biotechnology company Amgen to replicate 53 landmark preclinical cancer studies that had been published in top scientific journals. Eleven percent were successful. More ominously, further attempts to replicate findings in medical or biological research found that the methodologies described in the studies were so vague – and, when contacted, the scientists who conducted the original experiments were so unhelpful at clarifying the nature of their work – that they couldn’t even attempt to replicate them. Ritchie cites another study that found 54% of biomedical papers failed to identify the animals, chemicals or cells they used in their experiment. The work itself could not be reproduced, let alone the results.

The book (and article) puts it down to fraud, hype, negligence (which doesn’t say a lot about peer review), and…

The most important chapter in Ritchie’s book is about bias, which points to deep, systemic problems within science itself.

Read the whole thing. Danyl’s a good and entertaining writer with skin in the game.

But this brings me to this article on criminal forensic experts and recent unravellings:

In 1994, the Bexar County (San Antonio) forensic serologist, Fred Zain, was found to have repeatedly lied under oath and provided falsified evidence needed for prosecutors to obtain criminal convictions. Previously he had done the same for the West Virginia State Police.
…
Forensic scientist Henry Lee, known for his expert testimony in high-profile criminal cases including the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the JonBenet Ramsey case, has been found liable for fabricating evidence that led to a wrongful murder conviction.

That article goes into a lot of background on Zain but makes this point (which Lefty Mclauchlan pointedly ignores):

Lives were ruined, justice was denied, and freedoms were lost due to the fraudulent “expertise” of Fred Zain. “Covid experts” and “climate experts” are little different from Mr. Zain.

Exactly. All of the above alone are reasons enough why the term “expert” is rapidly losing its power – but Covid and Climate Change are the more well-known and powerful reasons because they were and are things that The Powers That Be were able to take advantage of to control society in ways that “Violence genes” and the rest never could have. As bad as the insanity of Covid was and Net Zero will be, the freedom-suffocating mass hysteria of those things has at least delivered the erosion of credibility of “experts” and their institutions.

They never deserved the credibility that they squandered. The word “expert” was widely overused and abused in recent decades. Declaring a person with some level of subject matter knowledge an “expert,” and empowering him to determine how others may live their lives, plants the seed for him to become an authoritarian demon even if he was a kind and gentle person before being given that authority. An “expert” whose pronouncements are God-like and who may not be challenged is an extremely dangerous person…one who often can’t exercise restraint with the power given to him.

In addition to the news slowly leaking out (much of which was known at least two years ago) about the origins of the C-19 virus and the uselessness of lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, plus the inadequacies of the vaccine itself, here’s some Climate Change news, which at first sounds like one of those needed corrections to inadequate scientific papers:

The paper was produced by four distinguished scientists, including three professors of physics, and was heavily based on data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…During the course of their work, the scientists found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed no “clear positive trend of extreme events”

In the age of “global boiling” we can’t have that sort of counter-message. And this is where the “experts” once again enter the picture, including long time AGW fanatic, Michael Mann, who joined up with others like him to get the paper retracted a year after it was published by sending it to four new reviewers. Three of them said it was fine:

“The statements made by the authors are generally in agreement with the assessment produced by the working group 1 of the IPCC on their Sixth Assessment Report.” Another reviewer wrote: “The original article is a straightforward recitation of credible, key data about several types of extreme weather events. I find nothing selective, biased or misleading in what they present. While there’s hardly anything written that isn’t well known to experts, it’s useful for non-experts to see the underlying data, which are most often obscure in the IPCC reports.”

As you have guessed those three were ignored and the sole dissenting expert’s recommendation to withdraw was accepted.

Ask yourself which set of scientific experts are affected more by what Science Fictions listed: fraud, hype, negligence and bias?

Clearly experts haven’t been trashed enough, given the influence they still have over our everyday lives, especially via our increasingly worthless MSM and our increasingly worthless political and bureaucratic class, otherwise known as TPTB.