Against credibility

In a comment on an earlier post, Robert Schwartz says: “I trust that you did not mean for us to take this seriously.”

No, Mr Schwartz, I didn’t. I don’t want to be taken seriously. The prospect terrifies me. It’s a slippery slope. First, you take me seriously, then I become credible. And before you know it, I’ve got gravitas and turned into Woy Jenkins.

The fact is, serious people throughout history have been the enemies of reason and progress. As Bryan Caplan shows here, they have frequently been utterly wrong. And the people who have been right have often not been taken seriously at first. Copernicus, Mendel, pretty much any successful inventor, and Winston Churchill in the 1930s, were all either ignored or laughed at.

What matters isn’t whether someone is credible or not, but whether they are right. The overlap between the two is tiny.

Indeed, “credibility” is part of managerialist ideology. The managerialist, qua managerialist, cannot show us facts, or logic, or skill. So he adopts a credible demeanour, in the hope of hiding his intellectual nakedness. If you’re boring, most people, being idiots, will think you’re serious, and that you have something worth saying. This is a trick which most of the middle-class acquired through their genes, but it’s as contemptible as putting your qualifications after your name.

No. It’s not people you should take seriously. It’s facts and evidence. No more, no less.

Herein, for me, lies one of the great merits of the blogosphere. Most bloggers (there are obvious exceptions) start with little reputation. And we judge them not by their character, but by their writings.

This is the true democratic, scientific ethos – defer to no-one and nothing but the evidence.

So please, don’t take me seriously.

* From the late great Bob Monkhouse: “When I said I wanted to become a comedian, people laughed at me. Well, they’re not laughing now.”

Comments

[dearieme]

At the time of our first Euro referendum, it was the sane, sensible chaps (Heath, Woy) who lied to us, safe in the knowledge that they were right in their views, and the bloody fools (Enoch, Wedgie) who correctly warned us of what we were letting ourselves in for. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

[Blimpish]

The other such ideological pose is "sincerity" or "authenticity," where we attempt to claim authority on the basis that we "genuinely" care more about the subject, or that our experiences allow us to know more about it.

Random passing thought (naturally not to be taken seriously either): Say modernity culminates in two dominant philosophic strands - Existentialism and Marxism (by which I mean materialist historicism, without any Left connotation).

Is then "authenticity" the Existential virtue (this is true) and "credibility" the Marxist virtue (this needs to be proven)? Then consider the extreme political manifestations we've seen of each strand: Nazism was the rule of the resolved, the authentic; Communism was the rule of the knowledgeable, the credible.

[Blimpish]

"This is the true democratic, scientific ethos – defer to no-one and nothing but the evidence."

But of course, what counts as evidence (and how to understand it) is too often the very root of ideological conflict.

[Andrew M]

Your heart is in the right place, but your view on appeals to authority, both in this post and its predecessor, is too simple. No individual can be in a position to evaluate the kinds of non-testimonial evidence that you allow as acceptable on any but a tiny handful of the very many questions on which he or she needs to have an opinion. This is true not only of the laity, but also, and particularly, of scientists. Biologists routinely rely on scientific claims made in other branches of science, and indeed in other parts of biology, that they have neither the time nor the energy nor the competence to evaluate in the way that you recommend. They believe claims because they have made estimates of the authority (i.e., the probability of being correct) of those who make the claims. And these estimates can be quite rationally based: someone's track record for honesty and being right, their education, their standing among peers, the venue for their claim--these are all relevant considerations when properly weighed.

The role of testimony in science is a major theme in the most important book on general philosophy of science for a decade or so, Philip Kitcher's The Advancement of Science. I recommend it highly.

[Robert Schwartz]

Please, don't take what I wrote, the wrong way. I was not referring to you personally, but to the calculation embeded in the following statement, to wit:

" To buy an annuity paying £20,000, index-linked at 2.5 per cent, for 4935 years would cost around £670,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 trillion."

Which struck me as being a bit exagerated, perhaps for comic effect.

At any rate I did mean to offend. My appologies.