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Against the Experts
Some of the oldest works that have come down to us identifying the pathologies of expertise were written by the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus. Although most of his works focused on these pathologies as they showed up in philosophy, he also wrote about how they showed up in other fields such as medicine, music, mathematics, and rhetoric. The surviving work that is the best example of this is known as Against the Professors (other translations of the title are Against the Learned, Against Those in the Disciplines, and Against the Mathematicians — the last being a common but bad translation). The book is a slog to read because much of the content is about now arcane and obscure expertise that was state of the art in the Roman Empire during the second century CE. The general principles Sextus used however are timeless.
Before going into those principles, it’s worth mentioning that one principle now popularly attributed to Sextus is actually not one of them. That principle is, “Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.” This quote is now frequently misattributed to Sextus. The true source of the quote is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Here’s the section in his book Skin In the Game where he implies this quote is from Sextus:
…science has been taken over by vendors using it to sell products (like margarine or genetically modified solutions) and, ironically, the…
