DEFERENCE IS PART OF OUR INHERITANCE.

A recent Reason article taking issue with Our President's claim to Expertise Based on Experience inadvertently touches on a phenomenon as old as Civilization Itself.

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Biden and his faculties, we all have a knowledge problem, to some extent, of our own making. Instead of demanding clear goals and functioning markets to get us there, we millions of creative Americans question whose knowledge is greatest and allow the so-called best and brightest to attempt the whole job themselves. This, too, is a fatal conceit.

That belief probably started when people more attuned to the workings of the weather and the motions of the planets claimed to have some Special Connection to the Gods, from which emerged the Clerisy and the Technocracy.

The instinct to deference, however, is strong.  I recently saw a clip on the libertarian-leaning Fox and Friends morning show endorsing the idea of empaneling experts to regulate artificial intelligence.  As Bruce Yandle notes, it's hard enough to do that to regulate traffic, or other actually existing phenomena.

Cooperation, interaction, and trade across a vast number of people is required. Not even a presidential administration can duplicate the efforts of so many involved players, or even know who every player is.

For an administration so invested in influencing resource use so that the right stuff gets produced in the right amount for the right folks—whether it's microchips, metals, energy, vehicles, or any of the things legislatively deemed as "infrastructure"—it's fruitless to simply assemble the brightest and best, find a consensus, and mandate a solution be applied to all economic agents.

That's addressing the actually existing power grid, which the environmentalist wackos running the presidency would like to entangle in green tape. At least you have known unknowns there. Artificial intelligence? That's the paradigm of unknown unknowns.

The more the administration uses a command-and-control approach to dictate how firms go about achieving reductions, the more it relies on its own knowledge rather than the collective ingenuity of the "vast majority" of people. It assumes Biden officials know more than anyone else about solving this problem, not only now, but in the future.

Look, this is folk wisdom: you don't animate a broom to carry water until you understand how to turn it off, and there's an old joke about computer scientists asking their supercomputer if God exists that it would be wise to know.

The record of reliance on Wise Experts is not encouraging.  Consider something as seemingly mundane as parking lots.  No previous thinking to go on, so the urban planners made it up as they went along.  Badly.

Then came the corona tyranny, which combines the sorcerer's apprentice with a neglect of previous thinking.  Conduct gain of function research the better to be able to develop more effective vaccines?  It's a secure lab, people.  We can stop the broom.  Oops.  Focused protection for susceptible people and mitigations limited in scope and duration?  Old research.  We'll make it up as we go along.

It's better to have governing principles and specialist expertise than not, but it's still on the specialists to use their expertise wisely and respect the principles.  Reality is socially conservative and reality bats last.