Respecting, Or Rejecting Expertise

 SUPPOSE, JUST SUPPOSE you live, were raised, and have lived most if not all of your life in a very small town in the former confederacy named after, for instance, of all people, the sixteenth president of the United States. Suppose you belatedly got your G.E.D., after spending years marrying, producing children, and working at, say, the local lumber company. You have read small parts of the Bible, bits of scripture pointed out to you by your minister, but have read few if any other books. You are convinced that Donald Trump won the election, because he says he did, and because he does not want to take your guns away, thus providing the only motivation you need to support him, fervently. You believe that climate change is a hoax, because Trump says it is, as do many other Republicans. You believe that the vaccination for Covid 19 is more harmful that Covid 19, because you read that it is on the internet, and because your minister and Donald Trump seem to think so. Your minister recommends God, and Donald Trump recommended...what was it...? Hydroxycholoroquine, bleach, Lysol, or something like that? Meanwhile, halfway across the country, at Harvard University, the Dean of the Chan school of public health says that vaccinations are urgently necessary for everyone. Harvard people also say that climate change is real, here now, caused by human activity, and will soon make life on Earth difficult if not impossible unless drastic action is taken now, as has been stated and outlined by thousands of trained scientists and tens of thousands of high school biology teachers.  The Harvard political science department and sociology department both say that Trump lost the election, fair and square. Thousands of political science scholars all over the country say the dame thing. Thus, on the issue of Covid 19, on the question of climate change, on the question on the issue of  Trump's election defeat, you and Harvard, and in fact you and the entire academic establishment, disagree, are at odds, greatly. So it is with many other questions, actually, including evolution by natural selection, which to you is a hoax because there is nothing about it in the Bible, to name but one. The final question is: who is right on these various matters, you, or the academic establishment? Of, course, you think you are. What do unbiased people think? Studies reveal that the answer is simple. The more educated the unbiased person, and the more progressive the person, the more likely he or she is to agree with Harvard and the academic establishment. (Education and progressive ideology tend to go together, studies indicate). The less educated and the more conservative one is (people with less formal education tend to be more conservative, surveys indicate), the more likely the person will be to agree with you, to disagree with Harvard, and to consider the entire academic establishment nothing but a bunch of lying left wing liberals, out to get conservatives. Go figure. In our age of internet disinformation and poor critical thinking skills,  people often prefer their own cosmic paradigm to those expounded by well educated experts in various academic fields. It is not uncommon for poorly educated people to consider themselves superior intellectually to those so called "experts". Invariably, the G.E.D. folks are ludicrously wrong, and the so called experts are so called because they are very nearly always right, eventually and soon, if not at first. Well educated people tend to value expertise. Again, go figure.