By Yvette Hacks
Ultracrepidarian – “Someone who has no special knowledge of a subject but who expresses an opinion about it.” That’s my word of the day, a word that I learned recently for people who, up to this point, I had referred to as “uninformed opinionators” or more formally epistemic trespassers. In particular, I am interested in people who actively convert expertise or success in one area into (perceived) legitimacy in others. Emblematic examples of this cited in the links above often come from the hard sciences. One might think of Frederick Seitz, an excellent physicist who went on to sow doubt over tobacco’s link to cancer and questioned global warming, or Linus Pauling, a Nobel Prize winning chemist who went on to tout vitamin C as a kind of cure all medicine. While trespassing into the medical domain presents relatively clear links between uninformed faux experts and clear harm to their listeners, we also need to think about how this occurs in other fields. Think of Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology suddenly speaking on gender studies, pronouns and related legislation. Or Steven Pinker, a professor in cognitive psychology and linguistics branching out in a number of directions but most recently shifting his focus to academic freedom, free speech and DEI. (Their powers combine to form Pinkerson [they/them] when discussing postmodernism.) Of course, this is not to say that a person can’t learn new things and become an expert in other areas, but this is not what is happening in the examples above and below. Rather, what occurs is a notable, often deliberate (if not sometimes disguised), lack of engagement with existing experts, research and knowledge. Yet despite this, the new opinionator’s claims are taken as meaningful and important contributions due to their prior unrelated successes. Rather than assessing the merits of their actual arguments or evidence, a crude appeal to authority secures belief in the claims. The ultracrepidarian epistemic trespassers get an immediate seat at the table whether or not they are meaningfully engaging with their current topic of interest.
Epistemic trespassing is not only a phenomenon in academia but also other domains, especially business leaders who feel (and are perceived as) capable of presenting relevant and valuable arguments on whatever political or cultural topic strikes their fancy. I offer Exhibit A, Bill Ackman, who has been stirring up trouble at US colleges for several years now, particularly in the wake of the congress hearing with university leaders. Of special interest for us is his rambling post from January, 2024 that touches on the hearing but also expands more fully on his rebirth as an anti-DEI activist (a topic he returns to again and again and again). The post itself makes largely boring arguments relying on strawmen, unsupported claims and exaggeration. According to Ackman, DEI is a unified “ideology” that has a “methodology” and “McCarthyist techniques” in which (mainly white) professors and students are now the true victims of racism and oppression.
Now, despite my snappy title, I’m not going waste time going point-by-point through Ackman’s many delusions (though his MLK Jr reference deserves a special mention) but I do want to explore the phenomenon of deliberate non-engagement. One would expect that a good faith argument against DEI would engage in some meaningful way with the arguments that proponents of DEI put forward. That is, of course, completely absent here apart from a brief shout out to conservative commentators’ favourite antiracist posterchildren, “Ibram X. Kendi and others”. Instead, Ackman offers a long series of unsubstantiated claims about the nature of DEI and racism. Indeed, as claims of plagiarism fly back and forth, it’s also worth noting the striking (initially unattributed) influence that Christopher Rufo seems to have had on Ackman’s rant (by the way, Christopher called and he wants his book back). Rufo has been a chief architect of the current ongoing war against critical race theory and DEI but has also been consistently criticized for sloppy research riddled with errors and/or outright lies, bogus claims, and having hyperbole and distortion as the cornerstone of his political project. Likewise, Wesołowski offers an excellent breakdown of Pinkerson’s misuse and misrepresentation of historical knowledge, showing how these “errors” are in fact the whole point of an enterprise in which “their idea of the truth” decentres all other forms of agreed upon truth. At the absolute pinnacle of non-engagement is Peterson’s casual call for the abolition of whole fields outside his expertise:
Women’s Studies and all the ethnic studies and racial studies groups, man those things have to go, and that faster they go the better. . .It would have been better had they never been part of the university to begin with as far as I can tell. Sociology that’s corrupt, anthropology that’s corrupt, English literature that’s corrupt, maybe the worst offender are the faculties of education.
And yet, despite criticism, debunking and fact-checking, they carry on in the same way because (as we explored with reference to Jason Stanley in a previous post) genuine intellectual engagement in the so called marketplace of ideas is not the point, emotional engagement is (just listen to the applause echoing around Peterson’s speech above). An uninformed opinionator of the sort discussed above doesn’t need to engage with the fields they criticize because they seek to convert their pre-existing success into a platform for emotional engagement in other domains. And what engagement that is! Ackman’s post has racked up over 35 million views. Christopher Rufo supposedly got the attention of Trump via Fox News, leading directly to his infamous executive order. Jordan Peterson is a veritable social media star. Research, meticulous analysis and presentation of data sit secondary to incendiary claims in the world of social media engagement which rewards emotional over intellectual engagement, and indignant outrage over all else. But that emotional engagement is often more effective at making changes in both universities and beyond than any sort of methodical process of argument and counterargument. Ackman (and his money) continue to push for DEI changes both in universities and politics all the while arguing that universities should be run more like businesses, measuring success by their financial investments and customer (i.e. student) growth rather than, you know, something related to research and/or teaching. He keeps pumping out uninformed twitter posts with an ever-expanding platform. Jordan Peterson’s twitter feed is treadmill of [warning, scary clowns!] literal demonization of the trans community and gender affirming care. The massive success of his social media outrage farming operation helped him largely retire as an academic in 2022 because he “can now teach many more people and with less interference online.”
It’s in the realm of outrage farming that we can return more explicitly to the question of harm. What kinds of harms are inherent in the techniques and successes of the uninformed opinionating elite? That is a job for a future post.
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