About experts

There was a potent sound-bite in the Brexit campaign, about people having had enough of experts.

The experts and their acolytes are still choking on that one :)

But I've been thinking about this recently, because on the question of electricity generation, I rather am for listening to the experts (as you'll have gathered from yesterday's post, if you bothered to trawl through it).

So I was happy to come across this comment, where someone has expressed what I hadn't quite got around to thinking:

So… nobody who actually knows anything about, say, energy or industry or economics thinks it’s a good idea to carpet Britain with expensive, unreliable windfarms. But the ‘experts’ do.

Nobody in real life thinks it’s a good idea to replace the English with Somalis, Syrians and Sudanese. But The Economist says it’ll boost GDP by 1% and The Guardian says having our own country is racist so the ‘experts’ do.

Nobody who owns a map and remembered the Iraq war thought it was a good idea to attack Libya and turn it over to Islamic fanatics. But hey – ‘experts’!

The rest of the comment is worth a read, but slightly less politically correct, so you can click through if you're not going to be offended by further abuse of experts and their followers.