Jordan Peterson, the Matthew Principle, teachers, and public health experts

I’ve started reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life… perhaps many of you have read it, it is a popular book and I feel as if I’m relatively late to get to it here. And there was a lot of synchronicity between materials in the first chapter, “Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”, and other things I’ve been thinking about lately. For one, uh, see if you think the below quotations have anything to say to COVID-world. In the first he’s primarily thinking about interpersonal relationships actually, standing up to personal bullies and the like, but I suspect he has the political in mind as well.

If you say no, early in the cycle of oppression, and you mean what you say (which means you state your refusal in no uncertain terms and stand behind it) then the scope for oppression on the part of the oppressor will remain properly bounded and limited. The forces of tyranny will expand inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence.

And then a little later,

Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power.

Might be some application from that to COVID-world.

The Matthew Principle

But I found especially interesting his discussion of the “Matthew Principle”, so called by reference to Matthew 25:29,

For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.

He also calls it “The Principle of Unequal Distribution”, and it refers to the fact that, in area after area of human life, and even in the natural world, a relatively small number of people (or objects) have or produce an inordinate amount of the stuff. The wealthiest one percent have as much as the poorest fifty percent. The majority of scientific papers (at least before publish or perish culture) are published by a small number of scientists (where the idea is also known as Price’s Law). 1.5 million book titles are sold in the US every year but only about 500 sell more than 100,000 copies. The works of just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky), and only a small fraction of what they wrote, make up all the classical music most people know. Even, ninety percent of communication uses only 500 words. And the great mass of the universe is concentrated in a small number of locations (galaxies, or more specifically stars)!

The Matthew Principle and Credentialism

What does this have to do with teachers and public health? Well one of the odd things about COVID-world to me is that we apparently need to relearn, or learn better, a lot of lessons I thought we already knew, but apparently because “but people mean well this time” none of those lessons apply anymore or something. One of those lessons, which actually might be more true in our day of mass credential-granting than it was before, is that “has the right credentials” does not equal “someone actually worth listening to”. Or… OK, not quite saying the same thing, but this related tweet from Martin Kulldorff a week ago did have me nodding my head.

Martin Kulldorff @MartinKulldorff

Based on close interaction with a variety of people, from illiterate Guatemalan peasants to Harvard professors, my anecdotal conclusion is that there is not much correlation between education and intelligence.

Per the Matthew Principle, we might say that the number of people in any field who have the right credentials might be very large. The number of those people really worth your time is much smaller. In some areas of life we should know this very well. For example, take this tweet from a week ago:

Libs of Tik Tok @libsoftiktok

Pennsylvania teacher writes on FB that people who have religious exemptions should die from the virus or be shot

And yes, not only is that person a teacher, she is a member of the board of directors of the National Education Association. Or at least she was, her name seems to have been removed from their website shortly after this tweet went viral, imagine that.

There is a lot we could say about that tweet, but one of the thoughts I had was… hey look, this person is a properly credentialed teacher. She probably has done lots of additional training past the original credentialing as well, which is usually required for public school teachers. Would you want this properly credentialed, highly-trained teacher teaching your children? No, because she’s a psychopath who wants people to die, turns out.

OK, she’s an extreme example, but the point is that generally every public school is almost 100% filled with properly credentialed teachers. A small number of these teachers are truly excellent. A much larger number are mediocre or even bad. That’s a sort of Matthew Principle in education.

And so also for public health

And this is also true for public health. I said a week or so ago on Twitter that it seemed to me that perhaps 5% of “public health experts” really deserved that appellation “expert”. Maybe it gets up to 5%. And I think by “expert” what is in my mind is not just subject matter knowledge (though that is definitely part of it), but also the combination of intelligence and the competent and confident independence (which also requires courage) that marks real expertise. So what are the other 95% doing then? Participating in safe groupthink and mimicking the people around them (sometimes literally doing a copy/paste job with the orders of other people). Just doing what some higher authority tells them to do. Writing simple orders that don’t really make much sense but are easy to understand and implement (including for themselves). Acting mainly for political reasons which require comparatively little and less serious thought.

Or they’re just thinking badly. I have not read Scott Atlas’ new book, but Arne (who often comments on these posts) was emailing me about it yesterday (shared with permission) and mentioned that, according to Atlas anyway, this “they just don’t really know what they’re doing” problem extends all the way up to the White House COVID-19 task force.

Birx wasn't aware of the problems with data dumps, testing levels, testing demographics, and so on. She also wasn't particularly conscious of the natural shape of a wave of infections and the tendency for lockdown measures to be instituted as the declining half of a wave was underway. It turns the mantras about "trusting the science" upside down, and that is one of the recurring themes of Atlas's book, that there were very few people on the Covid task force in 2020 who actually studied and followed the science.

So maybe 5% deserve to be called experts. Ah, but lately we have decided that 100% of them deserve coercive powers. Everyone who has the right credentials gets the powers! But that’s crazy. That’s like saying any teacher is as good as any other when it comes to the teaching of your children. But at least the harm of one bad teacher is relatively contained. We’re making people who really, really, are not up to the task, little dictators because “public health expert!”. They got the right degree in college you know. They don’t deserve those powers.