I believe that the fundamental issue in social epistemology is the process by which people climb the status hierarchy. If the process is meritocratic, as in a chess tournament, it is a good idea to trust the people at the top. If the process is corrupted, by rules that are unfair or easily gamed. then the high-status people are not so worthy of our trust. But the solution to corruption is to improve the process, not (just) to belittle high-status people.
The internet is changing the entire game of status, and we have a long way to go yet.
Consider Yelp, through which I can find better local restaurants in any new town I go to. How long before we all have our own such online reputation, not just businesses?
Of course, people game these new online systems of status and counter-measures are constantly deployed to avoid that. That cat-and-mouse game will never end, but we will soon have much more sophisticated ways to gain and mark status online, including Hanson’s prediction markets I suspect.
Yelp is pretty much useless these days. You can pay to have bad reviews removed.
Yelp should have sold out years ago to Google when they had a chance. They declined.
At this point, the reviews on Google Maps are the same or better than those on Yelp.
I say this as an active Yelp user.
The idea that the status hierarchy can be significantly reformed is naive. But in the meantime, ridiculing high status people when they are obviously wrong or corrupt tends in that direction. It is good that they fear consequences.
It has already changed significantly in our lifetimes- would you have ever imagined a geek sitcom like Big Bang Theory being the most-watched comedy decades ago? Of course, it’s a minstrel show that seems to ridicule their caricature of geeks more than highlight them (could never sit through more than a couple minutes of that crap), but that’s been true of most mass shows- and is going to radically change even more.
Thinking about status some more, it is important that the new online forms don’t become a zero-sum tournament, where everybody is fighting over a limited amount to be partitioned out, but that status be tied to competence and match your level of skill as much as possible.
Looking back on the 20th century, that was its great failure, that all these status markers of academic degrees or bureaucratic positions were tied to passing various tests, whether economics exams or tech brain-teasers that had little correlation with competence.
Of course, the marketplace is the great leveler, but it is too broad a brush to capture finer levels of competence and thus status, eg you may be a great cook who’s bad at marketing yourself so your own restaurant fails, but would do well at an established restaurant. With the gig economy these days, we’ve created an online freelance marketplace that should be much more amenable to better tying status to competence.
The current high status people, who benefitted from the corruption are the ones who currently control the status hierarchy process. Belittling high-status people may, as Milton Friedman advised, make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.