I have written a lot on dissent and how it serves in the truth-finding process (for selections, see my blog posts here and here, and some of my academic articles like the award-winning “Cascading Expert Failure” and “Expert Failure and Pandemics: On Adapting to Life with Pandemics,” coauthored with Abigail Devereaux of Wichita State University, Nathan Goodman of the Mercatus Center, and Roger Koppl of Syracuse University). Indeed, I believe dissent is so important, I teach it in my classes. I actively encourage my students to find information and challenge me. Being able to question is vital to revealing more information and for both the expert and nonexpert to achieve their goals.
Of course, dissent forces each party to shore up their arguments and reveal more information. But dissent is also vital because it reveals the knowledge each party has. Nelson and Winter discuss this effect in their 1982 book An Evolutionary Theory of Change. Parties must make assumptions and those assumptions may not even be known to them.
For example, a forecast of commodity prices requires assumptions about the major factors affecting supply and demand, expected weather conditions, the likelihood of major tail events, and so on. Additionally, since models are generalizations of observed phenomena, even the choice of models entails assumptions about conditions, margins the actors can adjust along, and the like. Dissent and the conversation it spurs help reveal these assumptions, as well as any potential biases the experts may have; we are all human, after all. Additionally, questions from the nonexpert can reveal what information the nonexpert values, which in turn helps shape the expert advice. Given much information is tacit, the dialogue between expert and nonexpert can reveal additional information to both parties as well as shape the interpretative frameworks of both expert and nonexpert.
Democracy, at least in any reasonable sense of the term, is built on the idea of dissent and conversation: citizens discuss and dissent with each other. Conversations and debate happen. The expert in a democracy, therefore, must serve a similar role: as dissenter to and converser with the nonexpert (and to each other). The expert’s ethical duty is to serve this role, not be a Yes-Man who simply acts at the behest of the nonexpert. Dissenting may cause the nonexpert to reevaluate their desires, hopefully in a direction that is actually toward the nonexpert’s true goals.
To that end, I propose a broader version of the Hippocratic Oath geared toward experts in general: the expert shall help, or at least do no harm. That will often involve telling the nonexpert what they don’t want to hear. But that conversation may ultimately lead to better outcomes.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Sep 18 2025 at 6:41pm
Jon: “That will often involve telling the nonexpert what they don’t want to hear. But that conversation may ultimately lead to better outcomes.” Hopefully. But I suspect the nonexpert should be self possessed enough to accept new information that challenges their beliefs. The well known example; Galileo’s defense of heliocentrism. Even with empirical evidence provided by his telescope, the church and its inquisitors charged him with heresy, placing him under house arrest. In the end, it’s nigh well impossible to to teach an old “dogma” new tricks. Bad pun. I’ll show myself out.
Jon Murphy
Sep 18 2025 at 6:51pm
Your point is well taken. But I argue that, even then, there is virtue in dissent as he provides evidence that would ultimately lead to the geocentric movement’s downfall
David Seltzer
Sep 18 2025 at 7:04pm
Yes!
steve
Sep 18 2025 at 7:49pm
I like the idea of experts “competing”. It’s pretty much the norm in medicine though we dont call it competition. People compete by publishing different papers on the same issue. They compete by expressing different ideas in editorials. We compete by publishing letters to the editor in journals. So issues like vaccination have faced years of competition among people with true expertise. The problem we see now is that people without any expertise, people like RFK, have entered the discussion and their arguments are given equal or more weight by the general public who have no expertise. This means that the experts are telling the non experts what they dont want to hear but it has little effect.
This was also true during covid. As you note Fauci screwed up but when you at the actual management of covid determined by competition ie publishing, we fairly quickly came up with management that cut inpatient death rates by 33%-50%. The very large majority of recommendations by the public health people were correct and those that were not were modified. Of note, some of the worst decisions were made by people who were selected for the politics and not true expertise in the field. Many of the testing issues fall in this area.
On the heterogeneity issue you are correct in that no model I am aware of accounted for that but the early models that faced the most criticism didnt have that info yet and I am not sure it made that much difference as we had no pragmatic (non-heroic) way to stop spread to those places. Note that deaths in those places occurred at a high rate up until the vaccines arrived.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Sep 19 2025 at 10:13am
Just to be clear about what Roger and I mean by “competition,” we are including experts dissenting with one another, but also the nonexpert being able to choose among expert advice and push back against the expert as well.
steve
Sep 19 2025 at 11:30am
AS a matter of practice I dont think it can work any other way. That said, what we are seeing, I think, is that often the general public doesnt have the ability to determine expertise and even when true experts argue they often choose based upon their tribal affiliation, the directions from their religious leaders or based upon some anecdote. People may not be aware that people who superficially have expertise may have financial influences that skew their POV. Thus, I end up debating with a family about whether or not there are really 5G chips in their IV. Anyway, to be clear I think this is just the new normal and not much we can do about it.
Just a reminder of how unique covid was, while I had families and patients arguing with me over covid care about stuff like the above, twice I had another family member also in the ICU for another emergency. In those two cases they never questioned our management. They understood just as much about covid as they did the other medical problems but because covid was politicized they were sure we were wrong.
Steve
Jon Murphy
Sep 19 2025 at 11:38am
It shouldn’t work any other way, but it often does. Just some examples: COVID vaccine mandates, eugenics laws, state-mandated curriculums for education, etc.
What a funny thing for them to claim. Everyone knows that they upgraded to 6G this past Spring.
Mactoul
Sep 19 2025 at 12:22am
Where are these Yes-Man experts? The covid, which was the purest rule of experts known in the West, the experts were all No-Man. And nothing has discredited the experts more than their own behavior during the covid.
Jon Murphy
Sep 19 2025 at 6:02am
A “Yes-Man” is one who agrees with another person no matter what. Right now, the Trump Administration is a great example. But during COVID, there were many yes-men too, specifically around the CDC and NIH.
Monte
Sep 19 2025 at 1:51am
Dissent is made more precious by disagreement (Syrus), which is often taken to dizzying heights on this forum.
We should all be willing to support experts debating the best course of action in the arena of ideas, so long as dissent is tolerated by non-experts in positions of power, unlike we had in the early stages of the global pandemic.