Welcome back to Ten Blocks. This is Teddy Cupford, an associate editor of City Journal,

and I'm joined today by

Oliver Turaldi, a PhD student in philosophy at Notre Dame and a writing fellow at Heterodox Academy.

Oliver's popular writing covers what we might call metapolitics, the norms of our political

discourse, the comings and goings of political fads, demystifying what we're really doing when we're having

debates. This work can be found in the pages of National Review, Quillette, and of course,

City Journal. And Oliver is working on a book project that will be titled Political Beliefs,

a philosophical introduction. So Oliver, thank you very much for joining.

Thank you for having me. Why don't we start

with the tricky subject these days, expertise? There was a book published a few years ago by

writer named Tom Nichols, now writes for the Atlantic, called The Death of Expertise. Nichols

lamented that we are living in dangerous times, as he wrote,

people have never had access to so much knowledge and yet been so resistant to learning anything.

But as you recently observed, learning from experts is actually an interesting problem.

How should we evaluate claims made by experts when we might not possess the domain-specific information that they do?

How can a layman adjudicate a dispute between two subject matter experts in a complicated field?

And indeed, the role of expertise in society seems to be an urgent problem today.

You know, if you open an article in the New York Times, the Washington Post,

you're likely to see a story treating the opinions of experts with dubious credentials as authoritative.

So if reliance on expertise means deferring to expert knowledge, what should small D Democrats make of this notion that we should just sit back and trust the people with expert knowledge to run society?

A small D Democrat should make their political participation as informed as it should be,

as it could be, as it can be.

...