Dinosaur Judges: Conservative Experts in a Changing Society
Speaker: Kim-Sau Chung (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Date: Sept. 23, Monday, 2019
Time: 12 - 1 pm
Venue: Room 1050, Pudong Campus
Abstract:
Modern societies need experts in a variety of areas. How do we identify these experts? In circumstances where an expert's track record cannot be easily assessed by the general public, our society relies on peer reviews from known experts to identify new experts. This gives rise to an aristocratic expert class that is inevitably conservative. In order to earn the approval of old known experts, young scholars are incentivized to study old subjects or follow old schools of thought at the expense of new subjects and new schools of thought that might better serve a changing society. Our society tradeoffs conservatism against competence in its endeavor to identify experts, but the optimal tradeoff may not be achieved due to time-inconsistency. We formalize this problem with a model described in terms of legal experts such as lawyers and judges, and use it to shed light on noise voters and anti-intellectualism in the Trumpian era.
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