I side entirely with Noah Carl here. I can’t think of a substantial disagreement with his points.
The debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan’s podcast has reignited a conversation on the right about the value of experts and expertise.
For those who didn’t catch the debate, here’s a brief summary. Its purpose was to ventilate the arguments for and against the West’s policy in Ukraine and Israel’s war in Gaza, with Murray representing those “for” and Smith those “against”. Right off the bat, Murray asked Rogan, “Do you think you’ve had enough people on who are supportive of either war?” (the implication being that he hadn’t). This prompted a lengthy discussion about whether Rogan had platformed too many people with non-mainstream or fringe views, and whether it’s even appropriate for non-experts (including Smith) to pontificate on subjects like geopolitics on one of the world’s most popular podcasts.
As I understood him, Murray was not arguing that non-experts shouldn’t be allowed to share their views, but rather that gatekeepers like Rogan have a responsibility to refrain from platforming them—or to only platform them alongside experts who have the knowledge to debunk their views.
“So what’s the solution—to not talk about it?” Rogan asks. To which Murray replies in an exasperated tone, “No, it’s to have more experts around.” He’s then challenged by Smith, who asks in relation to lockdowns and other Covid measures that he opposed, “Should I have just shut up?” Murray says, “No, no, no,” and explains that what he really means is, “Let’s have a bit of hygiene on our own side, not lift every sewer gate”. Murray also argues that it’s “weird” for people like Smith to talk “nonstop” about subjects in which they are not experts.
After the episode was published online, Murray received a lot of criticism: almost every single comment on the YouTube video makes fun of him in some way, and the top one has 37K likes. Yet a number of thoughtful commentators came to his defence. Konstantin Kisin, Nathan Cofnas and Yuki Zeman each penned an article defending Murray’s position on experts and expertise—i.e., that “certain people shouldn’t comment on certain things and that others should not elevate their voices” (to quote Kisin).
Like Kisin, Cofnas and Zeman, I obviously prefer to see people with a good understanding of the world have their voices elevated in the public discussion. (I have no interest in hearing from liars and ignoramuses.) However, I think that establishing who actually has a good understanding—i.e., who should have their voice elevated—is less straightforward than Murray and his defenders believe. And I think that by their own logic, Murray’s voice is one that shouldn’t be elevated.
All three pro-Murray articles take for granted that he is qualified to opine on the subjects he talks about. Beginning from this assumption, they then consider whether the targets of his criticism are similarly qualified, and conclude that some or most them aren’t. For example, Cofnas characterises Murray as someone who “went to Oxford, writes books with footnotes, and hangs out with academics”. This is in contrast to Smith, who “gets basic facts wrong in ways that reveal deep ignorance and intellectual irresponsibility”.
Now, I’m not disputing that Smith has made embarrassing errors. However, I don’t think these errors disqualify him from talking about the West’s policy in Ukraine or Israel’s war in Gaza—topics of which he seems to have a decent grasp based on his debate with Murray. Nor do they imply that Joe Rogan is irresponsible for having platformed him. After all, Murray too has made mistakes in his work, which I would contend are no less egregious than Smith’s. And I wouldn’t say he is unqualified to opine on these subjects.
Recently, the leftist journalist Nathan Robinson (who co-wrote a book with Noam Chomsky dealing with Israel/Palestine) penned a scathing review of Democracies and Death Cults, cataloguing numerous “errors, omissions and misleading statements”. Among the most egregious is that Murray used a fabricated quote and gave an anonymous Twitter account as the source. He also made false or misleading statements in a piece recounting his debate with Smith. For example, he stated that a previous guest on Rogan’s podcast had “very carefully tried to minimize the evil of Adolf Hitler” but that guest didn’t even mention Hitler.
More egregious than either Smith’s or Murray’s factual errors are some of the arguments Murray put forward on Rogan’s podcast. The first of these, which unsurprisingly went viral due to its patent absurdity, was Murray’s insistence that “if you’re going to spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it”.
This is not a serious argument and I’m actually astonished that Murray and others have continued defending it.1 Despite claiming to have a “journalistic rule” of “trying never to talk about a country, even in passing, unless I’ve at least been there”, Murray frequently talks about countries he’s never been to. And so he should—because his supposed “journalistic rule” is bunk. There’s also the fact that Murray’s visits to Israel/Palestine are hardly impartial fact-finding missions where he makes a good-faith effort to get both sides of the story. It’s not even clear what his point is: many public figures have visited Israel/Palestine and come away with radically different views from Murray.2
The second of Murray’s bizarre arguments was his claim that “Paul Wolfowitz is a great figure for almost any deep conspiracy”, made in response to Smith’s point that General Wesley Clark had first heard about plans for US military intervention in countries like Iraq and Syria from Paul Wolfowitz.3 Murray goes on to state that “when you start talking about Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle” it is “awfully noxious smelling”, before quoting Mark Steyn’s quip that Wolfowitz’s name “starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewishly”.
Again, this is simply not a serious argument. In fact, it sounds like something a woke leftist would blurt out. To begin with, Smith is Jewish himself—and he brought up numerous non-Jewish figures during the discussion, including George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. What’s more, both Wolfowitz and Perle are described on their Wikipedia pages as “architects of the Iraq War”. To top it off, Smith barely even criticised the two men; he merely mentioned their names.
The third of Murray’s bizarre arguments was his accusation that Smith made an “appeal to authority” when he quoted the former head of the CIA. This is simply not what “appeal to authority” means. An appeal to authority is where you argue, “I am right because such-and-such an authority figure says so”. Smith merely cited a diplomatic cable as evidence to support a point he was making.4 If Murray were correct, it would be logically fallacious to ever cite diplomatic cables in arguments, ruling out entire scholarly disciplines.
The last of Murray’s bizarre arguments was his reference to Smith, made in a follow-up article for the New York Post, as someone “claiming some Jewish ancestry” (the implication being that he does not in fact have much Jewish ancestry.) This is just an ad hominem, Smith having confirmed that both his parents are Jewish and he is 84% Ashkenazi Jew.
To be clear, my point is not that Murray’s understanding of the world is so bad that his voice should not be elevated. It’s the opposite: despite the factual errors he’s made and bizarre arguments he’s employed, he is still qualified to opine on these subjects. And by the same standard, so is Smith. Of course, one could demand an even more exacting standard from podcast hosts, in which case both men might fall short. Though I personally think the quality of public discussion would suffer in that case.
Does this mean I support a total free-for-all where any lunatic can spout nonsense to millions of people? Not necessarily. I can imagine individuals whom I would regard it as inappropriate to invite on to a major podcast.5 However, I would generally favour a low bar for who counts as a “non-lunatic”. In other words, I would tolerate a wide gamut of speculation, conspiracy theorising and questioning of received wisdom.6
The first reason I would do so is that in fields like geopolitics, scope for genuine expertise is rather limited. This is not to say there aren’t people who could reasonably be called “experts”. There are. But the differences between them and non-experts are far smaller than in subjects like mathematics and the natural sciences.
Physicists can predict things to the tenth decimal place. Social scientists and political commentators can barely predict things better than chance. In a famous study, Philip Tetlock and his colleagues had 284 experts7 make precise, numerical forecasts8 about economic and geopolitical events over the span of two decades, and then scored them for accuracy. Remarkably, the experts performed no better than dart-throwing chimps and performed worse than simple algorithms (like extrapolating from the recent past). In addition, experts with specialist knowledge performed no better than those without such knowledge. For example, people who worked on the Soviet Union were no better at predicting things about the Soviet Union than people who worked on other topics.
Why are social scientists and political commentators so lousy at forecasting? It isn’t because they lack the smarts. (Many of the experts who took part in Tetlock and colleagues’ study were distinguished scholars who presumably had very high IQs.) It’s because human behaviour and human society are inherently less predictable—owing to the vicissitudes of human agency and the impossibility of running controlled experiments. Which is why there’s vastly more consensus in physics than there is in history or politics.
With an issue like the War in Ukraine, someone who’s reasonably intelligent and reads the news every day can have a meaningful conversation with an expert—especially about the ethical and strategic aspects. There are scarcely “right answers” to questions like, “Should the West be more or less hawkish toward Russia?” or “Should the West put more or less pressure on Ukraine?” And unsurprisingly, expert surveys reveal no consensus whatsoever.
On a topic like electrodynamics, by contrast, there is literally nothing a non-expert can contribute to the discussion. And because there are experimentally-known “right answers” to all the relevant questions (except at the cutting edge of research), experts have reached an overwhelming consensus.
So, yes, it would be completely inappropriate for Rogan to invite someone like Smith on to talk about physics. But inviting him on to talk about geopolitics doesn’t seem inappropriate at all. We shouldn’t pretend that expertise in geopolitics is like expertise in physics.
The second reason I would tolerate a wide gamut of opinion is closely related to the first. In fields like geopolitics, not only are differences in genuine expertise much more compressed than in mathematics and the natural sciences, but it’s much harder to establish who has more and who has less.
Take John Mearsheimer. He is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and has authored plenty of scholarly books and articles. At the same time, he is frequently denounced as a “Putin apologist” on social media—including by other members of his profession. The man even stands accused of distorting history to whitewash Putin’s crimes. Is he someone that it would be responsible to platform on a major podcast? Well, if you agree with his views, you’ll almost certainly say “yes”. But if you don’t, you might consider him a charlatan or worse.
There are numerous figures like this on all sides of every major issue. And there’s no surefire way to tell the real experts among them from the cranks, hacks and charlatans. This is not only because human behaviour and human society are inherently hard to predict, but also because subjects relating to political affairs call for moral judgements—and those moral judgements inevitably colour our interpretation of the facts.
You may have noticed that when it comes to the War in Ukraine and the Israel/Palestine conflict, there are very strong correlations between people’s views about factual matters (such as the causes of each conflict) and their moral judgements (such as what policy should be adopted). You almost never find someone who believes the War in Ukraine stems from Western meddling but who wants the West to supply Ukraine with long-range missiles. Or who believes the Israel/Palestine conflict is due to Palestinian intransigence but who wants the US to cut off aid to Israel. These correlations may arise in part because exposure to different facts leads people to different moral judgements. But they mostly arise because people’s pre-existing moral judgements lead them to different interpretations of the facts.
How are people with vastly different pre-existing moral judgements going to reach agreement about who’s a true expert and who’s a charlatan? Credentials might have worked in the past. But they aren’t going to cut it any more. After all, dazzling credentials can go hand-in-hand with stunning hubris and profound ignorance.
Who has a better understanding of the world? An educated layman who’s instinctively sceptical of transplanting Jeffersonian democracy to the Middle East, or the intellectual advocates of “nation-building” and “regime change”. Members of the latter group would certainly boast more impressive qualifications. They could surely reel off more facts about the relevant countries. And they’d undoubtedly do a better job at explaining concepts like checks on the executive. However, I think that any honest assessment of the evidence would show they have significantly worse understanding of the world. As cynics are fond of saying: the US spent $2 trillion and 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
Which illustrates a point that Nassim Taleb has made about gauging expertise: we shouldn’t focus on the accuracy of people’s beliefs so much as the expectation—i.e., the accuracy weighted by the consequences of being right or wrong. As Taleb notes, if a trader predicts all the minor zigs and zags in the market but then loses millions when the market crashes, he will wind up poorer than one who fails to capitalise on the small fluctuations but profits handsomely during the crisis. By way of analogy, a commentator who makes many little errors but gets the big calls right may have a better understanding than one who give the appearance of erudition while advocating disastrous and costly policies.
I agree with Douglas Murray about almost everything, but he’s a polemicist, not a scholar. Grok notes:
Nathan Cofnas’s description of Douglas Murray—as an Oxford-educated writer who produces footnoted books and associates with academics—focuses on Murray’s formal credentials and social circle. It suggests a veneer of scholarly respectability. However, your view of Murray as a “predictable polemicist” without academic or scholarly credibility highlights a different angle: his work is often seen as provocative, prioritizing rhetorical flourish over rigorous scholarship.
Murray’s books, like The Strange Death of Europe or The War on the West, cite sources and engage with intellectual debates, which aligns with Cofnas’s portrayal. Yet critics, including some academics, argue his arguments lean on selective evidence and ideological agendas, lacking the nuance or methodological rigor expected in scholarly circles. His public persona—sharp-witted, combative, and media-savvy—further cements his reputation as a polemicist rather than a disinterested scholar.
Cofnas’s characterization isn’t entirely wrong but feels incomplete, emphasizing Murray’s polished credentials while sidestepping the polarizing, non-academic nature of his output. It’s like describing a fox as a well-groomed canine—it’s true, but misses the cunning.