With especially grim implications, the coronavirus pandemic provides further evidence for what careful observers have long understood: expertise is both indispensable and insufficient for coping with society’s most urgent problems. People following events in the United States have seen the glaring contrast between the judicious briefings of infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and the spectacularly ignorant ramblings of President Donald Trump. While many have rightly demanded more Fauci and less Trump (much less), Fauci seems to be acutely aware that simply putting the experts in charge is not a solution. Indeed, expert guidance during the pandemic has changed repeatedly, and it has often been contradictory or ambiguous. This has been due in part to rapidly developing scientific knowledge, but it has also been a result of changes in human behavior, as well as the different value-laden judgments of experts working in different political and cultural contexts. Gil Eyal wrote The Crisis of Expertise before the pandemic, but he briefly mentions Trump and Brexit as symptoms of “an all-out assault on expertise, in which populist politicians are riding the crest of a long-term wave of disaffection, yet doing their best to amplify doubt and mistrust” (p. 3). However, Eyal quickly delves into more fundamental issues. Echoing other scholars, Eyal notes that today we have a “two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise coupled with increased suspicion, skepticism, and dismissal of scientific findings, expert opinion, or even of whole branches of investigation” (p. 4). Despite widespread insistence that politicians should show more respect for “the facts,” that’s not the main problem. Empirical evidence does not speak for itself, and what counts as a fact is generally the result of a long and convoluted social process. Nor is the problem that some people are simply anti-science.

中文翻译：

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吉尔·埃亚尔，专业知识的危机

冠状病毒大流行具有特别严峻的影响，为细心的观察者长期以来的理解提供了进一步的证据：专业知识对于应对社会最紧迫的问题既不可或缺又不足。关注美国事件的人们已经看到，传染病专家安东尼·福奇博士明智的简报与唐纳德·特朗普总统极其无知的胡言乱语之间形成了鲜明的对比。虽然许多人正确地要求更多的福奇和更少的特朗普（更少），但福奇似乎敏锐地意识到，简单地让专家负责并不是解决方案。的确，大流行期间的专家指导一再变化，而且往往是矛盾的或模棱两可的。这部分是由于科学知识的迅速发展，但这也是人类行为变化以及在不同政治和文化背景下工作的专家的不同价值判断的结果。吉尔·埃亚尔 (Gil Eyal) 在大流行之前撰写了《专业知识危机》(The Crisis of Expertise)，但他简要地提到特朗普和英国退欧是“对专业知识的全面攻击的症状，在这种情况下，民粹主义政客们正乘着长期不满浪潮的波峰，但仍在尽其所能”。最好放大怀疑和不信任”（第 3 页）。然而，Eyal 很快就深入研究了更基本的问题。与其他学者相呼应，Eyal 指出，今天我们有一个“双头推密-pullyu，前所未有地依赖科学和专业知识，同时怀疑、怀疑和驳回科学发现、专家意见，甚至整个调查分支”（第 4 页）。尽管普遍坚持认为政客应该更多地尊重“事实”，但这并不是主要问题。经验证据本身并不能说明问题，被视为事实的通常是漫长而复杂的社会过程的结果。也不是有些人只是反科学的问题。