{"id":1080,"date":"2020-12-14T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/?p=1080"},"modified":"2020-12-11T16:52:30","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T16:52:30","slug":"not-so-ignorant-after-all-metaknowledge-matters-more-than-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/not-so-ignorant-after-all-metaknowledge-matters-more-than-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"Not so Ignorant After All: Metaknowledge Matters More than Knowledge"},"content":{"rendered":"

In one way or another, democracies put political power in the hands of the people.\u00a0 A perennial worry about democracy, voiced almost as soon as it was invented, is that it places power in the hands of the ignorant. To some extent, this worry reflects an elitist condescension, but there isn\u2019t much doubt that most potential voters know astonishingly little about policy and politics.<\/p>\n

For example, less than half of all Americans can name a single Supreme Court justice. Even during election years, most people can\u2019t identify the candidates standing in their district; most cannot name the party that controls congress; they routinely report the opinion that the US spends too much on foreign aid, instead suggesting as appropriate a percentage of the budget that vastly exceeds<\/em> actual spending; 40% can\u2019t name the United States\u2019 enemies during World War II; at the height of the cold war, only a minority correctly reported that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO. More than a third of actual voters are \u201cknow-nothings\u201d Ilya Somin claims<\/a>. Summing up the evidence, Brennan<\/a> suggests that \u201cmost people know nothing, and many people know less <\/em>than nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The world loves to mock Americans and their ignorance, but political ignorance seems just as widespread on the other side of the Atlantic. A survey<\/a> of people who voted in the Brexit referendum showed that neither Leave nor Remain voters knew much about the EU; on some questions they performed worse<\/em> than chance.<\/p>\n

Widespread voter ignorance seems to be a serious challenge for democracy. Effectively, democracy leaves the most consequential decisions (how, and whether, to respond to a pandemic, for example) in the hands of an uninformed mob. Representative democracy mitigates the harm, we might think, by interposing representatives between \u2018the people\u2019 and decision-making, but this is protective only so long as the representatives are themselves informed. As Plato pointed out, democracies may elect people whose appeal to voters is not dependent on their competence or expertise. The Trump election and Brexit referendum seem illustrative.<\/p>\n

Voter ignorance is the central plank of Brennan\u2019s case for epistocracy. Decisions (whether the decision to implement a policy, or the decision to elect someone with the power to implement policy) will be better if they are informed. That fact gives us a reason to replace rule by \u2018the people\u2019 in general with some form of rule by the competent.<\/p>\n

I suspect the case for epistocracy relies in important part on an individualistic conception of epistemology. I want to replace that conception with one on which knowledge and its production is socially distributed. I won\u2019t attempt to spell out how knowledge production works on my picture, but a central plank of the overall account is flexible and adaptive epistemic deference. People \u2013 all <\/em>people, including the experts \u2013 don\u2019t and can\u2019t know all that much. But they don\u2019t need to: they rely on others to do the knowing for them.<\/p>\n

Voters may not know much, but they have \u2018metaknowledge<\/a>\u2019: they know who knows on their behalf, and\/or they know how to find out. Metaknowledge is often better than knowledge: it updates flexibly and in realtime. The person who takes themselves to know may resist updating their beliefs in the face of new evidence, but the person who outsources their belief to the community of experts metaknows whatever the experts agree on.<\/p>\n

The case for the existence and the adaptiveness of metaknowledge \u2013 or for the broad and pervasive outsourcing of belief to other agents and even to the environment \u2013 is extensive. It rests on experimental evidence (for instance, that people attribute knowledge to themselves<\/a> when they know they can access the internet to retrieve the information, or when a partner<\/a> knows the information), on work in the philosophy of science on how little individual scientists know about their own<\/em> papers<\/a> and on how the institutions of science are responsible for knowledge production<\/a>, on work in anthropology and cultural evolution<\/a> on how representations may guide behavior without being accessible to individuals and on work in political psychology on how attitudes to policy are often better predicted by knowledge about who<\/a> endorses<\/a> the policy than by its actual content, and much more besides. It is, I claim, the best explanation of an enormous range of data from many different areas.<\/p>\n

Of course, contemporary democracies do have many ills, and the Trump election and the Brexit referendum are plausibly explained by some of them. In the US, and in many other countries, people have put spectacularly ignorant individuals in power. They haven\u2019t deferred appropriately. But the problem may not be their use of epistemic deference. They may have responded appropriately to the higher-order evidence we use to guide deference. The problem is that this evidence is misleading. Given misleading evidence, rational agents respond by forming inaccurate beliefs.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s right, the best response to the problems of democracy is neither to attempt to make agents more rational (they\u2019re fine as they are) nor to limit the franchise. It is to engineer the epistemic environment, so that cues for epistemic deference better align with good reasons to defer. That\u2019s not paternalism or manipulation: if these cues are genuinely (higher-order) evidence, its making sure that people are given good evidence and not bad. It is, in effect, to ensure that they\u2019re not being lied to.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s much easier to say we should do this and much harder to come up with concrete proposals. The suggestion also leaves a great deal of further work to do on defending the pervasiveness and rationality of epistemic deference and making good on the claims that engineering the epistemic environment need not be paternalistic. But those are topics for another day (in fact, for the whole book, in which these ideas will be fleshed out somewhat more fully).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Picture: Vote by William Vandivert.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one way or another, democracies put political power in the hands of the people.\u00a0 A perennial worry about democracy, voiced almost as soon as it was invented, is that […]","protected":false},"author":1319,"featured_media":1086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"On Open for Debate Neil Levy \"Not so Ignorant After All: Metaknowledge Matters More than Knowledge\" on voters' ignorance","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[71,36,270,269,261,271,192],"custom_author":[268],"class_list":["post-1080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-open-for-debate","tag-democracy","tag-epistemology","tag-epistocracy","tag-ignorance","tag-knowledge","tag-political-epistemology","tag-voting","custom_author-levy-neil"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8KPlM-hq","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1693,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/a-case-against-the-argument-from-collective-amnesia-and-forgetting\/","url_meta":{"origin":1080,"position":0},"title":"A Case against the Argument from \u201cCollective Amnesia\u201d and \u201cForgetting\u201d","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"May 15, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"The term collective amnesia is often used to analyse cases or states in which morally, socially and politically pertinent knowledge, such as knowledge about historical injustices, is (arguably) absent or unavailable in a society\u2019s collective memory. 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For instance, some of the most important scientific theories and findings have been the product of epistemic collaboration (see e.g. Einstein and Grossman's collaborative work in developing the relativistic theory of gravitation). 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Some of them are aimed at questions that have no significant impact on our lives, such as which restaurant in town has the best sushi, what does our friend want for her birthday, or in which year the last album of our\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2024\/05\/Tomat_photo_blogpost-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2267,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/intellectual-virtues-online-part-1\/","url_meta":{"origin":1080,"position":3},"title":"Intellectual Virtues Online \u2013 Part 1","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"May 12, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"For the second year in a row, the World Economic Forum has ranked misinformation and disinformation among the top global risks. And few places provide more opportunities for spreading misinformation and disinformation than the Internet. From conspiracy theories about stolen elections, to biased search results[1], deepfakes of politicians and LLM\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2025\/05\/pexels-marcelo-moreira-988124-2225771-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":891,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/following-the-science-trust-experts-and-covid-19\/","url_meta":{"origin":1080,"position":4},"title":"Following the science: trust, experts, and COVID-19","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"April 20, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Students of recent social epistemology could be forgiven for thinking that the world\u2019s social and political problems begin and end with the threat of \u201cfake news\u201d. The thought is that something new and dangerous has emerged at the end of the end of history: a \u201cpost-truth\u201d new world order in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/04\/ashkan-forouzani-ignxm3E1Rg4-unsplash-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1005,"url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/why-are-we-so-polarized-and-how-can-we-move-forward-a-perspective-from-social-epistemology\/","url_meta":{"origin":1080,"position":5},"title":"Why are we so polarized, and how can we move forward? A perspective from social epistemology.","author":"Alessandra Tanesini","date":"September 7, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Contemporary academic philosophy has recently taken a \u201csocial turn\u201d regarding the way it thinks about knowledge and related issues.\u00a0 Put differently, philosophy has turned away from the traditional ideal of a self-sufficient inquirer, doing his or her best to figure out what is reasonable to believe, in favor of a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Open for Debate"","block_context":{"text":"Open for Debate","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/category\/open-for-debate\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/09\/canstockphoto48175967-scaled.jpg?resize=1400%2C800&ssl=1 4x"},"classes":[]}],"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/533\/2020\/12\/vote.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1319"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1080"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1087,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1080\/revisions\/1087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1080"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=1080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}