Most Underrated Problem - There Are No Effective Mechanisms For Bringing The Depth Of Specialized Knowledge To Public Consciousness

This is one of the core problems of the modern world. 

Tremendous growth in knowledge of the world around us ironically overlaps with little or no growth in humans understanding of the complex system we live in. 

The movie Don't Look Up captured this essence and this brilliant piece captures this situation better through some of my favorite movies. 

The leader of the Soviet Union cannot find even an appropriate posture in response, shifting uneasily before throwing up his hands in bewilderment. Likewise, in Contagion, when epidemiologist Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) describes to a touchy public official how a recent spate of infections will develop into an epidemic, the official can only think to remind Mears that releasing such information to the public would cause panic and economic contraction. Whether under Soviet Communism or the liberal capitalist order, there are no effective mechanisms for bringing the depth of specialized knowledge to public consciousness. The calamities beggar belief because the knowledge that unveils them seems to have been developed in seclusion, secret to all but a collection of elite minds.

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Just as the expert is ennobled in the technical disaster movie, his responsibilities expanded by dire circumstance, so too is the ordinary person demoted and infantilized. Each entry has its surrogates for the layman; those whom Margin Call calls “normal people,” represented by janitors, plumbers, valets, firefighters or the pedestrian masses. Inevitably, they all exhibit the same characteristics: desperation, superstition, panic and an ignorance that tends to self-destruction. They cannot be anything but numbers, vectors, collateral, victims. They are never so lucky as to receive knowledge when it still matters.

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Make no mistake: the truth of any technical matter undergoes a similar filtration when it is disseminated to the actual public, government officials or within private institutions. The raw facts, the data, when they reach you, have been neatly ordered, interpreted and summarized for your benefit. Such is the cost and convenience of living in modernized society; to “trust the experts” and their liaisons not out of goodwill but stark necessity. But only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized: a technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience. The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions (the disasters of both Chernobyl and Margin Call are expert-made.) There is no time to consider past errors.

I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t accept the guidance of experts. We have to. But we could reexamine how and why this social necessity emerged, especially when so much popular media is content to simply chastise the skeptical layman for not upholding their end of the irrefusable bargain. This was recently exemplified in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, an unbearably stupid allegory for climate-change denial in which two astronomers discover an Earth-bound comet that will destroy human civilization and most life on the planet. As they try to inform the public of the coming apocalypse, the astronomers are ritually ignored from all quarters of society—a manic political class; a glib media; shallow celebrities; a droolingly stupid public; and a pseudo-intellectual capitalist cult leader. The film cloaks itself in Cassandrian garb but only serves to vindicate liberals and progressives who want to unearth an ancient idea about disasters: that they are punishment. McKay’s film carries forward the logic of the technical disaster movie, but only after perverting it into a petty morality play, where the catastrophe is the only natural fate of a society so aloof and disdainful of expertise. Don’t Look Up manages to partake in the lethal incuriousness it means to bemoan by finding the suspicion of experts to be a moral failing, rather than a manifestation of the structure of technical knowledge itself. 

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Specialized knowledge progresses in a sort of fractal pattern, further departing from commonsense understanding as it reaches deeper into nature, reticulating endlessly at ever greater resolution. Its complexity and abstraction are always rising. But it also works, bringing us closer to what is apparently true about our world. And what works reliably makes its way into the mechanisms of society. The theory that earthquakes are the result of faulting is developed and tested until it becomes the basis of building codes. Likewise, securitization is prototyped and refined by bankers and economists until it becomes a mainstay of the global financial system.

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The technical disaster movie and the real events that inspire it serve as the most advanced expression of this social reality. Yet we will never find within these films a way out of the problem they uncover. The project of synthesizing technical knowledge into broader social concern, much like specialization, is a long collective haul—and we lag far behind the progress of knowledge. Until then, the expert class will remain in the unenviable position of convincing the public, with every compounding crisis, that ours is a technocracy of necessity.

So how do we solve this problem. There is no panacea. 

• Understanding humans nature and human phycology would help in curating and convening the message to masses. 
• Religious places should help in spreading the knowledge (yes, its possible and important) 
• Educating kids in early age to appreciate and meditate on the gift of complex systems, curiosity and wonder. 
• Educating people through movies and TV series
• From home to work encourage people to be humble towards the limits of one individual understanding everything and limits of human knowledge
• Encourage people to act more than talk. 
• Most importantly - people with depth of specialized knowledge should be humble, not label themselves politically and money, fame etc., should not be the primary drivers. 
• What else?