The Celebrity Expert Delusion

On Trusting Experts and Which Ones to Trust

1. Expert Letdown

Recently, two staple names of the non-fiction bestseller lists have come under scrutiny: Robin DiAngelo and Bessel van der Kolk – authors of White Fragility and The Body Keeps the Score, respectively.

DiAngelo’s criticism has been the far more publicized of the two. According to The Guardian’s Ella Creamer, DiAngelo is facing accusations of 20 instances of academic misconduct concerning her 2004 thesis. Matters are made worse since the material DiAngelo plagiarized comes from authors who belong to ethnic minorities – one of the exact racial aggressions Diangelo calls out in her own work.

Which is, on its own, cause for termination. But this also comes on the decade-long heels of criticism toward her anti-racist tactics in general, which have been decried by many black scholars, professors, and activists.¹

As for Bessel van der Kolk, his criticisms can barely be called public.² You’ll find his detractors amongst lesser-known academics within his field who accuse him of using pseudo-science.

The issue isn’t der Kolk’s ideas about PTSD sufferers benefitting from meditation or talk therapy.³ The issue is actually just the fact that the body doesn’t really keep the score.⁴

• Many, myself included, are surprised to find that van der Kolk is actually the same guy who dreamed up those outlandish repressed memory theories from the late 20th century.

• If you’re unfamiliar, the repressed memory theory piggybacked the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s. In a nationwide effort to unmask clandestine satanic cults, therapists urged practicing hypnosis and motivational interviewing on children that acted up at school, believing antisocial behaviors were manifestations of buried trauma from cultic abuse.⁵

• In reality, all this did was plant false memories in the heads of hundreds of kids, leading to wrongful convictions, FBI goose chases, and ruined families.

And it was all thanks to van der Kolk’s leading questions and genuine belief that any childhood suffering was a sign that they had trauma in need of unearthing.⁶ As is very well known nowadays, the repressed memory craze was nothing more than faddish, nightly-news hype.⁷

van der Kolk probably isn’t a villain. But his research is shoddy and his strategy can be harmful. It can put people in a never-ending cycle of victimhood.⁸ Rather than offering healing, it can encourage a perpetual journey of trying to explain away one’s present issues by searching the past for hidden trauma until, if unsuccessful, they end up inventing some.⁹

Now, this is significant because both DiAngelo and van der Kolk are accepted authorities in their fields – garnering speaking invites at over tens of thousands of dollars apiece, national news interviews, and acclaim as “expert” authorities.

But, in a sense, maybe neither of them are.

Which highlights a larger issue in our culture: what we’ll call the “celebrity expert delusion.” It’s when we’re so enraptured by the famous faux experts with charming personalities that we disregard legit experts or conflicting facts.

In The Death of Expertise, Professor Tom Nichols argued that our culture wants trustworthy voices but doesn’t have any coherent models for figuring out how to trust one voice over another.¹⁰ Our modern prophets are “guy on tv who read a book one time” and “girl with 6k followers.” This also happens in religious communities, where expertise is often assigned in proportion to personality and a gift for communicating via strings of attention-grabbers.¹¹

Now, it’s well-discussed that we’re an anti-authority generation. But the issue isn’t that we really distrust everyone. Our experts have just turned into whoever puts together the best content or least offends our ideological tastes.

So my goal here isn’t to throw together a “Let’s just trust the experts” article. This is more of a “Who are the right experts and how much should we trust them,” article.

Which is a more difficult question than I thought it’d be.

For example, I’m a(n almost fully trained) theologian. I’ve gotten decently good at scanning theological resources to judge if they’re legit. But in the cases of DiAngelo and van der Kolk, experts from other fields had to point out their flaws. If I hadn’t read their takes, chances are, I’d never know.

So I’m interested in how people who don’t understand a specific field (like race politics or trauma therapy) can figure out who’s truly an expert and who’s just a celebrity masquerading as an expert.

2. The Problem with Expertise

In general, the more subjective a field is, the harder it becomes to judge expertise.

Take for example the very subjective field of wine tasting. Wine connoisseurs are paid a salary that can make almost anyone self-conscious. But their “skill” is surprisingly biased and unscientific.

Researcher Robert Hodgson set up experiments at the 2005-2008 California State Fairs, where wine aficionados are annually tasked with rating a flight of thirty wines. Unknown to the wine reviewers, three of those thirty wines were identical.

As the three-year study showed, very few judges rated the three wines identically.¹² For example, a judge might rate one 92, the second 86, and the third 79. Even when judges were more consistent one year, their consistency would drop off the following years.

Which showed that wine reviewers’ skill might be based more on mood or the wine’s cachet than actual expertise.

The celebrity expert delusion occurs in many fields. For example:

• Many famous conference circuit psychiatrists might be worse at therapy than that friend from college who comforted you after your breakup that one time. The social scientist Robyn Dawes found that, in many cases, untrained persons acting as psychotherapists can produce better patient satisfaction than lifelong professionals in an average therapy session.¹³

• The same can be said of entrepreneurs or finance geniuses. Some earn reputations for their fiscal brilliance, but multiple studies show that they don’t make much more lucrative stock choices than novices or machines playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe.¹⁴

• The exalted authorities in climate studies notoriously make worse assumptions than those who couldn’t explain how a cloud is formed. In my lifetime alone, I’ve lived through nearly 10 “doom dates” (i.e., environmental expiration dates due to rising or lowering temperatures).¹⁵

• In classical music competitions, researchers found that judges often put outsized weight on a performer’s status, physical beauty, and gender than talent.¹⁶

3. Four Questions for Discerning Experts

So how do we discern if someone is a legit expert?

One surefire way judge expertise is whether they pass the peer-review. But unfortunately, many unreputable people still pass those barriers. So we could use a few more qualifiers.

The social scientists and “expertise experts” Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool spent years trying to study how the best people in a field became the best in their field – and also how to weed out those who actually knew their stuff from the pseudo-experts. I adapted their advice and added a few tweaks:

1. How are they perceived by peers?

Talk to other experts in the field and see who they think the real experts are. If 9 out of 10 Bible scholars and theologians think N.T. Wright is the real deal, then chances are that he knows his stuff.

But, make sure you also ask these experts what kind of knowledge or experience they have that makes them a solid judge of excellence. Or else you might just be entering into another game of following bias and likability rather than expertise.

2. Do they work closely with others?

Look for doctors who work closely with other doctors or therapists who are on a professional improvement track with other therapists. Being in tight-knit working environments can bring your own shortcomings to the surface, which might sting but ultimately reveals how you can do your job better.

Theologians who work in tight cohorts tend to churn out stellar material, while those who cloister themselves off often lose their edge. Iron really does sharpen iron. The best experts will naturally de-isolate themselves.

3. How were they trained and are they still determined to improve?

Training is about more than alma mater. In fact, going to an Ivy League does little to show how well someone performs in the work force.¹⁷

Evaluating someone’s training is more about whether the practical knowledge of their trainer transferred to them – not just their trainer’s head knowledge. In just about every field, those who get their professor/trainer/mentor’s hands-on lessons fare better than those who don’t.¹⁸

Further, training is also about whether they’re continually trying to refine their skills. If they’re uninterested in challenging old habits, chances are their skills are getting rustier and rustier.¹⁹

4. Do they try too hard to justify their expertise?

Essentially, look for humility.

For example, people who know the Bible really well don’t need to start their talks by explaining how well they know the Bible. They’ll just show they know the Bible really well by explaining the Bible really well.

The more people feel the need to verbally explain their own status, the more likely they’re insecure about their actual competency.²⁰

4. Four Qualities of Experts (Christian Edition)

Okay, so that’s how we can identify experts broadly. But I want to look at qualities of expertise that are more specific to Christian circles.

1.     An effort to read (widely)

Reading theology or biblical studies is a mainstay of every solid Christian teacher, researcher, pastor, or even podcaster that I know. Those who don’t invest into learning are, unsurprisingly, some of the worst.²¹

Specifically, this is about more than just reading books. It’s about educational diversity and learning outside of our own camps. It’s unimpressive for a Calvinist to only read Calvinists or John Piper-ians to only read Piper. What is impressive – and a trait I see among all thinkers I trust – is a willingness to read both in and outside one’s tribe, to read in circles, to hang out with both young and old books, to read from 224 A.D. as much as 2024 A.D.

Take the case of Rob Bell’s famous Love Wins book. Many people to this day treat it like it’s a Wiccan tome that’ll drain your faith the second you crack it open. But that fear is part of what gives it power – and also reinforces a subtle assumption that your deeply held beliefs might be inferior to whatever’s in that book. This is a recipe for flimsy faith.²² If you just took the time to open Love Wins or read an Arminian, you can see firsthand that it’s either more or less compelling than your own views. But most importantly, this will demythologize other viewpoints while reinforcing whichever one seems correct.

2.     The people you trust trust them

If you work in the publishing industry, you probably know one of the biggest ways to boost sales:

Get the Comer approval stamp.

A John Mark Comer blurb – or better yet, foreword – is a surefire way to guarantee your advance back. If you watch Amazon sales stats, you’ll find that everytime Comer mentions a book, sales spike.

from the cover of Josh Porter’s Death to Deconstruction

I’m just using this example to illustrate a broader point: if someone you’d endorse endorses someone, it’s easier to lend that new person your own endorsement. Who do the people you trust trust? If your favorite theologian/philosopher hypes up another, chances are they’re pretty darn good.

3.     They’re not obsessed with their brand

At this point in my life, I’m tired of the flashy, personality-driven, Christian influencer type.

Now, obviously, to run a church or do marketing, you need some level of prosocial showmanship. I’m not skeptical toward everyone with charisma or sociability. But I just get exhausted by those who seem to make their decisions according to their brand first, PR second, and the Kingdom third.

Nothing is more of a turn off than ostensible self-obsession. Personally, I’m drawn to the nerdish types who sound like kids in a candy store when they discuss their passions. Monastic hermits who don’t understand cloud storage are even better.

So, as a general rule, I try to look at where someone’s leading from: are they leading from talent and personality or from weakness and vulnerability? As A.J. Swoboda put it, “Love the preachers who talk about their sin. Be skeptical of everyone else.”²³

4.     Look at how they talk about their relationship with God

This one is pretty dicey, and can drift way too far into the “judge not that you be not judged” territory. But essentially, I’m more inclined to trust someone when I trust that they’re living in genuine relationship with God.

• Eugene Peterson told a story about how he became infatuated with another author.²⁴

• When Eugene got the chance to meet him, it initially felt lovely, like catching up with an old friend. But a few days later something wasn’t sitting right: the conversation felt a bit robotic and playacted.

• So, Eugene started scanning the author’s books again. He searched every page for any mention of “prayer” but came up short. So he gathered up all the books and threw them in the dumpster.

This story’s always stuck with me. I love someone who’s good with ideas and wordplay and formatting arguments. But if there’s no relationship with God to support the creativity, I don’t care for it as much. It’s not that their information is wrong. I just don’t see its beauty as easily. There’s an implicit anointing in work made with the Spirit’s assistance.

And I’m aware of how “Christian elitist” this sounds, but it’s just realistic. There’s an integrity to someone’s creation after they’ve spent the morning in prayer rather than scrolling on TikTok.

5. Trust First

In sum, I really believe we should trust most experts as authorities – just not godlike authorities. It’s about finding the sweet spot between, on one end, accepting their word as Gospel or, on the other end, doubting every word out of their mouths.

In physicist Werner Heisenberg’s words, “An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.”²⁵

Put succinctly, experts help us be wrong less.

Which is why, as a general rule, I think it’s important to air on the side of trust rather than suspicion, almost always.

Because, truthfully, if we’re going to be full on expert-snobs, we’ll sadly find very, very few people we can trust. The majority of the majority of people aren’t experts in any field.

Take me for example. I’m a PhD student in the year of our Lord 2024 that tries his best but has a pretty shaky grasp on Greek and Hebrew and gets pretty impatient with overly dry tomes. When my wife asks me to grab things from other rooms, I almost always forget. I lose track of where people’s sentences start by the time they finish them and my ADHD makes focusing on anything for longer than 15 seconds strenuous.

• I’d love to tell you I have it all figured out, that my research is the gold standard. But the odds are that I don’t and it’s not.

• This is because I, like everyone, am extremely biased. I was born with a specific personality bend and socio-economic status in a historical context where I’m inoculated by influence from professors, friends, and mentors with all their biases, bends, and contexts looped in – all topped off by a highly personalized Amazon book algorithm.

• All of which is exacerbated by the simple issue of time. I’d like to think I invest more time than the average writer into verifying facts and reading different viewpoints, but I always reach a half-life where my interest and determination wane and I start thinking “good enough” rather than “perfect.” But every writer, even the best of the bunch, presumably hits that same wall. Like Oscar Wilde said, “Books are never finished. They are merely abandoned.”

The way I think about it, it’s like I’m comfortable with the 90% (the basics of theological knowledge that come up in everyday life), but when it comes to the remaining 10% (the details and gray areas), I’d prefer to lean toward caution than unbridled confidence.

I’d be overjoyed to teach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I don’t know which parts of what I’m teaching might be the wrong parts (i.e., I don’t know what I don’t know).

In other words, take the 90% of the basics as more or less true, and the 10% of the details with a grain of salt.

Which might be the exact posture we should have toward experts.

1. In short, while Diangelo claims she’s simply continuing the work laid out by MLK Jr. and other Civil Rights advocates, her extremist takes on anti-racism have incentivized a reverse bigotry toward anyone who disagrees with her tribe. See Coleman Hughes, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America (New York: Thesis, 2024); John McWhorter, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility, The Atlantic, July 15, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/; Katy Waldman, “A Sociologist Examines the ‘White Fragility’ That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism,” The New Yorker, July 23, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism.

2. The following are likely the most public critiques: “The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now” and “Does the Body Keep the Score?”

3. Jacqueline Mei Chi Ho, Alex Siu Wing Chan, Ching Yu Luk, & Patrick Ming Kuen Tang, “Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma,” Frontiers of Psychology 12 (2021): 704974.

4. “There is no convincing evidence that trauma survivors exhibit implicit memories of trauma, such as psychophysiological reactivity, without also experiencing explicit memories of the horrific event as well. Thus, even when the body does 'keep the score,' so does the mind.” R.J. McNally, “Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory,” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 50, no. 10 (2005): 817-822.

5. This phenomenon is discussed at length throughout Mark Pendergrast, Memory Warp (Hinesburg, VT: Upper Access, 2021).

6. David J. Ley, “Forget Me Not: The Persistent Myth of Repressed Memories,” Psychology Today, October 6, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-who-stray/201910/forget-me-not-the-persistent-myth-repressed-memories?amp.

7. Sena Garven, et al., “More Than Suggestion: The Effect of Interviewing Techniques from the McMartin Preschool Case,” Journal of Applied Psychology 83, no. 3 (1998): 374-359; see also Pendergrast, Memory Warp, 110-117.

8. Karen G. Raphael, et al., “Childhood Victimization and Pain in Adulthood: A Prospective Investigation,” Pain 92, no. 1-2 (May 2001): 283-293.

9. I’ve personally been diagnosed with PTSD, so this isn’t just the ranting of someone who’s emotionally removed from this conversation. I’m attempting to be as sensitive as possible to those who suffer from trauma while also being clear with my criticisms of van der Kolk’s shortcomings. But I do sincerely apologize if you feel I have not handled this discussion with grace. See also Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (New York: Sentinel, 2023), 115-135.

10. Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2^nd edn., 2024).

11. And, realistically, this also might be due to a fundamental flaw in human communication. The way our world is set up, it’s almost never the best or brightest who sift to the top. It’s always the best communicators and self-promoters.

12. Robert T. Hodgson, “An Examination of Judge Reliability at a Major U.S. Wine Competition,” Journal of Wine Economics 3, no. 2 (2008): 105-113.

13. One of Robyn Dawes’ issues with the state of therapy is mental health practitioners over-reliance on their own intuition rather than an effort to refine their ability through keeping up with contemporary research trends. See Robyn M. Dawes, House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth (New York: Free Press, 1994).

14. Carl-Axel S. Staël Von Holstein, “Probabilistic Forecasting: An Experiment Related to the Stock Market,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 8, no. 1 (1972): 139-158; K, Anders Ericsson, Patric Andersson, & Edward T. Cokely, “The Enigma of Financial Expertise: Superior and Reproducible Investment Performance in Efficient Markets,” http://citescerxist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download.

15. Please don’t read any political bias into this statement; I have none concerning this issue. Mark J. Perry, “18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Were Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year,”American Enterprise Institute, April 21, 2022, https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-were-made-around-the-time-of-the-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year/.

16. Alf Gabrielsson, “The Performance of Music,” in Diana Deutsch, ed(s). The Psychology of Music (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 1999), 501-602.

17. Dasyl Taras, Grishma Shah, Marjaana Gunkel, & Ernesto Tavoletti, “Graduates of Elite Universities Get Paid More. Do They Perform Better?,” Harvard Business Review, September 4, 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/09/graduates-of-elite-universities-get-paid-more-do-they-perform-better.

18. See J. M. Rodriguez-Paz, M. Kennedy, E. Salas,A. W. Wu, J. B. Sexton, E. A. Hunt, and P. J. Pronovost, "Beyond 'see one, do one, teach one: Toward a different training paradigm," Quality and Safety in Health Care 18 (2009): 63-68; K. Anders Ericsson, “Acquisition and Maintenance of Medical Expertise: A Perspective from the Expert Performance Approach and Deliberate Practice,” Academic Medicine 9o, no. 11 (2015): 1471-1486; Diana L. Miglioretti, Charlotte C. Gard, Patricia A. Carney, Tracy L. Onega, Diana S. M. Buist, Edward A. Sickles, Karla Kerlikowske, Robert D. Rosenberg, Bonnie C.Yankaskas, Berta M. Geller, and Joann G. Elmore, “When Radiologists Perform Best: The Learning Curve in Screening Mammogram Interpretation,” Radiology 253 (2009): 632-640; Ericsson, Pool, Peak, 131-130-145.

19. Ericsson, Pool, Peak, 13.

20. For example, people who are in lesser known Ivy Leagues like Penn feel much more inclined to verbally assert that they went to an Ivy League than more widely known Ivy League grads like those from Harvard. See Paul Rozin, Sydney E. Scott, Hana F. Zickgraf, Flora Ahn, & Hiomg Jiang, (2014). Asymmetrical Social Mach Bands: Exaggeration of Social Identities on the More Esteemed Side of Group Borders,” Psychological Science, 25(10), 1955-1959.

21. This is a dreadfully Western thing for me to say. In many contexts outside of the West, reading and books in general are not a very culturally important or even feasible pastime.

22. James Hollis makes the point that refusing to acknowledge the aspects of our beliefs which we are skeptical over makes our beliefs even more shaky and we become more easily angered by opposing opinions. James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (New York: Avery, 2010), 219-222.

23. A.J. Swoboda, The Dusty Ones (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2017), 8.

24. Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperOne, 2012).

25. Der Teil und das Ganze (1969) ch. 17 (trans. A. J. Pomerans as Physics and Beyond, 1971).