most discussions about expertise and public policy go nowhere partially because critics often use them mostly as an excuse to vent anger, which in a way partially just recapitulates the original assumption of the expert as the parent and the critic as the child

the child rants and raves about the real or perceived bad behavior of the parent, but it serves first and foremost as a stress outlet and secondarily (at least unconsciously) as a demand for the parent to do something in response to the child's distress

the child's failed expectation that the parent live up to perceived standard X is the source of the problem, otherwise the child would not be upset. the child is in a relationship of dependency, so throwing fits is the way in which the child exercises leverage.

the parent has to be reasonable, the child can afford to be unreasonable because the child lacks the power to act on its own. the child failing to be reasonable incurs little consequence, the parent failing to do so maximum consequence.

by analogy, its simply impossible to run a complex industrial civilization without a massive amount of specialized expertise and technocratic organizing structures. you cannot do so.

generally critics can eschew a posture of "responsibility" as defined here (h/t @averyfjames) and aim mostly for expression of public outrage, with the implicit assumption that there is someone that is "reasonable" that should intercede to fix things

when populists or revolutionaries often have attempted to substitute alternatives, they've often been forced -- grudgingly -- to back off after catastrophic outcomes. a recurring cliche in regimes like rev france, ussr, or iran is ancien regime "military-technical specialists"

having to be coaxed back into service after a failed attempt to build a "people's army" without ranks or typical forms of military organization

because there isn't really a viable alternative on the horizon, its easy for things mostly to become empty displays that implicitly acknowledge the very paternalistic relationship that generates the outrage to begin with https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1340700030706085891

neither entity in the relationship is really happy, because they are trapped with each other and cannot simply ignore each other, yet have no clear way to communicate and cooperate besides this.

similarly @deontologistics makes a good point about how Foucault-esque theorizing also implicitly relies on the existence of actual machinery that works, which the theorist can afford to discuss without consideration of its correctness https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1340604782080356353

you can "suspend" here the question of whether claim X is true or not because some kind of prior machinery for working on climate change is presumed to exist and we want to look at its discursive structures

the thing is that all of these types of discussions seem premised on the pre-existing functionality that keeps things going, to the point when that functionality suddenly disappearing or eroding would expose the actual dependency

as said before, there's a kind of mutual unhappiness at work. the unhappiness over the fact of dependency, but also the unhappiness that the dependency does not result in blind deference https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1340705271157551104