Too Many Experts

In theory, diversity is about accepting people different than you; in practice diversity means those who ignore diversity have more moral clout. Thus, my kid's schools do not have little birthday celebrations (eg, cupcakes) anymore because the new Somalis don't celebrate birthdays, and we wouldn't want to implicitly single them by having birthdays as was done for years. No one can mention this sucks in public, however, without being called in intolerant bigot, and as we all know, diversity is The Most Important Thing public schools teach. Or a bunch of Hasidim move to a small town in Iowa to run a kosher meat packing plant (and hire illegal immigrants at $5/hour), avoiding the locals in their social activities and in schools, referring to them as shiksas and goyim, and the locals, not the new asocial group, needed to learn to 'understand and respect each other's differences'. An institution that employs a bunch of autistic types is 'diverse', even though no individual who works there is accepting of diversity except management. Thus, diversity is about acceptance when you are passive or 'leading', but for those who are not considerate about existing mores or who are doing, it's a pretext for being insular.

Such are the paradoxes of modern life, the kind of thing that makes life difficult for machines trying to pass a Turing test, such as the fact that being 'hot', 'cool', or 'warm' are all compliments. Similarly, experts are supposed to tell one what to do, but in practice they merely help rationalize whatever one wants to do. Expert opinion usually spans the space of conceivable opinion. To wit, the WSJ has an article on the current economic mess, and interviewed several well-known economists. Here's their advice:

Barry Eichengreen: $300MM for banks, $800 fiscal stimulus.
Ken Rogoff: more inflation
Robert Hall: sales-tax holiday paid by the Federal government
Robert Shiller: subsidize financial advice (here here!)
Alan Blinder: Infrastructure spending stimulus
Anil Kashyap: shut down ‘bad’ banks
Jeremy Stein: audit banks
Adam Posen: shrink the banking sector
Douglas Diamond: convert bank long-term debt issued after the TARP to equity, make it easier to wipe out equity shareholders
Markus Brunnermeier: put in a new regulator framework for banks

So, give money to the banks, shrink them, extinguish debt or equity in banks, regulate them or audit them--perhaps all of the above! Also, give out tax rebates and spend more. In other words, whatever the Federal government can do, it should do, say the experts

The point is that expert opinion does not focus, but from a meta perspective, merely rationalizes. Thus, it means almost the opposite of what a single expert does. The paradox is like the way diversity, in practice, is license to insularity. A thing in practice is the opposite of what it is in theory.