Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do.

Why Priesthoods?

In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.

For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?

If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example:

• Individual: The wellspring of everything else. Eccentric individuals can go on expeditions into unlikely regions of ideaspace and come back with unique insights. And this is the only size class with much hope of avoiding groupthink entirely. But it’s also the size class at the most risk of going on crazy tangents and getting everything wrong. And it fails to produce consensus - if a million different people argue a million different things, the average spectator has learned nothing.

• Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise.

Is there a useful group size in between these two?

What about discussing ideas in a group made of only the most intelligent and knowledgeable people? This gives you the debate and collaboration functions that you only get in group conversation. But it’ll have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all of society, and it might be small enough to manage. Also, you can make people sign on to good discussion norms before they enter, and you can expel them if they screw up.

The Boundary Against The Public

From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public.

The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get a specific active penalty, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fits with Democratic ideals.

I recently reviewed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, on the architectural priesthood. It discusses the response when renegade architects would build things in styles favored by the public - for example, Edward Stone and the Kennedy Center:

Stone and Saarinen, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long – so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball – it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing upto American megolomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments.

More generally:

In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere at the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit.

Or, from the comments, this quote by architect Peter Eisenman:

What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.

I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!). Granted that some of this is because I lean libertarian and so do they - but I don’t think there’s a mountain of amazing and popular left-wing econbloggers who I’m ignoring. Part of this must be that department chair Tyler Cowen is better at spotting and cultivating talent than others - but you’d still think the #73 ranked department would try to poach some of his hard work.

When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.

This is my experience too. I once got rejected from a psychiatry residency I wanted, partly because they saw I had a blog and thought it might cause trouble (though the less prestigious hospital that eventually accepted me did consider it a plus, for which I remain grateful). I wish I could say that the program which rejected me is kicking themselves right now - I’m probably one of the most-read psychiatrists in the world, and most of what I write is relatively orthodox and (I hope) reflects well on the field. But outside of my fantasies, they are doing nothing of the sort. At best, my blog has gone from a liability to being neutral or a very slight positive. Certainly it doesn’t make me as impressive as someone who went to a medical school one tier above mine.

Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.

Still, at least I’m a member in good standing. At least I’m higher than pond scum. The lowest-status doctor in the world - the guy who, if doctors were Maoist revolutionaries, would get his face on the “Criticize X, Criticize Y” posters - is Dr. Oz. This isn’t because Dr. Oz lacks medical skill. Back in the day, he was a professor of surgery at Columbia, and by all accounts quite good at it. But then he went on TV and started catering to the public. He told them their stupid miracle cures and $19.99 supplements were Real Medicine. Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. Authority bestowed to fight the heresies of a fallen world, instead used to prop up those heresies. Columbia recently “cut ties” with Oz in some vague way, but as far as the medical profession is concerned, it’s too little, too late.

I think the profession’s hatred for Oz is justified - his claims are false and probably cause a lot of harm. But other doctors who say false harmful things get only a fraction of the hatred that Dr. Oz does. He’s not just defrauding and maybe killing the people who take his supplements. He’s sullying Medicine itself.

This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations.

The Boundary Against Capitalism

Dr. Oz illustrates another point: power corrupts, and the priests (as people known to be more knowledgeable than the public) have the power to bless or damn interventions in their field. Without some boundary against capitalism, they would abuse that power to make money. Again, cultural evolution has produced such a boundary.

A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status in the priesthood. My father - a much more orthodox (and hence higher-status) member of the medical priesthood than I will ever be - used to even get suspicious of concierge doctors. Was it really in keeping with the principles of medicine to care about the amount of money you got for your service? Shouldn’t the usual insurance payments (calculated behind the scenes, without you ever having to think about it) be enough for anybody? If you let doctors charge extra for their services, they might do bad medicine in order to more profits. In the worst case scenario, they might flatter members of the public who wanted all-natural $19.99 supplements.

This taboo has faded as insurance squeezes doctors harder; even my father eventually relented. But there’s still the sense that doctor is a calling in a way that used-car salesman isn’t. If you pursue money too aggressively, can we really be sure you’ve heard the call?

Why doesn’t every doctor pursue their own $19.99 supplement business? Some of this is professional regulation - there’s a sense that probably the Medical Board will come down on you if you do something wrong (though most doctors are proudly ignorant of the exact limits of the Medical Board’s power - why should the pious worry about the exact boundaries of excommunicable offenses?) But most of the barrier comes from self-regulation based on social status. By the time you’re done with medical school and residency, all of your non-doctor friends have long since abandoned you, and all the old sources of status and approval that you used to crave have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start the supplement line, you might get a new Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. The public might think it’s cool that you have a Ferrari, but doctors know better: nobody with a supplement line has ever been cool.

This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free.

Is ritual purity really the same as moral acceptability? Sounds like the kind of question a member of the public might ask!

Communication Norms Within The Priesthoods

Although priests talk normally when when they meet one another at the water cooler, ex cathedra communication must be performed in a ritually pure way. For the medical priesthood, that means papers published in a medical journal.

Consider ritually impure communication - for example, Twitter. Someone may try to make a medical claim (“SSRIs are a great depression treatment!”). But one can’t even predict the genre the reply will take. It could be any of:

• Insult (“You’re just another a big pharma shill trying to poison us!”)

• Anecdote (“I took an SSRI once and my arm fell off! Why don’t you care about people’s arms?!?!”)

• Extremely erroneous attempt at a statistical claim (“Here’s a survey showing that people who take SSRIs are MORE DEPRESSED than people who don’t, that obviously means that SSRIs cause depression!”)

• Manifesto (“Don’t you think we should be trying to end depression by overthrowing capitalism rather than treating the symptoms?”)

• Totally unrelated (“Buy #DogeCoin, you’ll never get better prices!”)

• Something about woke (“You’re just being woke!”)

It’s near-impossible to have a productive conversation under these circumstances, even if a handful of the people involved have good points. Even if you do, other people might never see it.

Hence ritually-pure communication. Only the most expert members of the priesthood are allowed to participate. They must submit their opinions to a medical journal, which will carefully remove all the human element, force them to add whatever hobbyhorse Reviewer #2 is on about that day, and publish a bloodless collection of sentences and figures with a title like “Shmenger And Wong Respond To MacOMillicuddy Et Al On The Possible Benefits Of SSRIs: Did Figure 2 Fail To Control For Age-Related Effects?”. Conversations will be naturally sorted by importance - the most crucial ones in the best journals that everyone reads, less important ones in the smaller journals read only by a specific field. Everyone in the priesthood reads the same few journals and ends up on the same page about the big issues of the day - you can even talk about them in natural language with your friends around the water cooler if you want.

Of course, high-impact-factor journals would never accept anything from random members of the public or the Dr. Oz style apostates who flatter their dumb ideas.

Grading The Priesthoods

The basic idea behind the priesthoods - have a “smart people only” discussion room with high standards - has obvious appeal. And in many cases, it seems to work. The quality of discussion in the average medical journal is very high. Normies who try to criticize it are almost always wrong. Sometimes an outsider from another priesthood - like a statistician - can land a hit. But it’s pretty rare.

Doctors know an extraordinary amount about medicine. They’re also well-coordinated. The phrases “scientific consensus” and “medical consensus” exist for a reason. Wider society sometimes reaches consenses on important questions - for example, after long debate, most Americans now agree that segregation was wrong. But priesthoods do it faster, and on more complicated questions.

Many priesthoods, like doctors, still have a good reputation. Even people who disagree with the medical establishment maintain a fetish for the priesthood, and will parade the tiny number of renegade MDs on their side as the strongest evidence that they’re right.

Still, they’ve bleeding reputation for the past few decades.

Some priesthoods have coordinated on ideas opposite the values of the public. We discussed modern architecture recently, but that’s an edge case - it has a non-zero number of genuine fans. Maybe a better example would be academic musicology, which produces a lot of atonal compositions that AFAIK almost nobody who is not themselves an academic musicologist ever says anything good about. This might be a natural consequence of the priesthoods’ drive to separate themselves from the public. And there’s not a clear enough objective standard for musical quality to say they’re wrong, exactly. But a member of the public who invested the priesthoods with authority and resources in the hope that they would come down from their ivory tower with new and better music might justly wonder what went wrong.

Other priesthoods more clearly coordinate around false ideas. For example, to a first approximation, 1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here, but a full list would take all day). Whole fields like anthropology or sociology turned on a dime to become 100% Marxist, only to very gradually shift back or lose turf to other priesthoods with more grounded ideas (many subjects have one priesthood doing it from a Marxist theory perspective, and another - often a sub-branch of economics - doing it from a data-driven perspective).

These failures are the flip side of the same qualities that make the priesthoods useful. They’re designed to stay isolated from the public (to prevent their beliefs from being downstream of the ignorant prejudices of the common man), and to find consensus (so that they have a practical result to report back to society). This was supposed to go well, because the priests are smarter than everyone else. But a natural result of these qualities is that all the priests get one-shotted by some bias which is especially appealing to smart people (and especially repugnant to the public who they’re actively trying to differentiate themselves from), lock it in as consensus, then stand firm as a rock in response to the rest of the world telling them they’re wrong.

This still isn’t completely useless. The biases that affect smart people are often different from the ones that affect dumb people. And even though priesthoods can and do stand firm forever, if they fail to present an intelligible case then society can pass them by. Only a handful of musicologists remain to work on their atonal songs, but pop music is a $30 billion/year industry. This provides an indirect level of engagement with society that allows the best ideas from society and the priesthoods to engage with and cross-pollinate one another. Ideological diversity is overall good, and the existence of sealed priesthoods, even imperfect ones, provides a useful anti-correlated error mode.

My impression is that overall, priesthoods stay net positive when they have some source of feedback (like data/experiments or engagement with public opinion) and can be mildly negative otherwise, but usually not in a colossal correlated society-wide failure mode.

…and then there was the past ten years.

Why Were The Priesthoods So Politically Easy To Capture?

Priesthoods have been politically easy to capture for at least a hundred years. Whole fields turned Marxist during the early-to-middle 20th century. Still, it seems like this reached an entirely new level during the 2010s. This isn’t just my subjective judgment; priesthoods themselves changed their bylaws or mission statements to declare political activism an integral part of their mission and condemned past incarnations for focusing on “objective” knowledge. Many priests who opposed the changes resigned in protest; their opponents defended themselves not by saying that nothing had changed, but by insisting that the changes were good.

The priesthoods draw from a certain type of person: usually upper-class, well-educated, successful but not too successful, prone to (and good at) abstract thought - I’m listing some obvious examples here, but there are probably deeper personality similarities beyond these. Then they isolate many examples of this type of person in a community designed to have dense connections within itself and thin-to-nonexistent-connections with the rest of the world. This ends up the same way as any other monoculture. Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases only rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically-near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. In the same way, the priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues.

Priesthoods enjoy some protection in their area of specialty - partly because they’re actually smart in that area, partly because they’re forced to be in contact with reality, and partly because internal academic politics incentivize and stoke scientific disagreements. These factors are less protective outside their area of specialty, but there they have other protections - their norms restrict formal discussion of topics outside their specialty - and besides, apart from their specialty they’re barely worth capturing. Those plagues that successfully capture them have found some way to thread this balance, basing themselves in overarching social theories outside the specialties’ competence to assess, but claiming broad relevance (maybe even with ethical urgency) to the specialty’s own topics and practice.

I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad. Maybe it was just luck of memetic evolution - why did the 1918 flu kill so many more people than the 1917 one? Maybe the rise of the Internet let various bad ideas recombine into more virulent versions or just spread faster than they would have otherwise.

But here’s one story that makes intuitive sense to me, even though it can’t be exactly right.

The most obvious complaint you could possibly lodge against the priesthoods is that they’re “out of touch”. But its very obviousness should make it suspect. If you’re making an obvious complaint about a set of people much smarter than you, you should wonder why the much smarter people haven’t thought of the complaint themselves. The answer is often that they already have, that your having the complaint at all is downstream of them telling you to have it, and that you’re being used as a tool in some kind of internal conflict.

Everyone in the priesthoods is well-aware that they might be accused of being out-of-touch. They don’t want to be in-touch in the sense that Dr. Oz is in-touch, where the the public is able to influence their ideas. But they want to be cool. They want to be on top of the latest trends. They want the public to say “Those doctors understand everything about being a normal person, in addition to having special magical doctor knowledge”, or “I’m happy to follow any advice that doctors give, because they’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the problems of people like me.”

In art and architecture, the drive to be “in touch” took the form of pop art and postmodern architecture, where artists took the materials of normal public life (like Cambpell’s soup cans) and transformed it in some kind of complicated way. The average member of the public might think “Campbell soup! That artist is in touch with my everyday existence!” while also being baffled by layers of ironic reference and artistic flourishes outside his puny little brain’s ability to comprehend. A+ instant classic.

The need to stay separate from the public, mixed with the desire to stay in touch with the public, creates a productive tension. Sometimes it inspires new forms of art. Other times it helps one faction of priests lead a coup against another - “your faction is out of touch, but mine is in touch”. In medicine, it mostly just causes a mind-numbing proliferation of Communication Skills classes and columns about the role of medicine in the Current Thing.

My theory is that this production tension was the vector of attack for wokeness, and the reason it took over almost every priesthood within a five-year period.

Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”

Now in-touch-ness is no longer about pleasing the “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It’s about pleasing all the identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. In fact, you don’t even need to actually please them! You can call Latinos “Latinx”, which they are known to hate, and you will be even more in touch than the Latinxes themselves!

As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals. Their ability to converge quickly made everything happen too fast to organize resistance. Their obsession with intra-priesthood reputation (as opposed to normal sources of status) let them force dissenters into line. And their splendid isolation from public opinion prevented common-sense sanity checks.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods; parsimony suggests the same principles were involved in both cases. But when I think of my own observations of wokeness within the medical priesthood, the tension-reduction story feels compelling.

The priesthoods tried so carefully to maintain a boundary with society, with media, with capitalism. Once they demolished the boundary between themselves and politics, it was all over. The sordid outside world came rushing through the breach; their reputation for cloistered purity dissipated.

We never realized how bad things could get. Better Dr. Oz than Alex Jones! Better Alex Jones than the average entry on BadMedicalTakes:

Yet here we are!

I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse.

But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics.

So Who Needs The Priesthoods?

Maybe we should accept this. Maybe we should say: to hell with the priesthoods!

I think this would be a mistake.

My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor an epiphenomenon of the distribution of knowledgeable people. It’s not that we need doctors, and by coincidence various medical associations have captured the concept of “doctor” and gotten a monopoly on it. The structure of priesthoods is itself functional. They’re a type of epistemic community that is usually more accurate than - or at least uncorrelated with - the world outside. Most other arrangements of doctors would be less functional. The doctors would get drowned out by other voices and fail to converge, or be lured away by worldly baubles and stop doing good medicine.

I’ve been despairing the past few years because the priesthoods have been doing such a bad job - biasing so many pronouncements to fit their political leanings. I was looking forward to seeing what happened after they got taken down a notch. Unfortunately, it’s nothing good.

The meme is supposed to be a criticism of the priesthoods. But I genuinely miss the step where you had to find a priesthood member who made something up, rather than making it up yourself directly.

Priesthoods make things up differently from normal people. Even when they’re corrupt, they still have a reputation to maintain. I’ve written about this before at Bounded Distrust and The Media Very Rarely Lies. Because priests are so focused on their reputation, even their mistruths follow certain ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest who lies to support a political cause will repeat some un-fact-checked lurid anecdote, or some utterly idiotic misinterpretation of garbled data. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant. They’ll publish a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then bury something in the footnotes which reveals that it’s irrelevant to any of the real world situations that people would expect it to be relevant to.

Why do this? Because the priesthood jealously guards its own reputation. If you catch some random YouTuber telling an idiotic lie, what are you going to do? Publish it on your blog? How many people both read your blog and (would otherwise) watch the YouTuber? Even if you land a hit, there are a million other dumb YouTubers fighting to take his place. You’ll never be able to enforce standards on them all.

But to a first approximation, there’s only one medical priesthood. If a priest sullies their good name, all the other priests will get angry. Priests are highly sensitive to their reputation among other priests; they fear provoking them more than they desire whatever worldly goods they could get by lying. If a doctor makes something up in a stupid blatant way, then in the best-case scenario, all the other doctors are mad because they have a deep commitment to Truth. But in the worst-case scenario, all the other doctors are still mad because he’s bringing the medical profession into disrepute. And there are so many intra-priesthood fights that there’s always another faction of priests ready to call you on your mistakes. So priesthoods’ standards fall slowly; a substantial fraction of doctors need to have been corrupted before any doctor feels comfortable acting in a corrupt way. An especially corrupt doctor will take only the opportunities for corruption she expects to get away with, which are limited by what other slightly-less-corrupt doctors will notice and punish. And when she does do something corrupt, it usually requires so much effort to ritually purify the results that she’s limited in how much garbage she can spread per unit time.

Veteran readers of this blog know I have many complaints about journalists. But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers. And I expect the spin to have some level of elegance. They (usually) won’t give a per capita statistic and claim it’s absolute numbers, or mix up stocks and flows, or commit post hoc ergo propter hoc. Relatedly, the journalists I know are obsessed with the opinions of other journalists, which they monitor and gossip about constantly.

In comparison, alternative media is really hit or miss. A few alternative sources are great, usually due to the personal virtue of the people involved. But the average person isn’t smart enough to figure out on their own which ones those are. And the rest are garbage. Also, and it pains me to say this, many of the really good alternative sources are run by former journalists or people with journalistic experience (eg Matt Yglesias - or Jesse Singal, who recently wrote a good piece about exactly this problem). You can resign from a priesthood. You can even be excommunicated. But you’ll always be a defrocked priest; you can never go back to being a normie.

The lies of priests are so limited and subtle, compared to the lies of non-priests, that it might seem like following priests is still an obviously superior option. I think this is true in every way but one: because the priesthoods move as one and fall victim to ideological fads, the lies of priests are correlated and manipulative. If you follow every priestly pronouncement, eventually your society will end up somewhere you really didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, if you follow the lies of non-priests, you’ll probably end up trying to cure your liver disease with ground-up hippopotamus eyes, but whatever disasters this causes will push in random directions and cause random chaos, rather than slowly turning your society into a totalitarian hellhole. Even though on every specific point you’ll probably do better trusting the priests, you may find that a blanket policy of always trusting the priests is not in your interests. And unless you’re a priest yourself, you probably can’t distinguish good priestly pronouncements from bad ones.

So for me, the big questions are:

How broken are priesthoods?

If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?

How would we even begin to do either of those things?

In the very likely case where we fail to do either of those things, what is our least-bad course of action? When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)? And when should we trust non-priest public intellectuals / bloggers / influencers / etc, on the grounds that at least they have a million uncorrelated failure modes instead of one big one?