Educated Anti-Intellectualism in Government

I have a Ph.D in microbiology making me, by most standards, an "intellectual" and yet simultaneously I consider myself an "anti-intellectual" when it comes to matters of economics, and public policy in general (for example, I was for Brexit).  I don't consider being anti-intellectual an uneducated stance; in this post, I am going to try and explain why.

The core of Educated Anti-Intellectualism is the recognition that there are real and practical limits on what we can know or understand as well as intrinsic inabilities of experts to apply what they DO understand.  There are basically six reasons this is the case.  (There is a seventh... but that will be a whole post unto itself).

1. For many systems sufficiently accurate and detailed information can not be collected fast enough to predict the consequences of action based upon that information.  This feeds into Chaos Theory.  The result is that attempts to understand what is going on in these systems and manipulate them can only ever operate in real time at the most blunt, high-level of generalization.  Expertise and domain specific knowledge provide no special advantage at such generalized abstract levels of intervention. 
2. For many systems the fact that predictions are being made from data is itself altering the system... this creates a feedback loop where looking at the system alters it to the point where your tools to look at it are no longer effective.  The classical example of this would be Runs on a Bank... people think that the bank will fail which causes them to take out their money, which causes more people to think it will fail which causes more people to take out their money.... this feedback loop actually causes the bank to fail where it might not have without people trying to figure out and anticipate the system that the bank is part of. 
3. There is a conceit that many scientists, particularly physicists, share: the idea that we can figure out anything... that sufficient application of intelligence can model or solve all problems.  There are lots of reasons why this is not true, but perhaps the most fundamental one is that all systems are subject to the Incompleteness Theorems that, in non-mathematical-terms, means that they always have either a flaw in their own rules, or their rules are incomplete.  Connected to this, there are certain classes of problems that are literally "unsolvable"... that is they have properties that simply can not be derived except by experimentation... no amount of computation, even with perfect data can ever derive the answer, and as has recently been proven, this includes material properties of at least some things in the real material world, not just abstract math problems. It is profoundly unlikely that complex human systems will never have similarly underivable properties.
4. Humans have a proven inability to figure out complex systems with multiple interlocking feedback loops leading them to attempt simple direct fixes that have unpredicted and disastrous effects well out of proportion to anticipated effects.  Perhaps the most classical case of something like this is Rent Control... a policy meant to increase housing availability that actually reduces it. 
5. Policy is a function of POLITICS... politics is, contrary to the conceit of many self styled intellectuals, NOT about finding the best answer to a public policy problem.  Rather, the purpose of politics is to balance and serve the EXISTING INTERESTS of enfranchised parties.  Experts, on the other hand, are also almost always focused upon the long term interests of the system as a whole, often to the detriment of at least some of the existing interests within that system.  This leads to an intrinsic and unavoidable disconnect between what experts want and what governments want (particularly governments by, for, and of the people).  My favorite example of this is the 2015 Paris Climate Deal... the experts agreed as to what should happen, but the political reality of what COULD happen is so different that its laughable.  The result? A non-binding agreement without any form of enforcement that was abjectly pointless before it was even signed.  This is what happens when politics is dominant over experts... ineffective policy from the point of view of the experts.  But what happens when experts are aloud to dominate politics?  Why then... we get Brexit... a revolt of the electorate because they feel, correctly, that the experts have silenced their voice and thus are prioritizing not their existing interests, but rather whatever the experts are convinced are their long term interests.  It doesn't matter if the experts are right or not about what their long term interests are... The purpose of politics is to protect EXISTING interests, and when it fails to do so you have broken politics from the point of those interests (who are, not coincidentally, the same groups that keep the government in power).
6. Experts, by definition, are few in number (if comprehension of a subject is not rare we don't call it "expertise" any longer, but rather "education").  Because of their small number, if their expertise is to be applied broadly to a matter of policy, it must be done as a centralized global policy across the nation/system/economy.  Unfortunately, this global policy must then be implemented locally where local variables almost always dominate the problem.  This leads to a paradox where policy that is both correct and broadly applied is simply impossible.  Perhaps one of the most classical examples is the antibiotic Chloramphenicol... a very small fraction of people who take this antibiotic die of side effects... the number adversely effected is variable with a number of factors but we're talking much less than 1 in 10,000.... now, should it be used?  There is no good *global* policy for whether it should be used across a large collection of patients... some patients have minor conditions, others life-threatening ones, some patients are allergic to the alternative antibiotics, and others not, some patients have infections that are resistant to the alternatives, and others not, but the policy has to apply to all of them.  The blanket policies, to use the treatment, or to ban it, are BOTH bad choices for a portion of all patients.  The right answer is to NOT have a policy... leave the decision on the individual doctor/patient level because at that level, and ONLY at that level the sorts of variables I list above aren't variable at all.  Most public policy matters are like Chloramphenicol, best left un-managed by centrally empowered experts, and rather controlled by locals who while not trained in the underlying science of the issue have a much more clear understanding of their personal circumstance.

When one understands the above limitation on our knowledge, understanding, and capacity to apply either, the idea that we should listen to "experts" on complex poorly understood systems in which our capacity to collect data is pitifully inadequate like the economy, or the ecosystem, or the climate is intrinsically questionable.  Where we SHOULD listen to experts is where they have the DATA to do their job... I'm not interested in what a doctor on TV has to say about Type II Diabetes.  I am interested in what MY DOCTOR with MY TEST RESULTS, and with has to say about MY DIABETES.  I don't care what a plumber on the internet has to say about stopped up toilets.  I do care what MY PLUMBER who has inspected MY FLOODED BATHROOM has to say about MY STOPPED UP TOILET.  It is ONLY specific interpretation of specific data that makes expertise useful.  In subjects that don't have specific data and are based upon observations of a singular system (such as the whole Earth) and thus can never use the scientific tool of controlled experimentation (and no computer models are not an adequate substitute) and which are data limited in how often and precisely data about their state can be collected (such as macroeconomics, or climatology, or global ecology) the musings of experts is MUCH less reliable.