You can find 999 doctors who help and 1 bad apple who prescribes Oxy willy-nilly. That doesn't mean you trust them all equally, that means that trusting doctors works out pretty well 99.9% of the time, which are good odds and WAY better odds then every idiot out there trying to figure out medicine on their own and/or listening to random talking heads (which has a WAY lower hit rate).
Once you just focus on general policies that lead to better outcomes, and everyone stops thinking they are so exceptional that they can become an expert in all fields, then recognizing true expertise and following its advice becomes an obviously more generally optimal path.
Their point is those "bad apples" lead to people not trusting doctors as a whole. Over-prescribing opioids is one aspect. Not taking women seriously is another aspect. Does every doctor do this? Obviously not. But enough people have had bad experiences that overall I see people innately trusting doctors less and less.
And it's not "1 bad apple". America is in the middle of an opioid epidemic.
" everyone stops thinking they are so exceptional that they can become an expert in all fields"
People don't think they can become experts in all fields. This is different from not blindly trusting someone, due to reasons mentioned above, etc.
Wiki says there are 950k docs in the US. I'll start with thinking that since I don't have better numbers, that is a good initial estimate. I'll next estimate that there are less that 1k doctors wildly prescribing Oxy to patients and wind back up at my 1:999 ratio. I bet, frankly the odds are actually way BETTER than that. And I'll just finish by pointing out I didn't say "1 bad apple", I said "1 in 999 doctor apples are bad for the sake of this argument.
On the expert in all fields: actually I just disagree here. I get your point but I think my summary is right. Let's again take the doctor sub-argument. If I decide that because my nephew's college roommate's friend had a doctor who was a bad apple (bad call? Oxy abuser? whatever) that I won't trust doctors anymore then the result will be that I become the medical expert in my life. As I am no longer delegating that competency and expertise to doctors, I have now assumed that role. Then add to that my assuming all the other roles that the top post used as examples and I'm now (in my world) the export (for me) on all those subjects.
I don't know about you, but I have a life and just don't have the time to be an expert on geopolitics, all fields the press is covering, all house repairs, my car, science, my health, and everything else mentioned... (1) For my part? Thank god for qualified experts.
1 - from top post: "Politicians, journalists, contractors, car mechanics, scientists, all experts and all professionals with with trust issues."
Out of all things, one should take time to trust and verify about one's health and body. And at least some knowledge about car mechanics and home repair/contracting. The latter two are just a reality of life if you don't want to get scammed and/or have a really bad job done by contractors.
It's not really fair, but also we don't -make- time to understand our bodies. It's a total choice. Preventative care is so important, yet hardly anyone takes the time to do it, only going in once issues develop.
It's not about totally rejecting anything an expert says. It's more about trust, but verify, and take the lead yourself to be on top of things.
In my personal experience, I am the one who has had to try to figure out my diagnosis so far because my GP, Dermatologist, and Immunologist haven't been very helpful. Most of my sessions over the last year were about 10-15 minutes, I answer some questions, and here are some pills, come back in a month. There hasn't been much testing after the initial battery of tests in the first ~2 months. I'm the one who has had to take the lead and be aggressive about trying to figure out a diagnosis, and now, about getting a referral to a tertiary/quaternary center with better immunologist experts to hopefully figure out the cause of this damn thing.
It's not that I don't trust doctors- it's the opposite! But this whole situation has made me wary about blindly trusting anything or sticking to their timelines. My Immunologist emphatically stated that "it can't be gluten"- well guess what? So far, not eating gluten is appearing to help. It's only been ~1.5 weeks so we'll need to see. Of course I recognize that diagnosing skin issues/dermatitis is totally different than other types of issues.
I suspect that we aren't so far apart on this as one might think. The more central an issue is to your life, the better the rewards for developing some local expertise are. One can imagine that this is why some people develop into the domain experts they are, that field was central to their life.
I think, however, this is a different discussion. The article was about the value of domain experts and trust in them, and I feel it's sad this is somehow contentious (although thankfully less so on this forum). I believe another article could be written about the need to improve access to relevant domain experts (your premise I believe) and the need to increase accountability of experts/professionals (another person's premise). Both are worthy areas to examine once we acknowledge the importance of domain experts and offloading/delegating to them...
I think it's deceptive to put it at 99.9%. That might be true for oxycontin abuse now since law enforcement started acting, but not necessarily so for doctors that brush away minority concerns or women's concerns or are just ignorant of those and then won't admit to it. There's probably other concerns which are not as obviously illegal as oxy abuse, but those still cause you to lose trust.
Well, my specific counter-point was to a specific argument so this feels a bit like goal-post shifting.
But on that note: whatever the ratio of good:bad is in any field it is always still important to improve it. I hope noone would disagree that all your examples of bad behavior are, in fact, bad... and society should work to improve on them through culling the bad actors and enforcing standards of behavior and expertise.
I might note thought that this article was about expertise which is a different issue than "do you trust general law enforcement". Again I think we are at risk of mixing two separate but important issues. At the risk of further blurring the lines though, in this separate case I still suspect the answer is to specifically address the underlying problem of untrustworthy law enforcement when that problem is identified, rather than accepting a world were we have to take that responsibility on ourselves at all times. ie I suspect the policy of better controls and accountability on the people we trust is better than a policy of not trusting.
You could say the same thing about police officers. People think that because a small percent are bad we’d be better off letting society police itself into utopia.
#DefundTheDoctors?
Your missing the point. I'm not arguing you shouldn't trust most doctors. I'm arguing corruption is causing trust issues with experts in many fields. I don't have a solution, but I imagine the solution does involve managing corruption better. Same with institutions. corporations are spending lots of money undermining institutions and experts for "for profit" ends. More corruption. Not saying the other points aren't relevant just the solutions also needs to deal with corruption better.
> "Somehow, such critics missed the successful conclusion of the Cold War, the abundance of food to the point that we subsidize farmers, the creation of medicines..."
I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's such a fundamental problem that it's solution will have to step on the rights of some people, as you can't have respect to authority on one side and social bubbles reinforcing the opposite view on another. And they can't be equally worthy of respect. Case in point - how the hell did antivaxers become a significant portion of the population, in a pandemic, of all times?
.. But once you start censoring, it inevitably will end with overreach, because power is corrupting.
Of course some peoples "rights" will have to be stepped on. In order to have and maintain a civilization that civilization requires people who are competent at the skills needed in that civilization. These people are the most necessary. The obvious targets for suppression should be the people who provide the least value to society. No other method is practical.
It is important to remember that "rights" are imaginary despite grandiose titles such as Universal Human Rights. The universe provides no such framework. Pragmatism has to come first. Providing for the least is a luxury.
As far as corruption goes, there is no passive method to prevent overreach. it needs to be actively rooted out. Think of this as error correction.
I also think that only small groups of humans could achieve such a system. Expecting this at the country or planetary level at this time in history is delusional.
Value here is defined as the NECESSARY tasks required to maintain the civilization whether they be menial or intellectual. Needs not wants. Tasks that provide food, shelter and the basic life sustaining requirements so that other ventures can be pursued. No civilization can exist without these. People that don't or cannot work are not as valuable. This is harsh but is in tune with reality. People that choose to invest in their own interest form a split. Some when investing in their own interests create value for their civilization. Others do not and in fact drain value from civilization. They do this because they can. Any civilization will have a given amount of drainers and can indeed sustain a certain amount of drainers unless they drain enough resources to collapse the civilization.
The other consideration is that while what I have said uses logic, many humans rely of emotional reasoning over logic. In order to make these people provide value a certain amount of emotional manipulation is also necessary,
I read the GP as meaning that people spreading lies provide less value than people spreading truth.
Of course, deciding what is a lie isn't trivial, so system that enforces that will be complex and unstable. But that does not automatically means it's a bad system.
Yeah, I admit it does use some of those elements. However this is reality. Trying to provide to those less fortunate is a luxury. The idea of creating an equitable society is only possible if the members of that society are ever-learning and hardworking. In our reality people like this are drained from two sides 1) the less fortunate and 2) the greedy. This is pragmatism. The main difference between my views and what you are referencing is that I'm not picking the membership arbitrarily. Competent people HAVE to come first BECAUSE they are needed. You can't drain what you need and give to less fortunate. You can only build your civilization until you can afford to help out others. We are not in that situation currently. Harsh reality cannot be ignored forever.
how the hell did antivaxers become a significant portion of the population
Some people see Jenny McCarthy as a great model and assume she's knows more about health than she does. People put misplaced respect into a guy like Novak Djokovic. It's OK to respect his stance on backhands, but why does anyone care about his stance that he's against vaccines?
This. Reverence for celebrity also engenders a weird trust in celebrity viewpoints even when they are wildly misguided and completely divorced from a particular celebrity's training/knowledge/experience.
Not to say a tennis player and former MTV host started the anti-vax movement, but celebrities can fan the flames of ignorance pretty easily because of how much people pay attention to and trust them.
I don't think the answer is to step on the rights of people, I think it's that culturally we have to expend a lot more effort on challenging ignorance and elevating the voices of reason.
I also think we have to stop promoting ignorance and bad faith actors at the same level of people coming to the table with real knowledge and a good faith desire to engage. The current media landscape features a lot of promotion of people promoting misinformation to argue with actual experts because it's entertaining. But the effect is corrosive. On the personal level more people have to push back on the same phenomenon.
Tom Nichols and his most of his expert friends advocated for the Iraq War and faced zero consequences for doing so. I think if we want to really understand waning trust in the ruling class we could do worse than start there.
I don't think that undermines his point at all. Experts can be wrong on things, experts can disagree, experts can change their position.
I think that's one of the big problems with how people are approaching experts in this climate. 'Dr. Fauci was wrong about that one thing, now I'm only going to listen to Dr. Oz!' We're in a weird place where people expect experts to be right 100% of the time in situations with murky or evolving information or in subjective calls. When experts are wrong people turn to people with no expertise who say things they like.
There's room to disagree with experts, there's room for experts to be wrong sometimes. But the problem is people lining up to follow people who have little to no expertise at all and elevating them over experts. Even worse, people are growing actively hostile to expertise when it advocates something that they don't like.
Experts can be wrong, but there are limits. There has to be some line that a person can cross, whether through duplicity or ineptitude, that strips them of their status as “expert”, otherwise the term loses its meaning and we are talking about something more akin to a religious figure or royalty.
When someone is completely wrong on a matter that is central to their supposed expertise, and there are terrible consequences for humanity, they shouldn’t get a pass just because they went to Harvard or wrote some books or held important positions in the government. That doesn’t mean it’s better to listen to Dr. Oz instead, but it is better to find new experts to listen to.
I think when experts are wrong it negatively impacts their credibility. If they're wrong often enough, or wrong on something important enough, sometimes they lose enough credibility that people no longer solicit or listen to their input.
This may not happen often enough, but that is part of the scrutiny and accountability that should come part and parcel with being a renowned expert.
In a way it is. The experts that say the truth exists. But people who gladly promote untruth keep getting promoted, keep getting n-th chances and there is no accountability. The latter win over the former in the market and Tom Nicholson is part of that issue.
Dr Fauci spent the initial months of the pandemic telling people not to wear masks. We can rationalize why he did that, we can understand that experts make mistakes, but the end result was an undermining of public confidence when later the consensus in the liberal media switched to people who don't wear masks are stupid and selfish.
One quality an expert has is the willingness to admit that they were wrong in the past, but that their assessment was based on information they had available at the time.
Expertise exists, but people misidentify experts too easily. That's a problem. I think this manifests in multiple ways.
1. People respected in one field shouldn't automatically get our respect in others. Like the article hints at, you shouldn't automatically believe a great basketball is an expert about the shape of the Earth. I would trust Kyrie Irving 100% on shooting technique, but not astrophysics.
2. Having a platform is not a credential in and of itself. It used to be that you could trust the nightly news. Your parents vouched for the anchor. They were right 99% of the time, and if they were wrong, they published a correction, so they also independently earned your trust over time. These days, though, anyone can tweet. Anyone can get a blue check. Anyone can have a news blog. Anyone can appear on your screen. It doesn't mean anything without a strong track record. You can't trust a Twitch star like you can trust Walter Cronkite. Cronkite earned our trust over years, if not decades.
3. People have a hard time understanding when they're being conned. This isn't about intellectuals, it's about street smarts. Facts generally speak for themselves. It's important to learn the difference between influencers posing as "experts" trying to persuade vs someone just telling it straight.
4. Trust, but verify. Maybe there's a chicken and egg problem here - budding experts don't get the benefit of the doubt, how can you believe them over all the pretenders? Well, corroborate it. Trustworthy journalists wouldn't print something without multiple sources. Likewise, you should be skeptical of an expert that no one agrees with.
All of the above is true, and I would add one more:
5. Legitimate, credentialed experts can be full of shit too. Sometimes they are simply wrong, as being expert on a given topic does not mean you can correctly answer every single question related to it. Sometimes the expert might be correct about the facts, but wrong about recommendations, because real world policy decision making is complex and difficult, and experts in one thing, as you observe, rarely are experts in many things. Finally, it might also happen, and it sadly does more and more often these days, that the experts are actually deliberately conning you, misrepresenting reality to make you draw wrong conclusions that match better their agenda — experts, after all, are still just human.
Just to add that all disciplines have more than one current of thought and the expert's advice is influenced by his affiliation. It is a difficult to find someone who is skilled enough to overcame this problem.
> Trustworthy journalists wouldn't print something without multiple sources.
There are unfortunately too many recent examples of media organizations that do just this, publishing articles with a single source that turn out to be biased or unreliable.
I think the defining theme of this decade will be "how do we establish trust digitally?" This entire article is based on an assumption that knowing who can be trusted as an expert is easy but it's increasingly hard when all of our media is digital and can be manipulated by those with an agenda.
> It used to be that you could trust the nightly news. Your parents vouched for the anchor. They were right 99% of the time, and if they were wrong, they published a correction, so they also independently earned your trust over time. These days, though, anyone can tweet. Anyone can get a blue check. Anyone can have a news blog. Anyone can appear on your screen. It doesn't mean anything without a strong track record. You can't trust a Twitch star like you can trust Walter Cronkite. Cronkite earned our trust over years, if not decades.
Walter Cronkite lived in an era when there was little way to know any better if Walter Cronkite was lying to you.
About #2, a random news anchor used to tell the same story every other one would, so that they corroborated each other. But it's a very far fetched conclusion that the story was true, and very often it wasn't, it was just the propaganda all of them were paid to repeat.
these are all good observations but they miss coalescing an approachable framing of understanding, not the least of which, by accepting expertise as a legitimate concept in the first place.
one elucidating observation is to realize that the term 'expert' is largely a mediopolitical assertion. that is, people who have no qualifications in a given field use 'experts' to assert the credibility of their narrative by choosing a single/small voice from that field to represent the entirety of it's esteem. that's quintessentially a political act, to influence others, perhaps unduly, perhaps against their own interest, which is where the trust dies away.
trust develops among humans through direct interaction and obseration, and most experts haven't gained that directly with an audience. at best, they've done so among a small, arbitrary (to observers) group of people around the 'expert'. moreover, trust isn't a singular concept. people trust others for their political motivations much more often than technical skill, for instance. bury that under many layers of credentialism, an abstraction specifically designed to convey trust where it can't be built naturally, and where we go wrong societally starts to become clear.
when seeking information in a mediopolitical context (e.g., all of social media and news), the most reasonable course of action (for most people most of the time) is to disregard expertise entirely, because the purpose in that context is to mislead via an appeal to (constructed) authority, even if subtly and relatively benignly. it's propaganda built on top of slivers of factuality loaned in from 'experts', in a grand jostling for voice, relevance, and power. none of it should be taken seriously from a technical point of view.
Tom is really smart, and he has written a book about this topic. I respect him. But he's fighting a losing battle.
As he points out, expertise is a relationship between experts and audience. It depends on social and technological structures that accord experts more authority and a bigger megaphone than non-experts. We don't have that anymore. We have the Internet, where everybody votes with their attention to support the voices they want to listen to. It turns out, people vote for entertainment -- powerful storytelling and tribal snark -- much more consistently than they vote for good, objective information, which most of them are not qualified to evaluate anyway. How can you vote for that which you cannot identify? Does Tom want every conversation to be one long argument on authority?
Tom misses the old broadcast hierarchy, the few-to-many information flow where gatekeepers chose experts who told ordinary people what to think and how to act. The Internet and social media killed the old way, and it's not coming back.
And that's too bad, because personally I do want experts deciding some things. I want doctors to be in charge of diagnoses; I want engineers in charge of building bridges. But in public fora, those experts are being drowned out, because we democratized how people write and consume opinions.
I agree with a lot in this article, but the author touched, in passing, on an interesting (and lower stakes) example: baseball.
The experts in baseball for a long time thought baseball should be played a certain way. Bill James starting proposing radically different approaches that were later put into practice by Billy Beane (described in Moneyball) and later by Theo Epstein (who led the front office for the Red Sox and Cubs organizations when they won the World Series the article mentions). The story of baseball over the past 10-15 years has been about ignoring one set of experts as the industry has developed a new set of experts.
Another problem with experts I would have like to see this article address is when experts overstep their area of expertise. Experts can tell us facts from their area of expertise, but when we have complicated problems that involve trade-offs from areas outside the expert's area, that can lead to bad decisions.
> The experts in baseball for a long time thought baseball should be played a certain way. Bill James starting proposing radically different approaches that were later put into practice by Billy Beane (described in Moneyball) and later by Theo Epstein (who led the front office for the Red Sox and Cubs organizations when they won the World Series the article mentions). The story of baseball over the past 10-15 years has been about ignoring one set of experts as the industry has developed a new set of experts.
The emergence of analytics in sports is an example when the old prevailing thinking was displaced by new and better approaches rooted in data. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that science or experts can be disproven over time by better science and approaches. Sports is easy because the results are very easy to evaluate. But in other areas it can take a very long time for the results to an approach to be apparent.
Still, the problem being discussed is not that there's a competition of experts and scientific approaches, it's that sophistry and ignorance is being promoted to the same level of experts.
> Another problem with experts I would have like to see this article address is when experts overstep their area of expertise. Experts can tell us facts from their area of expertise, but when we have complicated problems that involve trade-offs from areas outside the expert's area, that can lead to bad decisions.
This is true, and he touched a bit on this with his Vietnam War example.
"A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.
But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years' time of a body of politicans, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy. Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.
Consequently, no external legislation and no authority - one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themsleves.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." - Mikhail Bakunin, 1870
The problem with experts has come from the divide of physical competence from decision making and power. An expert now is someone whose skills are for navigating bureaucracy and politics, and they hire talent to provide any facts they might need. These experts are politicians, and not practitioners.
The author says, "The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert."
No. The answer is to a) demand a demonstrable bar of current physical domain competence on anyone professing expertise, and b) reduce the role of deference to so-called experts by promoting and rewarding the values of personal accountability and agency, and c) hold experts accountable for lying or being wrong. What we have suppressed and consequently, lack, are the costly honest signals of expertise.
Education credentials do not suffice today either, because if you want to know what a 30yr old with a master's degree and an unsecured 150% debt to income ratio working as a jr. analyst in a consulting firm will tell you about the problem you need solved, I'll save you the retainer, the answer is: anything you want.
The reaction against incompetent intellectuals is that their interests can compromise their apprehension of facts so much so that in any serious situation, a reasonable person cannot trust a modern professed expert to put the truth ahead of their self-interest. When you trade on physical skill like coding or engineering, you have a stake in being wrong, because your reputation and survival depends on being right. When you trade on a position or credentials, the consequences for stepping out of line are greater than those of lying, and the incentives are clear.
Many experts can't even tell themselves, because they were educated by constructivists. The way to use experts is not a matter of whether they are lying or not, but assess whether they even know if they are lying, and what the consequences of being misled by them might be.
Listening to experts doesn't mitigate consequences, especially in examples of things in recent memory like asbestos, thalidomide, attacking middle eastern countries, collateralized debt obligations (squared), lockdowns, and what we are about to see with monetization and electronic identity papers. My advice would be to always consult experts, but rarely believe them.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadFor the right price I can find an expert to say anything. you got experts, I got experts to say the exact opposite.
should you trust the doctors that prescribes OxyContin to anyone that walks in the door.
Politicians, journalists, contractors, car mechanics, scientists, all experts and all professionals with with trust issues.
you want people to trust more than fix the corruption. The old adage one bad apple spoils the bunch seems highly applicable here.
"vc/entertainment" science & research vs "open/real" science & research
You can find 999 doctors who help and 1 bad apple who prescribes Oxy willy-nilly. That doesn't mean you trust them all equally, that means that trusting doctors works out pretty well 99.9% of the time, which are good odds and WAY better odds then every idiot out there trying to figure out medicine on their own and/or listening to random talking heads (which has a WAY lower hit rate).
Once you just focus on general policies that lead to better outcomes, and everyone stops thinking they are so exceptional that they can become an expert in all fields, then recognizing true expertise and following its advice becomes an obviously more generally optimal path.
And it's not "1 bad apple". America is in the middle of an opioid epidemic.
" everyone stops thinking they are so exceptional that they can become an expert in all fields"
People don't think they can become experts in all fields. This is different from not blindly trusting someone, due to reasons mentioned above, etc.
On the expert in all fields: actually I just disagree here. I get your point but I think my summary is right. Let's again take the doctor sub-argument. If I decide that because my nephew's college roommate's friend had a doctor who was a bad apple (bad call? Oxy abuser? whatever) that I won't trust doctors anymore then the result will be that I become the medical expert in my life. As I am no longer delegating that competency and expertise to doctors, I have now assumed that role. Then add to that my assuming all the other roles that the top post used as examples and I'm now (in my world) the export (for me) on all those subjects.
I don't know about you, but I have a life and just don't have the time to be an expert on geopolitics, all fields the press is covering, all house repairs, my car, science, my health, and everything else mentioned... (1) For my part? Thank god for qualified experts.
1 - from top post: "Politicians, journalists, contractors, car mechanics, scientists, all experts and all professionals with with trust issues."
It's not really fair, but also we don't -make- time to understand our bodies. It's a total choice. Preventative care is so important, yet hardly anyone takes the time to do it, only going in once issues develop.
It's not about totally rejecting anything an expert says. It's more about trust, but verify, and take the lead yourself to be on top of things.
In my personal experience, I am the one who has had to try to figure out my diagnosis so far because my GP, Dermatologist, and Immunologist haven't been very helpful. Most of my sessions over the last year were about 10-15 minutes, I answer some questions, and here are some pills, come back in a month. There hasn't been much testing after the initial battery of tests in the first ~2 months. I'm the one who has had to take the lead and be aggressive about trying to figure out a diagnosis, and now, about getting a referral to a tertiary/quaternary center with better immunologist experts to hopefully figure out the cause of this damn thing.
It's not that I don't trust doctors- it's the opposite! But this whole situation has made me wary about blindly trusting anything or sticking to their timelines. My Immunologist emphatically stated that "it can't be gluten"- well guess what? So far, not eating gluten is appearing to help. It's only been ~1.5 weeks so we'll need to see. Of course I recognize that diagnosing skin issues/dermatitis is totally different than other types of issues.
I think, however, this is a different discussion. The article was about the value of domain experts and trust in them, and I feel it's sad this is somehow contentious (although thankfully less so on this forum). I believe another article could be written about the need to improve access to relevant domain experts (your premise I believe) and the need to increase accountability of experts/professionals (another person's premise). Both are worthy areas to examine once we acknowledge the importance of domain experts and offloading/delegating to them...
But on that note: whatever the ratio of good:bad is in any field it is always still important to improve it. I hope noone would disagree that all your examples of bad behavior are, in fact, bad... and society should work to improve on them through culling the bad actors and enforcing standards of behavior and expertise.
I might note thought that this article was about expertise which is a different issue than "do you trust general law enforcement". Again I think we are at risk of mixing two separate but important issues. At the risk of further blurring the lines though, in this separate case I still suspect the answer is to specifically address the underlying problem of untrustworthy law enforcement when that problem is identified, rather than accepting a world were we have to take that responsibility on ourselves at all times. ie I suspect the policy of better controls and accountability on the people we trust is better than a policy of not trusting.
assuming random selection. What if that one bad doctor is selected more than 0.1% of the time though?
https://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2003/review_...
We stick a label of "expert" to charlatans, liars, idiots, mouthy and loud idiots and then we are surprised that "experts don't work".
I'm not sure what the answer is, but it's such a fundamental problem that it's solution will have to step on the rights of some people, as you can't have respect to authority on one side and social bubbles reinforcing the opposite view on another. And they can't be equally worthy of respect. Case in point - how the hell did antivaxers become a significant portion of the population, in a pandemic, of all times?
.. But once you start censoring, it inevitably will end with overreach, because power is corrupting.
Do poor people provide the least value, because they don't work or only do menial jobs?
Do rich people provide the least value, because they keep most money to themselves or invest in their own interest?
Of course, deciding what is a lie isn't trivial, so system that enforces that will be complex and unstable. But that does not automatically means it's a bad system.
Ah, eugenics, and utilitarianism. Smells like .. the 1930's and 40's.
Some people see Jenny McCarthy as a great model and assume she's knows more about health than she does. People put misplaced respect into a guy like Novak Djokovic. It's OK to respect his stance on backhands, but why does anyone care about his stance that he's against vaccines?
Not to say a tennis player and former MTV host started the anti-vax movement, but celebrities can fan the flames of ignorance pretty easily because of how much people pay attention to and trust them.
I also think we have to stop promoting ignorance and bad faith actors at the same level of people coming to the table with real knowledge and a good faith desire to engage. The current media landscape features a lot of promotion of people promoting misinformation to argue with actual experts because it's entertaining. But the effect is corrosive. On the personal level more people have to push back on the same phenomenon.
https://www.carnegiecouncil.org/publications/journal/17_1/ro...
I think that's one of the big problems with how people are approaching experts in this climate. 'Dr. Fauci was wrong about that one thing, now I'm only going to listen to Dr. Oz!' We're in a weird place where people expect experts to be right 100% of the time in situations with murky or evolving information or in subjective calls. When experts are wrong people turn to people with no expertise who say things they like.
There's room to disagree with experts, there's room for experts to be wrong sometimes. But the problem is people lining up to follow people who have little to no expertise at all and elevating them over experts. Even worse, people are growing actively hostile to expertise when it advocates something that they don't like.
That's right, and I think as you've hinted at they hold these people to a much lower standard than they hold the experts.
If Dr. Oz was wrong about one thing 6 months ago, that doesn't shake their belief in him the same way it did Dr. Fauci.
When someone is completely wrong on a matter that is central to their supposed expertise, and there are terrible consequences for humanity, they shouldn’t get a pass just because they went to Harvard or wrote some books or held important positions in the government. That doesn’t mean it’s better to listen to Dr. Oz instead, but it is better to find new experts to listen to.
This may not happen often enough, but that is part of the scrutiny and accountability that should come part and parcel with being a renowned expert.
1. People respected in one field shouldn't automatically get our respect in others. Like the article hints at, you shouldn't automatically believe a great basketball is an expert about the shape of the Earth. I would trust Kyrie Irving 100% on shooting technique, but not astrophysics.
2. Having a platform is not a credential in and of itself. It used to be that you could trust the nightly news. Your parents vouched for the anchor. They were right 99% of the time, and if they were wrong, they published a correction, so they also independently earned your trust over time. These days, though, anyone can tweet. Anyone can get a blue check. Anyone can have a news blog. Anyone can appear on your screen. It doesn't mean anything without a strong track record. You can't trust a Twitch star like you can trust Walter Cronkite. Cronkite earned our trust over years, if not decades.
3. People have a hard time understanding when they're being conned. This isn't about intellectuals, it's about street smarts. Facts generally speak for themselves. It's important to learn the difference between influencers posing as "experts" trying to persuade vs someone just telling it straight.
4. Trust, but verify. Maybe there's a chicken and egg problem here - budding experts don't get the benefit of the doubt, how can you believe them over all the pretenders? Well, corroborate it. Trustworthy journalists wouldn't print something without multiple sources. Likewise, you should be skeptical of an expert that no one agrees with.
5. Legitimate, credentialed experts can be full of shit too. Sometimes they are simply wrong, as being expert on a given topic does not mean you can correctly answer every single question related to it. Sometimes the expert might be correct about the facts, but wrong about recommendations, because real world policy decision making is complex and difficult, and experts in one thing, as you observe, rarely are experts in many things. Finally, it might also happen, and it sadly does more and more often these days, that the experts are actually deliberately conning you, misrepresenting reality to make you draw wrong conclusions that match better their agenda — experts, after all, are still just human.
There are unfortunately too many recent examples of media organizations that do just this, publishing articles with a single source that turn out to be biased or unreliable.
Walter Cronkite lived in an era when there was little way to know any better if Walter Cronkite was lying to you.
one elucidating observation is to realize that the term 'expert' is largely a mediopolitical assertion. that is, people who have no qualifications in a given field use 'experts' to assert the credibility of their narrative by choosing a single/small voice from that field to represent the entirety of it's esteem. that's quintessentially a political act, to influence others, perhaps unduly, perhaps against their own interest, which is where the trust dies away.
trust develops among humans through direct interaction and obseration, and most experts haven't gained that directly with an audience. at best, they've done so among a small, arbitrary (to observers) group of people around the 'expert'. moreover, trust isn't a singular concept. people trust others for their political motivations much more often than technical skill, for instance. bury that under many layers of credentialism, an abstraction specifically designed to convey trust where it can't be built naturally, and where we go wrong societally starts to become clear.
when seeking information in a mediopolitical context (e.g., all of social media and news), the most reasonable course of action (for most people most of the time) is to disregard expertise entirely, because the purpose in that context is to mislead via an appeal to (constructed) authority, even if subtly and relatively benignly. it's propaganda built on top of slivers of factuality loaned in from 'experts', in a grand jostling for voice, relevance, and power. none of it should be taken seriously from a technical point of view.
As he points out, expertise is a relationship between experts and audience. It depends on social and technological structures that accord experts more authority and a bigger megaphone than non-experts. We don't have that anymore. We have the Internet, where everybody votes with their attention to support the voices they want to listen to. It turns out, people vote for entertainment -- powerful storytelling and tribal snark -- much more consistently than they vote for good, objective information, which most of them are not qualified to evaluate anyway. How can you vote for that which you cannot identify? Does Tom want every conversation to be one long argument on authority?
Tom misses the old broadcast hierarchy, the few-to-many information flow where gatekeepers chose experts who told ordinary people what to think and how to act. The Internet and social media killed the old way, and it's not coming back.
And that's too bad, because personally I do want experts deciding some things. I want doctors to be in charge of diagnoses; I want engineers in charge of building bridges. But in public fora, those experts are being drowned out, because we democratized how people write and consume opinions.
The experts in baseball for a long time thought baseball should be played a certain way. Bill James starting proposing radically different approaches that were later put into practice by Billy Beane (described in Moneyball) and later by Theo Epstein (who led the front office for the Red Sox and Cubs organizations when they won the World Series the article mentions). The story of baseball over the past 10-15 years has been about ignoring one set of experts as the industry has developed a new set of experts.
Another problem with experts I would have like to see this article address is when experts overstep their area of expertise. Experts can tell us facts from their area of expertise, but when we have complicated problems that involve trade-offs from areas outside the expert's area, that can lead to bad decisions.
The emergence of analytics in sports is an example when the old prevailing thinking was displaced by new and better approaches rooted in data. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that science or experts can be disproven over time by better science and approaches. Sports is easy because the results are very easy to evaluate. But in other areas it can take a very long time for the results to an approach to be apparent.
Still, the problem being discussed is not that there's a competition of experts and scientific approaches, it's that sophistry and ignorance is being promoted to the same level of experts.
> Another problem with experts I would have like to see this article address is when experts overstep their area of expertise. Experts can tell us facts from their area of expertise, but when we have complicated problems that involve trade-offs from areas outside the expert's area, that can lead to bad decisions.
This is true, and he touched a bit on this with his Vietnam War example.
But that which is true of scientific academies is also true of all constituent and legislative assemblies, even those chosen by universal suffrage. In the latter case they may renew their composition, it is true, but this does not prevent the formation in a few years' time of a body of politicans, privileged in fact though not in law, who, devoting themselves exclusively to the direction of the public affairs of a country, finally form a sort of political aristocracy or oligarchy. Witness the United States of America and Switzerland.
Consequently, no external legislation and no authority - one, for that matter, being inseparable from the other, and both tending to the servitude of society and the degradation of the legislators themsleves.
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." - Mikhail Bakunin, 1870
The internet allows you to quickly get to the level an expert explains in public.
Life on Venus... Slow for the internet, but commentators explained months before the media did why it was nonsense.
Weapons of Mass destruction, these days you would get someone on 4chan getting photos of weather balloon stations pretty quick.
Experts are far below hive minds and we can all access hive minds 24/7.
The author says, "The cure for these transgressions, however, is not to replace expertise with ignorance: It is to replace it with better expertise. If complaints about experts were meant to restore a balance between experts and laypeople, experts would be the first to support it. But this requires voters to be at least modestly informed, not simply convinced they are automatically right. And as it stands now, attacks on expertise often amount to a demand from ordinary citizens—sometimes encouraged by politicians and hucksters—that their views, no matter how contradictory or hazardous, be considered equal to those of the most experienced expert."
No. The answer is to a) demand a demonstrable bar of current physical domain competence on anyone professing expertise, and b) reduce the role of deference to so-called experts by promoting and rewarding the values of personal accountability and agency, and c) hold experts accountable for lying or being wrong. What we have suppressed and consequently, lack, are the costly honest signals of expertise.
Education credentials do not suffice today either, because if you want to know what a 30yr old with a master's degree and an unsecured 150% debt to income ratio working as a jr. analyst in a consulting firm will tell you about the problem you need solved, I'll save you the retainer, the answer is: anything you want.
The reaction against incompetent intellectuals is that their interests can compromise their apprehension of facts so much so that in any serious situation, a reasonable person cannot trust a modern professed expert to put the truth ahead of their self-interest. When you trade on physical skill like coding or engineering, you have a stake in being wrong, because your reputation and survival depends on being right. When you trade on a position or credentials, the consequences for stepping out of line are greater than those of lying, and the incentives are clear.
Many experts can't even tell themselves, because they were educated by constructivists. The way to use experts is not a matter of whether they are lying or not, but assess whether they even know if they are lying, and what the consequences of being misled by them might be.
Listening to experts doesn't mitigate consequences, especially in examples of things in recent memory like asbestos, thalidomide, attacking middle eastern countries, collateralized debt obligations (squared), lockdowns, and what we are about to see with monetization and electronic identity papers. My advice would be to always consult experts, but rarely believe them.