Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
It was decided originally that we all greatest expert in the subject of ourselves. To those that say trust in the experts, they really should say trust in the individual.
Some of the best common-sense reasoning I’ve read in a long time. Thank you @olesummers!
I have some expertise in intellectual property law. In the corporate world in which I was employed I repeatedly had to deal with lawyers who reported to me (and were more expert in their area of work than I was) who were upset that some business executive wasn’t taking the action that the lawyer thought most prudent. I kept pointing out that although to the lawyer (legal expert) the legal risks are foremost in our minds, the business executive is also hearing from the marketing experts, the engineering experts, the manufacturing experts, the distribution experts, the finance experts, etc., all of whom may be making conflicting or even contradictory recommendations. The business executive’s job is to balance all the competing expert recommendations to make a decision that is overall best for the company. Always following only the recommendations of one of the experts will lead to bad decisions overall.
One executive also reminded me that I was advising him from the perspective of being inside our company, but that his counterpart at our competitor was being advised by my counterpart in that company, a legal expert whose perspective was influenced by the fact that he or she was inside the other company. Even experts in the same field, but sitting in different positions, can have different, even conflicting, views.
Just so. During my career I was in positions of advisor, and later, decider. As an advisor I was always more certain than when I was a decider.
Every human being has agency and is constantly working to improve his position in terms of his circumstance. Sometimes an individual will have an incorrect assessment of what to do; most of the time an individual has a better assessment of his own situation than the expert. It is simply not possible to construct a model that takes all of this into account. Therefore just about every model based on human activity falls apart at some level. It is simply not possible to capture all that information, process it in a way that is intelligible and package it into something usable. This is way groups that try to govern by models i.e. Communist Governments, Bureaucratic Agencies, UN officials, Development experts almost always get it wrong.
Yes. It is rarely the case that the decision-maker is the expert in all the specialties involved in the decision. Any CEO or General Manager who has multiple functions reporting to him…sales, engineering, manufacturing, etc…is quite likely to get different views from each of them with regard to just about any situation.
I’ve written before about the problems of decision-making when the decision-maker is not the expert. A classic case was that of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who at the last moment got cold feet at the prospect of a two-front war. The Kaiser called in chief of staff von Moltke, and told him to turn around the troops destined for the attack in the west, and redirect them to the eastern front. Barbara Tuchman writes of Moltke’s reaction.
“Aghast at the thought of his marvelous mobilization wrenched into reverse, Moltke refused point-blank. For ten years, first as assistant to Schlieffen, then as his successor, Moltke’s job had been planning for this day, The Day, Der Tag, for which all Germany’s energies were gathered, on which the march to final mastery of Europe would begin. It weighed upon him with an oppressive, almost unbearable responsibility…Now, on the climactic night of August 1, Moltke was in no mood for any more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters.
“Your majesty,” Moltke said “it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised…Those arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete…and once settled, it cannot be altered.”
“Your uncle would have given me a different answer,” the Kaiser said to him bitterly.”
Yet the actual railway expert, General von Staab, was not consulted, and after the war he wrote a book demonstrating that he could, in fact, have redirected things as the Kaiser wished.
More here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57755.html
Another example of decision-making when the decision-maker is not a technical expert is the case of air defense strategy in pre-WWII Britain. Sir Henry Tizard wanted the emphasis placed on radar; Frederick Lindemann (close friend of Churchill) wanted equal emphasis placed on infrared detection and on the bizarre technology of parachute mines. Relations between the two men had become so angry that if the air defense committee was to continue functioning, one of them would have to go. The decision-maker was Lord Swinton, the air minister: he was by background a lawyer, with a specialty in mining law.
I wrote about this interesting case here: Radar Wars–A Case Study in Science and Government
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/41262.html
A primary source for that post was C P Snow’s book Science and Government, in which he wrote:
One of the most bizarre features of any advanced industrial society in our time is that the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men: in secret: and, at least in legal form, by men who cannot have a first-hand knowledge of what those choices depend upon or what their results may be…and when I say the “cardinal choices,” I mean those that determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die.
(although, in our current coronavirus case, the ‘in secret’ part of this should not apply….yet it often seems to, as for several of the models to results are being released but not the models themselves.
Sounds like you’ve rediscovered Austrian School economics!
Add to that, the expert himself is one of those human beings who is “constantly working to improve his position in terms of his circumstance.“
Ultimately, the advice he gives you is for his benefit, not yours.
As Scott Adams pointed out in a recent podcast, during this crisis we have discovered that the experts were lying to us when they told us not to wear facemasks, and probably lying to us when they told us not to use hydroxychloroquine.
In both cases their goal was not to tell the truth, but to prevent a run on these particular items.
Recently on Ricochet, various people (including me) have suggested that the authorities have intentionally blurred the statistics on mortality from coronavirus, to conceal from younger people the fact that they are being quarantined primarily for the benefit of us oldsters.
Experts have expertise in one specific field usually, sometimes more than one field.
Predictions are a completely different matter.
No matter how smart or knowledgeable you are, no one has a crystal ball that works.
Actually I have pretty much always been in the Austrian School of economics, at least since I discovered that Macro Economics makes very little sense. On to your more important point however which is true. I suspect you are correct about facemasks. Hydroxychloroquine I suspect is a case of falling back to old habits. i.e. It hasn’t been proven effective therefore we aren’t going to recommend it. Doesn’t help that Trump touted it, which caused the predictable anti-Trump backlash that is now a reflex in our elite and expert classes. The truth is the epidemiologist and the public health professional have a lot of power right now. They are likely working to enhance that, not that I think they are intentional giving advice they don’t believe in but, power is very seductive.
talking to the press makes everyone stupider
The rise of the Administrative State enabled by some truly ghastly and grossly unconstitutional Supreme Court decisions in the 30’s have led to a granting of near overriding authority to the Federal bureaucracy. These decisions granted these agencies with the power to not only write regulations and legislation, but to enforce them and to judge those who they deem to have not sufficiently followed their unconstitutional edicts. This has allowed Federal agencies like the FDA, CDC and NIH to rule almost unchallenged and to come down very hard on those citizens that come under their purview.
Suffice to say, any body that is put in a position of unchallenged authority will generally quickly become corrupt and will rule abusively. Lord Acton’s dictum ‘ Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” definitely applies to our Federal Agencies.
So those who demand that we slavishly follow the dictates of our Federal Health agencies without question perhaps need to re-consider their point of view.
the unelected 4th branch of govt
Models continue to be wrong. Meantime Trump-haters didn’t like that Trump made a joke about models.
In case people were confused about pandemic models vs human models