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Ironic that the guy who lamented “The Death of Expertise” was one of the grave-diggers.
So, the polls say that Biden is going to win and I want to vote for a winner so I’ll go vote for Biden. Not.
I think we need to listen to all of them, even the CDC, then take what they say with a grain of salt. They are right about a lot of things, eventually. :-) I am so impressed by what we have learned about treating pneumonia in just a year’s time. We might finally move it way down on the cause-of-death charts. :-)
But I completely understand your frustration. It’s their arrogant attitude that is hard to take. I’d be willing to bet that President Trump stopped going to the CDC meetings because at some point, he may have wanted to blurt out, “If you guys were as smart as you think you are, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place!” :-) I know I would want to say that. :-)
Wasn’t he barking “Russian collusion” every ten minutes or so?
Whatever happened to that guy?
Add the “intelligence” services to the list of those who deserve a good dose of contempt. They are liars by definition. They have brought their lies and tricks home to undermine our system. Bush and Obama have a lot to answer for. Bush for creating the monster. Obama for weaponizing that monster.
If nothing else, hopefully the citizenry will take to reading “highly-placed sources in a position to know who only spoke on condition of anonymity” as “some derp somewhere who may be lying his butt off.”
In any case someone should help out the New York Times. “A senior official in the Trump administration” is not the sobriquet one typically assigns to the guy who decides when the daily last pot of coffee for the Homeland Security steno pool is started.
Remember, an “Ex” is a has been. A “Spurt” is a drip under pressure. So, an “Expert” is “a has-been drip under pressure.”
(Thanks, Dr. Graham, I’m still using your definitions nigh on forty years later.)
I hate having “dueling experts.” I want (fairly) objective information, and it’s all sounding like propaganda. I feel like the only thing I can rely on is common sense, and that’s not very confidence-building.
A friend told me about a group project he did in high school. They pinned various weather prognostications to a dartboard, then threw darts at it while blindfolded. They compared the results with local weather forecasts and found their blindfolded-dart throw-obtained predictions were slightly more accurate.
I’m still a fan of experts. Broadly, I’d say it isn’t so much that expertise doesn’t exist but rather non-experts ask more from the expert than they should, and too many experts are willing to respond in kind without any caveats. Or we can flip it around. Experts too often go outside their expertise and we are too often shocked that they are wrong. Everything has margins of error.
With public policy, the tolerance for mistakes is very low. It is hard to get another bite at the apple for a variety of reasons, so even if the expert now knows what they did wrong and could fix it, they don’t often get the chance so it looks worse than it might have been. It’s hard to assess expertise there– I think there are varying levels of sophistication.
But even with the hard/natural sciences, “experts” regularly mess up and do so badly (think about all the drugs that fail). It doesn’t mean they aren’t experts. Sometimes you just get it wrong. Often however, their mistakes are hidden or inscrutable to the layman and they only release a product or a drug when it works, so we over inflate that type of expertise.
This is not margin of error. I know very few smart people who do not, based on deep (but narrow) expertise, assume that they are equally relevant and correct for adjacent and even tangential areas. In other words, all smart people like to play outside their own sandboxes.
The mark of a useful expert, to my mind, is one who is able to say, “this is really not my core specialty; maybe you need to ask someone else.” Climate “scientists” NEVER do this. But doctors and nurses do it all the time, perhaps because it is a key part of their training, perhaps because the consequences of mistakes are so dire and emotionally taxing.
There are no “experts” in how to balance all the Covid-related issues. This is where generalists (like myself and many here on Ricochet) really thrive, because we are able to understand, at a top level, most of the issues presented by the focused smart people. And then we can argue about how to trade them off against each other.
I don’t think it even has much meaning. Deep State bureaucrats serve different masters than do politicians. And politicians are usually pretty stupid, and have no experience actually doing a detailed study of the tradeoffs for any given proposal.
At least in medicine, for example, there are defined metrics. Most people are pretty good when the lines are well defined, and they have a set problem to work. That is not where we are: we cannot even agree on what the targets should be! Is it overall economic health? Minimized deaths? “Stopping” the virus?
So when an expert weighs in, having unilaterally chosen their own target, they do enormous harm. Before we trust any of them, we need to challenge them to establish how much, actually, they are able to assess a situation and trade off between different “good” outcomes.
I think what I am against more than the “experts” are the “professionals” because the professional standards organizations, aided and abetted by the monied interests such as insurance companies or government agencies, are so corrupt that it affects the accuracy and objectivity of the opinions they offer.
The history of the treatment of Lyme disease is a perfect example of this. The insurance companies did not want to treat Lyme disease with aggressive and long-running courses of antibiotics, even in the face of research that showed that it was a bacterial disease that stubbornly resisted the usual short course of antibiotics. It was the doctors’ professional organizations that resisted this aggressive and successful treatment for a long time.
I see the same thing in all of the sciences where scientists form some sort of group opinion and woe to the scientist who challenges that opinion.
I think professionals need to spend more time listening to their clients or patients than they presently do. And they all need a course in how to be open-minded to the unexpected before they are awarded their advanced degrees.
@iwe
Thanks for the response. It was engaging. I think we are generally in agreement, but there are differences. I’m not as fascicle with the quote function as I’d like so I’ll refer to what you quoted.
1st Quote/Para 1: You are saying that going outside of your expertise isn’t a margin of error? I agree with that. I actually didn’t mean for my statement to come off that way. My bad. I just meant as a general matter there is always a margin of error associated with predictions. People making their predictions should be transparent about that aspect but margin of error is a real thing and I suspect people are more resistant to that idea than they may want to think.
Para 2: My first paragraph is largely this complaint, to that extent I agree. I’m not entirely sure about the whole climate scientist vs doctors and nurses debate. Being a doctor or nurse doesn’t provide anyone with any added humility when one steps outside of their speciality. Medical journals are full of terrible gun articles. They are acting just like climate scientists who want to tell us about meat consumption. Medical journals are full of low powered studies that lazily invoke causation and don’t take into account pseudoreplication. I just think about “don’t wear a mask.”
Para 3 and 2nd Quote: Agreed. Answers can settle in a variety of places, so I am skeptical of how we can measure expertise there. But you can have people who are more sophisticated and able to move past a world of bivariate comparisons. So I’d go with maybe policy wonks since maybe sophisticate sounds pretentious?
3rd Quote: We may be talking past each other. The response reads as being largely about social policy? Even in fields with metrics, information is strategically withheld, models are poorly specified and accidentally misinterpreted and so on. The process of development is iterative and mistakes are fixed. There is nothing wrong with that but mistakes are made. We typically just don’t get to observe the mistakes, only the finished product.
I work with really brilliant scientists on a regular basis. Yet I am still able to advise them. Why?
Because my area of expertise is different from theirs.
Similarly,I have some expertise in the area of public health and microbiology. I’m not a pure biosafety expert, but I have picked up a lot over the past few years. I’ve tried to be straightforward in what I know and don’t know.
The real problem is that expertise does not provide authority.
On the other hand, I am slightly above the average bear in what I know about accounting and finance. Insurance is even crazier – especially medical insurance.
I don’t know that we should develop contempt for experts, but we certainly need to stop worshiping (in a colloquial sense) them.
As the colloquy between @iwe and @goldgeller illustrate, experts are not infallible even in their area of expertise, and there is even less reason to trust their word outside their area of expertise. Yet the media, politicians, and many of our friends and relatives urge us to accept everything an “expert” says on almost any subject. That needs to change.
The difference between an expert and the man on the street is that the latter often makes boneheaded decisions that can ruin his life, whereas the former often makes boneheaded decisions that can ruin everyone’s lives.
I do wonder if there is a perverse interaction/selection effect between certain types of “experts” and the media. Are lay people good at choosing who they consider experts? Do the really good experts (“experts”) recognize the uncertainty in their modeling and data and are subsequently less willing to say anything that is suitable for a 5 min CNN panel whereas people who are simply credentialed are far more willing to push their ideas precisely because they need an alternative way of competing with actual experts?
That is exactly the problem. There was no expertise on this particular virus at the beginning of the virus but they would not admit it. Instead, they were treated as rock stars, gods, whatever, when they had to rely on second-hand information (from China, no less). So of course they got it wrong initially. They did not have the experience necessary. However, the experts in South Korea and Taiwan had a far better idea of how to deal with this because they had to deal with Chinese dishonesty and the giant elephant China represents. So rather than going to the health experts who could have helped, the American health experts were too closely tied to the Chinese and were entirely gullible.
Excellent point, @hangon.
Amen. Amen.
That’s why “Build back better” is a bad idea if it’s describing social engineering schemes.
It’s a decent motto for an architect after a war or after an earthquake. You can engineer a building. But you can’t engineer a society or an economy.
“Build back better” might be a decent idea for a guideline for individuals making their own decisions about how to reorganize their own lives after we get the Covid vaccine. But I doubt that’s what Biden has in mind.
Whenever I see “build back better,” I think “what was damaged and needs to be built back?”
Minneapolis. Kenosha. Seattle. Portland. New York. DC. And on and on and on.
And who damaged it?
Wasn’t President Trump, Joe. It was your people.
Unfortunately, such professionals are so immersed in the value of their self worth they have no reason to be open minded.
As far as course work that would enable a professional to be able to think out of the box, that is one splendid idea. However, few universities are run by administrators who have experienced such course work themselves.
Then there’s the problem of gainful employment. An individual goes through years at higher institutions of learning only to find out there are not that many slots for their field of expertise.
Let’s say they are trained in forest management. They finally land a job at a government agency that has to do with their specialty. They begin their job just as funding to stop the prevalence of the nasty tiger coger beetle(hypothetical) is being considered by Congress. They now need to learn all the in’s and out’s of how to make application to get the grant money.
By the time their agency gets the grant money, it is already being rumored that the nasty tiger coger beetle is not really the problem with regards to trees dying. But their agency is about to cut their position unless they ignore those rumors and proceed to implement expensive strategies to eliminate said non-problematic beetle.
After all, if they don’t forge along the already funded path, they will be without a job, as it will be another two years before the new grant for the real problem is written and approved etc. If they just continue to work on eliminating the tiger coger beetle, they will get a raise and be managing an entire department of people who also are keen on eliminating this nasty pest.
Now the individual is officially a bureaucrat and may never do an honest and decently constructive thing in their life again.
Now you are confusing an expert with a politician or bureaucrat.
An expert is the person the authority asks for advice. They generally are not the person running things outside of a small area. For example, the department of surgery at a university hospital is run by an expert surgeon. The person with decision making authority should consult with experts from differing areas. Ideally, the president should have access to people who are highly informed on the specific topic he’s interested in. So, a response to post election rioting might get advice from police veterans, FBI agents in charge of antifa investigations, counter-insurgency experts from the military, FEMA emergency planners, public relations people from the president’s staff, etc.
However, the final decision belongs to the authority, the executive, after hearing what people have to say.
James Taranto used to have a section in his Best of the Web compilations called “What Would We Do Without Experts?” where he would highlight some absurd headline or column where “experts” had earnestly opined about whether it’s a good idea to eat nothing but Cheetos, or play in traffic, or whatever.
President Eisenhower was already calling the IC’s real results “a legacy of ashes.”
For many years, the Wall Street Journal made this point by repeated cycles of “expert” stock pickers versus a handful of darts thrown at the stock pages. The darts regularly won.