In the run-up to Brexit, Michael Gove, a leader of the pro-leave campaign, was challenged as to why he was proposing something which experts were fairly unanimous would be disastrous. He answered to the effect that we had all had our fill of experts.
Why is that, does it matter, and what can experts do about it?
Nobody really likes experts. Especially as they usually tell us something we want to believe is wrong. This, of course, is why we need them.
The first problem an expert has is how to communicate to a non-expert that she is, indeed, an expert. Being a non-expert (let us say ‘layman’) means you don’t know enough to distinguish the genuine expert from the charlatan. Since charlatans will always be with us, especially in the internet age, experts have trouble distinguishing themselves.
The usual solution is accreditation: I’m more likely to put weight on the utterances of someone with tenure at an elite university, with a string of ground-breaking publications in peer-reviewed journals, and an otherwise distinguished record of getting it right. The problem is that a charlatan can look pretty closely the same, especially to an uninformed eye. For example, a person claiming to be an expert on sustainable development, whatever that means, may cite a string of publications in the Journal of Sustainable Development, but I happen never to have heard of such a journal, nor do I know anyone who has ever published in it. Anyone can start an academic journal: The hard part is persuading experts to publish their work in it.
The second solution therefore, is just to make sense. This is oddly hard for a charlatan to do, because the expert can pull in apparently unrelated facts to show their explanation or answer is based on knowledge which can also explain lots of other puzzling phenomena. The problem is this requires enormous effort. Most things which only experts fully understand, such as general relativity, gene editing, and the Bolassa-Samuelson effect in foreign exchange rates, are extremely difficult to explain to a layman. Compounding the problem is that most true experts are usually very poor communicators of their ideas, as the ability to communicate ideas is different, although correlated with, the ability to have them, understand them, and critically evaluate them in the first place. Some people can do both. In my experience most can’t. Most of the Nobel Laureates of the past 10 years were unable to tell the public what their original contribution was and why it mattered. Pick one at random and listen to their acceptance speech.
The second problem an expert has is overreach. A doctor can expertly tell you exactly what will happen, in due course, if you don’t change your lifestyle. This knowledge is based on knowledge of what happened to many other people like you who both did and didn’t change from your current lifestyle. The problem is the next bit: the doctor is an expert on what will probably happen under either the change or no-change scenarios, but is not qualified to tell you what you should do. Only you can decide that. It takes a very careful doctor not to make this jump, and lose you in the process.
This is a minor problem in the giving of expert medical advice, but a major problem in giving policy advice. During the pandemic, experts in epidemiology made policy recommendations based on their expert predictions. The predictions were indeed expert, but the policy recommendations were not, and so they lost our interest, and much of their credibility. Most experts are of this kind, the ‘if-then’ kind: ‘if you do this, then such will probably happen’ is expert, the next bit ‘so you should avoid doing this’ is not. Epidemiologists in particular were not in a position to know the economic and other costs of the lockdowns they were recommending, only the specific benefits in terms of probable live saved. They were not really policy experts, called upon to holistically balance competing imperatives—in the case of Covid the conflicting medical, economic, and social costs—as policy-makers are called to do daily.
More generally experts are experts on only a small bit of the big picture, but often arrogantly and falsely assume they know the rest pretty well too. I have lost count of the number of genuinely distinguished scientists I have met who started businesses based on their scientific insights only to fail dismally. It’s not that business is hard, compared to science: It isn’t. But there are still specialist skills that most of us can learn, that even great scientists don’t actually understand until they learn them.
Some disciplines are better than others in this respect. Law and medicine are bad, economics and science tend to be a bit better. That’s a gross generalization, of course. But when a medical person starts making recommendations about public policy I’m afraid I lose interest.
A third problem with experts is that they can be wrong. Most knowledge is conditional, and new evidence overturns consensus views. The worst offenders in this regard are experts who don’t understand this basic fact, and who sound very certain about stuff no sane person could be certain about. The problem is confounded by the fact that far too many people still confuse mere correlation (babies born by C-section tend to be more likely to develop childhood obesity) with actual causation (your baby is no more likely to be obese later in life whether born by C-section or not). That is, experts are not always expert on the things on which they opine, and we should all have the ability to critically evaluate their reasons for their views.
Does all of this matter? Very much so. When we lose trust in our experts, we start taking decisions which are badly informed. Think of the anti-vaxxers and the nuclear disarmament lobby. More insidiously, think of those corporations, from asbestos to global warming, who were able to win decades more profits from casting apparently legitimate doubt on stuff on which almost all experts genuinely agreed: exposure to asbestos, herbicides and tobacco smoke do cause cancer; burning coal really does cause climate change. And is it just me who has met more people in the last few years than ever before who really believe paedophile lizards in underground cities actually run our countries? Successful places need reliable expert opinion, on which they can then rely.
So what can experts do?
First, avoid overreach, and stick only to your area of true expertise. The hardest thing for an expert to say, as it is for everyone else, is ‘I don’t know, I’m not an expert on that’. But do it.
Second, when giving expert advice be completely independent and be seen to be so. Don’t tell the press Oxycontin is safe for long-term use when you are getting paid by the interests who make huge profits from getting patients addicted to it, even if it’s just to go to awesome conferences in Las Vegas every year. Make sure you understand whether or not you are independent. Be your own worst critic. If in doubt, ask your spouse, friends, or kids.
Third, explain things as clearly as you can, and if you have time how this explains other things too. This is a very good discipline anyway: You might realize you made an implicit assumption which is false. Say so.
Fourth, never confuse causation and correlation. Always assume you don’t understand which is which and ask yourself whether you may have missed something.
In other words, the greatest protection for experts is self-doubt. It’s your greatest virtue, and therefore your greatest weapon. The surest sign of a charlatan is the lack of it.