Great, another excuse for the undereducated masses to weigh in on critical decisions in energy policy, monetary policy, and other areas where quantitative training should be very well required.
Don't trust experts? I'll take my chances. Know what's more blinding than knowledge? Having no idea what you're talking about! Like 96% of internet users, who think it's their god-given right to explain world events with their conspiracy-driven thinking, emotional ejections, and numbers off by one or more orders of magnitude.
Say what you will about my parents' generation; at least they knew not to form and promote opinions in fields they had no goddamn understanding of whatever. If you're in the top 1% of the population by intelligence, curiosity, and diligence (e.g. Richard Feynman) you will occasionally be able to scoop experts. Everyone else... should probably not be told at a young age that their opinions matter ex novo.
Once upon a time I tried to tell my mother about the problem of expert calibration, saying: "So when an expert says they're 99% confident, it only happens about 70% of the time." Then there was a pause as, suddenly, I realized I was talking to my mother, and I hastily added: "Of course, you've got to make sure to apply that skepticism evenhandedly, including to yourself, rather than just using it to argue against anything you disagree with -"
And my mother said: "Are you kidding? This is great! I'm going to use it all the time!"
If your complaint is about politics work, then I would agree.
Otherwise, I personally find it more troubling that some people say "well, I haven't spent 20 years studying this I guess I just have to believe what I'm told". You can't just believe what you're told either, you have to know the confidence level of the underlying field. Is this a hard science? It is just a bunch of computer simulations studying something that has far too many variables to ever be rigorously tested?
The best thing we can do, IMO, is be open minded and not be so final about things that can't actually be tested.
Sorry, just venting - I don't perceive overtrust of experts to be a great problem right now. Open-minded is good. I was 17 before a teacher ever mentioned its virtues (he discussed "parsimony" in science). I do believe that a lot of softer science has found voice through politicization, and perhaps other long-term effects of grant-driven research, subsidized tuitions...
What makes someone an expert, though? Is it credentials? Experience? Status in the community? Very often, that's the problem: the popular media often will deem someone as an "expert" when they really have little idea of what they're talking about, but are good at providing soundbites or generating controversy.
Even among experts, there is often little agreement in some important fields. You mention monetary policy, yet economics is notorious for having huge disagreements among freshwater and saltwater economists on basic fundamentals. Let's not even get into the pseudo-science of nutrition. Salt will kill you! Cholesterol bad!
Fundamentally I would narrow down the problem with expertise into two broad issues:
a) Much expert knowledge is taught and/or acquired in a very narrow & deep manner, there's very little integrative or synthesized world views, and so it's hard to communicate across these intellectual bulkheads and discover expert beliefs in a narrow discipline may make no sense in a broader context
b) Science and politics do not mix, even though we try to constantly. The results are usually disastrous.
An expert is a person who has become a major voice on an active mailing list.* Next question. :)
Science and politics don't mix, but policy will have to become more scientific if society is going to continue to improve itself. I think the Chinese understand this. Many of those who've risen to expert status in the U.S. today have done so after years of public mistrust of science (starting in 1969) and adoption of the ex novo "democracy" I described. IOW, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Macroeconomics is one of the biggest pseudosciences out there. But I'd still rather have Bernanke answering to the four most bitterly opposed macro bloggers than the House committee he just had to answer to. We recently saw the public exert unprecedented pressure on the Fed, via a discourse that resembled raw sewage. Would you rather have Dodd-Frank, or something that originated at a mechanism design conference?
My point about science and polticw was that there are attempts for politics to become more scientific, but politicians (along with big business managers, to a degree) want definitive answers, not equivocation and hypotheses that haven't been proven. Thus we get "scientists" guiding them based on their political views, charisma or communication skills, not on the actual evidence. I am not advocating for anti-intellectualism, but I am notimg that there is a reason for mistrust of science: it too can be abused to push an agenda by "acting" before the science can give you clear answers. Examples include Jean Mayer and Ancel Keys in nutrition (heavily influenced The first US policy on nutrition via George McGovern in the early 70s); Greenspan in economics (free money for far too long, pushing the belief the financial market wouldn't screw itself over even though they have time and again)
On the other hand I'm actually kind of happy that the Internet has made a meritocracy of expertise via blogs and mailing lists - credentials are too easily abused.
Ravi Mehta is not vaguely surprised that most high-profile basketball "experts" screwed up their Final Four predictions. Overall, of 5.9 million brackets submitted to ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge by those following the games, only 192 had Butler meeting Virginia Commonwealth in Saturday's semi-finals.
This is like asking people to predict the result of a slightly skewed coin flip, without giving any odds, and afterwards proclaiming them wrong if the less likely side happened. In other words, this does not show that the predictions were "wrong" in any meaningful way.
It only makes sense to have experts on topics that are clearly objectively and experimentally verifiable. Otherwise there is no way to identify truth and we abuse statistics to go in circles - this would be okay except it has the consequences of tarnishing the view of all science as wishy washy in public opinion. Note that in time, topics can move to become objective subjects.
Experts have a tricky road. The advice a good one gives is nuanced and filled with caveats. But people don't like that. They want definites. So there are some "experts" who sound like experts and they are dangerous. Especially when it comes to anything which involves taking action based on prediction. An expert's opinion is unreliable for forecasting, especially when compared to crowds or novices, basic algorithms and animals with simpler brains - e.g. little or no better than random. Human biases are too hard to get over, not to mention information limits and complexity of the process generating the probable events impossible to get a head around.
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Here is what one expert, Richard Feynman, has to say on the matter.
".. a story about strawberry jam test .. Their scientific question was simple: Would random undergrads have the same preferences as the experts at the magazine? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?... "
Don't trust experts? I'll take my chances. Know what's more blinding than knowledge? Having no idea what you're talking about! Like 96% of internet users, who think it's their god-given right to explain world events with their conspiracy-driven thinking, emotional ejections, and numbers off by one or more orders of magnitude.
Say what you will about my parents' generation; at least they knew not to form and promote opinions in fields they had no goddamn understanding of whatever. If you're in the top 1% of the population by intelligence, curiosity, and diligence (e.g. Richard Feynman) you will occasionally be able to scoop experts. Everyone else... should probably not be told at a young age that their opinions matter ex novo.