

Why Experts Get It Wrong - louhong
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/why-experts-get-it-wrong/73322/

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beefman
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.

~~~
danssig
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.

~~~
beefman
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...

------
Prisen
_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.

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Dn_Ab
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.

\---------

Here is what one expert, Richard Feynman, has to say on the matter.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPunpjeFaiQ>

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pella
my favorite:

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-
ra...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-radio-hosts/)

 _".. 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?...
"_

