The Death Of Expertise

I'll start with the articles bullet points -

1. We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right.

All humans are fallible, including "experts", such as Albert Einstein, who famously rejected Quantum Mechanics.

2. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours. (Because, likely, it is.)

There are "experts" in things that have no basis in anything other than the expressions of other people which may have no or very limited evidence to support them, priests, Marxist historians, Freudian psychoanalysts etc. Is their "expertise" of any actual value to the rest of humanity? What about "experts" in subjects that we as a species do not have a good understanding of? Does the conflating of those subjects with those that we have much better understanding of, for example conflating public policy with engineering disciplines, help or hinder this discussion?

3. Experts come in many flavors. Education enables it, but practitioners in a field acquire expertise through experience; usually the combination of the two is the mark of a true expert in a field. But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument.

If the "field" is nothing more than some ideology, not backed by evidence, then any "education" in it seems to be open to challenge.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

4. In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something.

Do I need to know the 12 Astrological Houses to reject astrology? Do I need to know the King James Bible to reject Christianity? Do I need to know Mein Kampf to reject Nazism? Do I need to know the Talmud to reject Zionism?

5. And yes, your political opinions have value. Of course they do: you’re a member of a democracy and what you want is as important as what any other voter wants. As a layman, however, your political analysis, has far less value, and probably isn’t — indeed, almost certainly isn’t — as good as you think it is.

So if someone wanted to bring about the destruction of humanity, that would be of equal value to someone who does not? Perhaps an Orwell quote would help here-

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

Okay, so how about trying to find out what is actually happening? I would posit the following-

1. The Internet has allowed the dissemination of both fact and fiction, evidence and opinion.

2. Critical thinking, the use of evidence and reasoning seems to be lacking from most educational systems. A population that can be swayed with propaganda rather than evidence and logic is more pliable to the will of the political class and therefore this state of affairs seems unlikely to change.

3. The rise of "Truthiness" as a consequence of 2.

4. The speed of scientific and technological progress is now so great that expertise in these fields has become much narrower and the ability to communicate this effectively to the non-experts in a timely fashion has gone down.

5. The lack of progress in understanding of the complex social, political and economic systems we inhabit while simultaneously an increase in that complexity.

6. The increasing perception of many people that the current political, economic and social systems are overly beneficial to an increasingly small number of people and those, like the author of this piece are no more than courtiers to the beneficiaries. As this idea becomes more prevalent, the courtiers must defend themselves and so they try to convince the rest of us that they are experts who have the same precise answers that engineers could give.

7. There is no ideological solution to 6.

8. People in forums like HN who do have the ability to think critically increasingly critique articles like this and hopefully spur some critical thinking in others, this is then twisted by some, like the author into an attack on all "experts".

That he could write this:

> after weeks of really having to watch them[Manning and Snowden], they’re both increasingly looking too weak, too stupid, and too easily manipulated to be conscious traitors. Rather, they seem to be narcissistic and naive pawns used by Wikileaks, and thus in turn by whoever is pulling Julian Assange’s strings these days. (Hint: It begins with “R” and ends with “ussia.”)

http://tomnichols.net/blog/2013/08/02/snowden-manning-and-sc...

Does really lead me to believe he is an incompetent buffoon who does not realize just how out of touch with reality he is. What upset people like him is that thanks to google instead of rolling over and taking whatever he says as gospel people can call him out for being wrong at the stroke of a few keys.

For example, did he know that Snowden has not released a single file through wikileaks?

I hadn't heard of cost-push inflation before, and I didn't specialize in macro-economics. Who discredited this theory? The Wikipedia article says that according to Keynsians (and most modern economists are neo-Keynsians who beleive in sticky prices), prices are sticky downwards and so a supply shock to a single good would cause inflation. This seems to be an issue that could be resolved empirically. Are you familiar with the empirical evidence?

On your second point, perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.

You claim that only the sex of the other person involved is relevant, and not whether the intercourse is with someone of the same or opposite sex.

This is wrong, and shows precisely the lack of understanding of conditional probability that I described. I am especially shocked by your use of lesbian intercourse as an example, since everyone knows the issue is men-who-have-sex-with-men. Lesbians are completely irrelevant to this debate.

Let us compare the probability of a man getting AIDS from having sex with a random man, vs a random woman. As you say, these are probably similar. However, it might be very hard for a man to convince another random man to have sex with him! So what we really want to calculate is the probability of getting AIDS from a random, actually occurring, sexual encounter (not with a prostitute) between a man and a woman, and a man and another man. This is what the statistic is intended to mean, and how people will interpret it, even if it is not always properly qualified. In this case, the probability of the man who has sex with a man getting AIDS is much higher, because gay men have a much higher incidence of AIDS than heterosexual women.

So we could add the following useless disclaimer to my earlier claim: if you are a man, sex with a randomly chosen man (including straight men) is not especially dangerous. It's only when you condition on that man being gay that it becomes statistically more dangerous.

Of course, this disclaimer would still be wrong since the sex with the man would probably be anal, which is inherently more likely to spread AIDS.

>What's more, the qualifier that it has to be with a white woman is important. That's why I included it :)

I can't comment on why AIDS is higher for heterosexuals in Africa than the US. I don't necessarily accept your claims about it. But that is not the issue here. I am talking about the probability of getting AIDS given the current situation, not any inherent link between being gay and AIDS. The actual cause is not relevant.

The best that you could say, is that the reason for these misleading statistics is not to promote gay rights, but to scare people into taking precautions that are good for society as a whole.

>> Second-guessing their doctors and refusing to vaccinate their kids after reading stuff written by people who know exactly zip about medicine.

>This claim was originally by an expert doctor.

Andrew Wakefield was no expert. He was found guilty of research fraud and is no longer allowed to practice medicine.