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In 1979, there was a partial meltdown at a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. I was a young newspaper editor at the time, and I was caught up in coverage of the resulting debate about whether nuclear power could ever be safe. I have long forgotten the details of that episode, except for one troubling thought that occurred to me in the middle of it: The experts we relied on to tell us whether a given design was safe, or indeed whether nuclear power generally was safe, were people with advanced degrees in nuclear engineering and experience running nuclear plants. That is, we were relying on people who made their living from nuclear power to tell us if nuclear power was safe. If they started saying out loud that anything about the nuclear enterprise was iffy, they risked putting themselves out of business.
I mention this not because I think the engineers lied to the public. I don't. Nor do I think nuclear power is so dangerous it should be rejected as an energy source. I mention it because it shows how hard it can be to make sense of information from experts.
Trust in institutions and expertise has taken a lot of knocks in the last decade. Can society recover it? Are we all called to a higher effort to vet the information we are given, or is there another, better remedy?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Tuesday August 29 2017, @12:07PM (2 children)
If you don't like trusting experts, because sometimes they can be wrong, try trusting non-experts for a while, and see which has the better outcomes.
Even better, do a randomised controlled trial, where you don't know if the person you are talking to is an expert or not and get someone independent to compare outcomes.
Experts don't always give 100% accurate, unbiased advice. This is true. The gold standard is proper evidence-based policy/decision making: but that can be hard (or impossible/unethical) to do. Ideally, you get answers from a panel of experts who are independent of each other (the 'Delphi method [wikipedia.org]') to try an eliminate bias and group-think. Most experts tend to reflect the current (scientific) consensus in their field at the time, and if that consensus is wrong, you have a problem (which is why there is a saying in academia along the lines of 'new theories are only accepted when the proposers of the current theories have died').
Don't trust men in white coats because they look old and wise, look to see if what they is is based on good evidence. Note that evaluating the quality of evidence is hard, and often requires deep knowledge of statistics, where is it possible to fool yourself as well as fool others.
On balance, over the long term, following decisions based on good evidence will have better outcomes, and an expert is someone who consistently does this, usually with a career in the field you are investigating.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:13PM (1 child)
But we (laypeople) don't usually hear directly from experts. We hear from the people who journalists say are experts. Among scientists, those are the ones who produce quotes that generate clicks and sell newspapers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 29 2017, @11:20PM
Mod parent up!!!
The people you hear on the news are rarely actual experts in the problem under discussion. And that may be putting too positive a spin on things, because when you do hear from a genuine expert, he's usually someone who is bought and paid for by an interested party. And it's a bit worse than that, because the news has a strong bias in favor of stories that are exciting.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.