Sunday, July 6, 2008
Expertise Shmexpertise, Think For Yourself
It's no surprise to learn that experts often aren't; especially when they predict. Louis Menand in a 2005 review of a book on the subject has written a fine piece of itself about the expert prediction game.
…people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. If you look backward, the dots that lead up to Hitler or the fall of the Soviet Union or the attacks on September 11th all connect. If you look forward, it’s just a random scatter of dots, many potential chains of causation leading to many possible outcomes…And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on.
I said at the beginning that “experts aren't” because even if much effort has been made to acquire knowledge, the use of that knowledge is not an automatic. An alphabet soup of degrees, or an appearance at guild-approved venues aggregated on a resume, don't tell you how competent, thoughtful, even smart, the putative expert is, let alone wise. For that, like everything else, you have to figure out for yourself, with some critical intelligence, how credible the expert's assertions are. Just as, at the end of the article, Menand counsels to think the issues themselves out for yourself.
When expertise conflates with ego, personality and a desire for attention, often driven by the intoxicating blaze of media focus, the audience has to be especially discerning. The way things are said, the assumptions made, the track record, all have to be taken into account.
…experts routinely misremembered the degree of probability they had assigned to an event after it came to pass. They claimed to have predicted what happened with a higher degree of certainty than, according to the record, they really did…experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely.
The article indicates that people unschooled in a field often do as well or better than the experts, who as in the above description, entangle their ego in their pronuncimentos. Menand points out, “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly…” The outcome is defensiveness from the expert and reflexive enabling by the society, which wants its experts to be expert 'cause you got to turn to someone to figure things out — there is just too much going on and someone has to be in front of the microphone.
…serious commentators differ from the pundits only in the degree of showmanship. These serious experts—the think tankers and area-studies professors—are not entirely out to entertain, but they are a little out to entertain, and both their status as experts and their appeal as performers require them to predict futures that are not obvious to the viewer. The producer of the show does not want you and me to sit there listening to an expert and thinking, I could have said that. The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.