None of the experts are experts

Thursday, October 23rd, 2014

There are whole fields in which none of the experts are experts, Gregory Cochran notes:

At the high point of Freudian psychoanalysis in the US,  I figure that a puppy had a significantly positive effect on your mental health, while the typical psychiatrist of the time did not.  We (the US) listened to psychologists telling us how to deal with combat fatigue: the Nazis and Soviets didn’t, and had far less trouble with it than we did.

Fidel Castro, a jerk,  was better at preventive epidemiology (with AIDS) than the people running the CDC.

In the 1840s, highly educated doctors knew that diseases were not spread by contagion, but old ladies in the Faeroe Islands (along with many other people) knew that some were.

In 2003, the ‘experts’ (politicians, journalists, pundits, spies) knew that Saddam had a nuclear program, but the small number of people that actually knew anything about nuclear weapons development and something about Iraq (at the World Almanac level, say) knew that wasn’t so.

The educationists know that heredity isn’t a factor in student achievement, and they dominate policy — but they’re wrong.  Some behavioral geneticists and psychometricians know better.

In many universities, people were and are taught that really are no cognitive or behavioral differences between the sexes — in part because of ‘experts’ like John Money.  Anyone with children tends to learn better.

Comments

  1. Chris C. says:

    Most of the “experts aren’t experts” issues seem to have a lot to do with herd mentality and stakeholding. A member of an “elite” group (doctors, whether medical or PhD types) is not likely to buck the “experts”, who have their careers invested in the prevailing opinion.

  2. AAB says:

    “None of the experts are experts” should be graffitid on every building where the public go and see ‘experts’ to remind Joe Public not to place too much, if any, faith in the opinion of the person in the building. It also begs the question why we defer to people in funny clothes (white lab coat, or royal crown, or bishops mitre etc) with funny sounding titles (Dr Ph.D, or Marquis, or bishop etc). Does anyone know the psychology behind defering to authority figures? The Milgram Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) demonstrated that we do defer but AFAIK it didn’t explain why.

  3. Coswell says:

    I think the central point is interesting and important, but the Nazis and Soviets had less trouble with combat fatigue than the U.S. did? Really? That’s news to me. The Soviets lost what, 10 million soliders during WW2. It seems they had less trouble with combat fatigue because they had no concern whatsoever for their soldiers and allowed them to be slaughtered in almost unimaginable numbers. I’d be curious to see evidence to the contrary, but I would guess that their way of dealing with “combat fatigue” was to ignore the issue altogether.

  4. Alrenous says:

    However, de Tocqueville came to the opposite conclusion: that in few places could one find ‘less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America’.

    Trusting that the system was fair and just, Americans simply gave up their independence of mind, and put their faith in newspapers and so-called ‘common sense’. The scepticism of Europeans towards public opinion had given way to a naive faith in the wisdom of the crowd.

    Tocqueville also says democracy turns Americans against authority, but that’s inexact. Journalists, politicians, and actors are considered Authorities on public opinion, and are thus extended that naive faith, whereas Europeans have to constantly have it browbeaten into them. (Admittedly the browbeating seem to work.)

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