More on experts

But not moron experts

There were some provocative comments on my “Why don’t people trust experts?,” and while I know I am not addressing all of them, I wanted to talk about a few. In that piece I argued that experts aim to generate understanding by producing models of (parts of) the world, and are unfairly dismissed when it’s noticed that those models are idealized and may contain falsehoods.

Being an expert

I think it’s helpful to compare academic experts to professional athletes. Pretty much any sport will do, but I’m going to use golf in this analogy. The short-term goal in golf is to hit a ball into a little hole some hundreds of yards away. Almost no-one does this in one shot. Pro golfers have a 1/2500 chance of hitting an ace. When you tee up, swing, and fail to hit it in the hole, you have to try again.¹ At least the ball is somewhat closer to the pin. You walk up to the ball, try a different club and hit it again. Once more the ball is very unlikely to have gone in. Sometimes you hook, slice, or top the ball, and you are in the rough, a sandtrap, or a pond. Maybe you take a penalty and drop a new ball. Meanwhile, other players are trying to outperform you.

My father accidentally hit a shot into the mouth of this alligator a few years ago. A heck of a ball lie; I’m pretty sure Dad took the penalty. #Floridaman

Trying to publish a paper is like playing a hole in pro golf. You do some research and take a swing at hitting something valuable or interesting. Keep in mind that long before you can get your PGA tour card you’ve already spent approximately insanity amount of hours on the golf course practicing, taking lessons, working on your swing, your short game, your mental game, cross-training, etc. Same in academia. Ok, you send out your paper. Now what?

It is rejected.² The top journals in philosophy like Mind and Nous have <5% acceptance rates. Other fields are similar. Good luck getting into Nature. Remember, everyone else submitting to Mind, Nous, or Nature also has a PhD and has worked as hard as you. There’s nothing else to do but walk downfield and take another swing at the ball. Maybe you birdie, maybe you double-bogie, but eventually you get it in the hole. Victory!

Of course not. There’s another 17 holes to go. Surely when you get to the end of the course you’ve established some important new result, found some new way of understanding this narrow topic, placed another brick in the cathedral of knowledge. Right? Maybe. You might have played your best but still lost the tournament. In fact, that’s probably what happened since most lose and there is only one winner. Then your ideas are doomed to oblivion.

If you win a couple of tournaments people will start to think you’re worth paying attention to. If you win a lot of tournaments, including the major events, you can get into the Hall of Fame. In all likelihood, though, you’ll devote your life to golf, become a journeyman on the tour, and when you age out, wind up the teaching pro at a country club somewhere. You are still an expert golfer.

That’s how it is in academia. You can work at your field as hard as you can for your entire life and make only a small impact, if any. You are still an expert.

Mistrusts writes

I trust professors to … push as many useless papers out as possible. Do I trust professors to produce reproducible, high quality research? No, especially in the biomedical fields most of their results are garbage.

Absolutely! However, this is a feature, not a bug. It is like criticizing golfers for not hitting an ace every time they step to the tee, or for not winning every tournament they are in. We try out lots of different ideas. Some turn out to be dumb, some smart-ish, others a dull epicycle, some brilliant, sometimes we fool ourselves with mistaken methodology, other times we’re just fallible human beings, occasionally we find a fat diamond in the knowledge mines. Like golfers, we try our best with every shot. Once in a blue moon we hit a hole-in-one, but more often wind up in the sandtrap.

It’s called “Nobel Disease” when Nobel laureates wind up pushing wacky theories. Parapsychology looks promising. Megadoses of Vitamin C cure everything. Did you guys also see the fluorescent raccoon space alien?

He seems nice.

Geniuses think outside of the box. Sometimes they think way, way too far outside the box. But we want that. That’s a good thing. Roger Federer recently commented that in all of his professional tennis matches, he won only 54% of the points. One of the greatest players of all time, a 20-time Slam champion, and he won barely more than half of the points he played. Imagine the anti-expert hate he would get if he were an academic.

What do we want from our experts?

Ted Rice:

what really discredits "experts" is when they proclaim they have the final answer and nobody had better question it, and/or use Government to force their answer down everyone else's throat.

I think this misrepresents the true dynamic. When genuine experts talk among themselves, nobody claims they have the final answer and refuses to let others question it. I don’t think I have ever seen that. In my experience the most arrogant are newly hatched PhDs who haven’t yet realized how much they don’t know, or weak scholars drawn to activism instead of research.³ The most modest are those at the absolute top of the pecking order.

Here’s an example. Last year I was at the World Congress of Philosophy in Rome. I went to a session in honor of Ernest Sosa. Sosa is a luminary in the field, a name known by everyone. He was also one of my teachers from a long, long time ago. He is 84. Ernie had no idea that I would be there, but as soon as he saw me, he greeted me by name and immediately told me how he was coming around to some of my ideas (which he cited in specificity) and thought his new work was converging with mine. In the ocean of philosophy, I am a clownfish and Sosa is a right whale. The notion that Ernie Sosa had any clue about my published work was amazing in itself, much less his humble and generous suggestion that some of his own views should incorporate mine. Ernie may be uncommonly courteous, but that’s how real experts talk.⁴

How experts talk to the general public is a different matter. Partly this is because there is a great wealth of shared background knowledge and assumptions, and it is frustrating/annoying to go over 101-level information to an uninformed and skeptical audience. Philosophers aren’t interested in a conversation with someone who says “nobody knows anything anyway because it’s all relative.” Physicists aren’t interested in replying to crackpot letters claiming to prove Einstein wrong on the basis of a math error they make on page three. Astronauts don’t want to talk to moon-landing deniers.

Buzz Aldrin, age 72, punching a guy who accused Aldrin of lying about the moon landing and called him a "coward, liar, and thief"

In addition, sometimes political action must be taken even when no one is sure what’s going on, and ideally relevant experts are consulted for advice. Unfortunately it leads to this dynamic:

Politicians: Hey we have a once-in-a-generation pandemic on our hands, with a completely novel virus. People are dying. What do we do, medical authorities?

Surgeon General, CDC, and other medical authorities: Well, we’ve done some preliminary sequencing, projections, and studies, and our best guess is we should probably all do X. However, we could easily be wrong here. We’re working as fast as we can, but our investigation is ongoing; check back later.

General public: Best guess? Probably? You have no idea what’s happening! I’m just gonna inject myself with Clorox.

Politicians: C’mon medicine, you’ve got to do better than this.

Medical authorities: Fine. Everyone should definitely do X.

General public: You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not the boss of me! It’s just a cold!

Politicians: Uh, the bodies are piling up. Hello, doctors?

Medical authorities: HEY EVERYBODY DO X LIKE WE SAID!!!

Some time later…

Medical authorities: OK, it looks like X isn’t working. We’ve gotten new data and now think you should do Y.

General public: Some “experts.” You told me I absolutely had to do X, and now that’s bullshit and I’m supposed to do Y. Well, not a chance. You all are a bunch of frauds. I’m just going to do what my political party says and what the YouTube celebrities I watch tell me to do.

Politicians: [Sotto voce: JFC voters are stupid]. Fortissimo: That’s right! Just listen to my party line. And vote for me!

Medical authorities: [facepalm, shaking head slowly, planning retirement]

Experts don’t like being compelled to assert with certainty things that are uncertain. If the general public could be made to understand probabilistic reasoning and decision making under uncertainty there would be a lot fewer overblown claims. Also, as di bubbe volt gehat beytsim volt zi gevain mayn zaidah.⁵

It’s all about the money

JustPlainBill:

I suspect the denting of trust in experts has a lot to do with the fact that so many have now been openly revealed to have been influenced in their "science" or "opinion" by something other than their love of the truth. (Hint: )

I think this is pretty far off the mark. Nobody goes into academia for the money. Look here if you want to really examine the data. The summary is that pay varies wildly by discipline, and faculty with industry competition get paid the most (law, medicine, engineering, economics). It also varies dramatically by rank and type of university. My salary would be at least twice as high if I worked for an Ivy+ school. For the rank and file at Average State U. the trajectory is this: you get a PhD, you work for 20 years, finally reach full professor, and now you make $100k. Yay! And most people are not full professors and are earning much less.

I doubt that the absolute top people in philosophy, the most famous at the best universities in the world, earn $400k. That’s what? Senior manager at Google pay? A Vice President salary at a company no one’s heard of? It’s not exactly F-you money, or even sellout money.

Some people think faculty are getting rich off of grants. That never happens. Grants have specific budgets—for labs, equipment, post docs, conference costs, travel, publication expenses, etc. The PI’s university salary might be covered by the grant (so they have time to research instead of teach), but they aren’t getting any extra.

I’m really at a loss to imagine who is selling out their expertise to get rich. Jordan Peterson? Dr. Oz? Scientists working for Philip Morris and declaring that tobacco is safe? I don’t think any of those are taken seriously as experts any longer. Anyway, at best we are talking about a minuscule number of people. But if anyone has some good ideas about how I can sell out for big bucks, please DM me.

Ultimately Bertrand Russell’s old advice still serves us well.

1. When the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain.

2. When they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert.

3. When they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

I have some more positive ideas about when we should trust experts, but maybe I’ll get to that in a future episode.

1. In fields with close collaboration and multiple authors it is more like a best-ball scramble in golf.

2. After a very long wait. I’m still waiting to hear back about a paper I sent to a journal seven months ago.

3. There are far fewer faculty activists than outsiders seem to think. It’s just that the activists are very loud.

4. In professional settings anyway. On blogs and such they can be obnoxious jerks like anyone else. But at conferences there’s a difference between vociferously defending one’s views and arrogantly dismissing criticisms. The latter is not well tolerated.

5. If my grandmother had balls she would be my grandfather.