How Do You Know Who the Experts Are?

There are two ways to know if someone is an expert. The first one is to have some expertise yourself, so that you can judge the quality of their work. However, no one can be expert in every field, and we often need to judge the quality of an 'expert' exactly when we aren't expert enough in that field (and consequently need to hire someone who is moreso to help us).

The second way is to rely on their reputation. If lots of people report that they did a good job in this field, you might have some reason to judge that they are indeed expert in that field. You might pick a plumber based on online reviews of their work, for example.

However, this method is subject to fraud. Online reviews can be concocted. What happens when a large, overlapping class of fakes mutually reinforce each other's claims to expertise?
The farce that has passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible.

Michael McFaul was U.S. ambassador to Moscow—he knows everything about Russia. He wouldn’t invent stuff about national security matters out of thin air. Jane Mayer is a national treasure, one of America’s greatest living journalists who penned a long profile of Christopher Steele in the pages of the New Yorker. Susan Hennessy is a former intelligence community lawyer, who appears as an expert on TV. And how about her colleague at the Lawfare blog, Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution fellow and a personal friend of James Comey? You think he didn’t have the inside dope, every time he posted a “Boom” GIF on Twitter predicting the final nail just about to be hammered in Trump’s coffin?

Many more jumped on the dog pile along with them, validating each other’s tweets and breathless insider sourcing. The point was to thicken the echo chamber, with voices from the right as well as the left in order to make it seem real. Hey, if this many experts are saying so, there must be something to it.

Except, there wasn’t—ever.
What to do about that? You can become expert yourself, or develop a better network of validators.

8 comments:

E Hines said...

And here, I thought the excerpt was going to be all about the pseudo-expertise on man-caused climate change. Then I read the piece.. That's, like, work.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

It's a general problem.

Online reputation systems are a major innovation when it comes to most of the non-political parts of the problem, because you can aggregate hundreds or thousands of experiences into a reputation that you can put some weight on. Ebay, for example, can tell you that a thousand people have bought from this guy before, and 99% of them have been happy with the experience. That suggests that he is very likely to deal fairly with you as well.

For now, that answer hasn't been brought to bear on politics.

Gringo said...

There are two ways to know if someone is an expert. The first one is to have some expertise yourself, so that you can judge the quality of their work. However, no one can be expert in every field, and we often need to judge the quality of an 'expert' exactly when we aren't expert enough in that field (and consequently need to hire someone who is moreso to help us).

Pseudo-expert Noam Chomsky has written scores of books to support his "US= great sinner" narrative. Quillete recently published Clifton Ross's article on Venezuela and the Half-Truths of Noam Chomsky.

Mr. Ross looked into Chomsky's "Yes Hugo's governance had problems, but he greatly reduced poverty" narrative.

While Chomsky was correct, and one can readily find stats to support him, Mr. Ross pointed out some problems in the narrative.
1)Hugo rode an oil revenue boom during his time in office. One would hope that some of that $1 trillion in oil revenue (2012 constant$) would have trickled down to the poor.
2) Venezuela has ridden what Ross termed the "ax and relax" cycle of oil busts and booms. Venezuelan governments should be judged on how they performed on both sides of the oil boom and bust cycle. Hugo's fans aren't doing that- they are judging his performance during an oil boom. What Ross didn't point out is that Hugo's election came in 1998- which had the lowest oil price in 25 years. If it weren't for Venezuelan voters judging performance on both sides of the oil boom and bust cycle, Hugo would never have been elected.

My knowledge of Latin America can add further points to the take-down.

3) Other Latin American countries had similar or better records than Chavista Venezuela in reducing poverty. In Latin America, Venezuela ranked about in the middle in poverty reduction from ~1998-2013. It wasn’t that exceptional.

4)Poverty reduction is dependent on a growing economy. If you want to distribute more money, you need more money to distribute. Even with a trillion dollars in oil revenue, Venezuela’s economic growth from 1998-2013 (here measured in per capita income) lagged behind Latin America’s and the rest of the world: 15% for Venezuela, 29% for Latin America, and 44% for the rest of the world. Which strongly implied mismanagement of the trillion dollars in oil revenue. Thus no surprise regarding what happened when the price of oil fell.

If your expertise can keep you from getting snowed, fine. But otherwise, you need to rely on some other experts. Good luck.

Dad29 said...

So with another 49,999,996 Frenchmen would they still be wrong?

Grim said...

The hope is those millions would have given you better advice.

But hey, Frenchmen, right? They haven't been right since the Hundred Years War.

David Foster said...

Sometimes, one needs to get past the obvious expert to get to the *real* expert. The Kaiser's reliance on von Moltke as the expert in railway aspects of mobilization provides an interesting example.

On Trusting Experts--and Which Experts to Trust

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57755.html

Ymarsakar said...

Try getting Ymar to listen to "experts", even if it is the whole world against one. See what happens.

https://religionnews.com/2018/12/12/southern-baptist-seminary-report-ties-founders-to-slaveholding-white-supremacy/

The Southern Baptists finally decided they might need to repent or else the Divine Counsel won't hold back.

My ways are not yours, my thoughts are not your thoughts. "Human expertise" isn't worth the paper it is written on.

Ymarsakar said...

Hey, if this many experts are saying so, there must be something to it.

These humans aren't worth the trash they are printed on. I am still surprised and half way to thinking America is pulling a prank on me when people still talk about Trum vs FBI vs Russia.

2 years? I have had to ignore the experts and everybody on this topic for 2 years. Which is no where close to what Ihad to do in 2007 vs Iraq.