As a trial lawyer, I both worked with and cross-examined hundreds, likely thousands, of experts in various fields. Many of them had extraordinarily impressive credentials. My experience was that experts are like everyone else. Some know what they are talking about, others don’t. Some back up their opinions with sound data and careful reasoning, while others crumble under adverse examination. Deferring to someone merely because he or she is a credentialed expert would be a terrible, and sometimes potentially suicidal, practice. Don’t do it.
Expertise
I couldn't agree more:
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On the other hand, I have it on good authority the the Left's authorities are above reproach.
Eric Hines
You could call me an expert, and I work with experts. We make mistakes sometimes. The whole point of peer review (and code review) is to spot the dumb mistakes.
"Show your work" isn't just for kids in school.
My cousin posted a letter on FB just yesterday all about his we should all be more humble and trust experts to run our lives. It’s amazing to me that anyone could be having that moment right now.
Doesn't "all" include experts?
Eric Hines
Oh yeah, that was a big part of the article. Even experts like himself should always defer to other experts whenever in their more specialized field. We should all be governed by others in everything.
Well, I opt for going full circle: His Arrogance Eric Hines as Capo di tutti gli Esperti.
After all, I'm an expert, too; I've written books.
Eric Hines
I think on the conservative side we have had the opposite problem the last 18 months, all quite certain that every expert we don't like is wrong. We are leaning so far away from one side of the boat that we are falling out the other. I am not recalling people in our little circle of blogs saying much in support of a traditional expert, only the renegades.
I have had experts for lunch many times in my career on a variety of topics, and it is satisfying. But I also generally find they are correct about many things.
Decision-makers are often faced with the meta-expert problem: which expert do you believe when different experts are telling you different things? A classic example of this was the secret British debate about air defense technologies, which I discussed in my post Radar Wars:
https://ricochet.com/834816/radar-wars-a-case-study-in-expertise-and-influence/
And sometimes the apparent expert is not the real expert. In the days before WWI, chief of staff von Moltke told the Kaiser that it was *absolutely impossible* to change the railway plan to redirect the troops planned for the West to go to the East instead. Nobody consulted the real railway expert, General von Staab, who didn't hear about this conversation until after the war, and then, angered at the implied insult to his bureau, wrote a whole book proving in detail that it *could* have been done.
It is true that the real expert is often not the credentialed expert. I know a international travel security expert who has no credentials, and as such would never be consulted if you were (say) setting up a major corporation's international travel security protocols. I know a fantastic logistics guy who has granular data on the state of the ports in China, who is never consulted by any government official planning any sort of logistical strategy regarding China.
The military has definitely fallen into that pit lately, and their structure tends to it. General Flynn's justly famous report on intelligence failings in Afghanistan -- from the Obama era -- was arrived at by an officer who actually decided to go down to the field guys and ask them to explain it to him. Because he had the credentials and also the wisdom to hear them out, he was able to bring their stuff forward and shake things up for a while. Unfortunately, the other parts of the credentialed class successfully derailed him and re-established their control of the narrative about what 'the experts say.'
Oh, and another example: Bill Roggio has been drawing a map for years of expanding Taliban control in Afghanistan. His reporting at The Long War Journal is truly expert -- but 'the experts' apparently ignored everything he had to say. 'Merely open source reporting,' they sniffed on their way to their disaster in Afghanistan.
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