On Listening to the Experts

Horse, as designed by committee.

A friend—not Xerxes—has written a piece for the BC Catholic on how to decide who to believe in the midst of conflicting claims about the coronavirus, or systemic racism, or homosexuality. His points are thoughtful. But his overall conclusion is essentially to “trust the experts.”

I disagree. Expertise is worth something, but our characteristic fault is in trusting the experts too much, not too little.

This is the lesson of the New Testament. The experts then were of course the scribes and Pharisees.

Our experience of the pandemic leaves me, at least, less inclined to trust the experts than I was at the New Year.

WHO, representing the global scientific consensus, early advised that wearing masks did no good, and probably did harm. The CDC in the US said the same. So did the Canadian medical authorities.

Several maverick laypeople I follow on YouTube, political commentators rather than medical experts, asserted the opposite immediately: that it was simply common sense that masks were a good idea.

I went with the experts instead. Now I feel foolish.

The lay YouTubers were right; and the scientific authorities were either wrong or deliberately misleading. Masks are hugely important.

The explanation seems to have been—Dr. Fauci in the US, for one, has admitted it—that the authorities saw a shortage of masks, and wanted to make sure there were enough for medical personnel. So they lied. A forgivable motive, perhaps, but it means that they were presenting a political decision as a scientific one. And listening to them instead of the mavericks, for the layman, was a mistake.

The WHO, and the scientific authorities in Canada, the US, Korea, and elsewhere, insisted for a long time that flights from China should continue. My same few YouTube commentators insisted very early that shutting down travel from Chine was just common sense.

Now everyone has shut it down. It seems clear that the original advice was based not on medical or scientific grounds, but on economic and political considerations. Yet it was the medical authorities who said this.

My friend points out that the experts have the right and the duty to change their minds with new evidence; but this does not seem to be the case here. Objectively, it took them a long time to come around to what common sense would have told us to do promptly had they not been involved.

Yes, as he pleads, they can’t test everything immediately. Still, how do they decide what to test?

A YouTuber I follow pointed early to the possible significance of Vitamin D deficiency in producing the severest symptoms. An early clinical study from Indonesia suggested this. Yet no studies; not even any admission from the official sources that this might be a factor.

Again, we had very early indications from Thailand and China that hydroxychloroquine and zinc were effective when given early in combination. There have been studies since of chloraquine, hydroxychloroquine, and hydroxychloroquine given late to the most serious cases; yet no studies of the precise regimen initially reported to work. This begins to look suspicious.

In the meantime, remdesivir was quickly tested and approved, even though its apparent utility is marginal.

Why the difference?

The obvious answer is that there is no money in Vitamin D or hydroxychloroquine or zinc; they are cheap and readily available. Remdesivir, by contrast, is under patent.

It looks very much, here, as though the priority of the medical/scientific establishment is not to find truth or to save lives, but to make money.

We have generally labored under the delusion that scientists are superior beings, not influenced by such petty concerns as wealth or power. Even though achieving wealth and power is an obvious incentive for anyone to enter the medical sciences in the first place.

But there is no reason to suppose doctors or scientists are intrinsically more moral individually or as a group than politicians, or salesmen, or auto mechanics. They simply operate with less oversight. They are largely left alone to self-govern.

We have been naïve.

And this makes my friend’s advice “When you’re trying to figure out what to believe, pay as little attention as you can to which ‘side’ a claim apparently serves, and you probably won’t go too far wrong” strikingly bad.

This is exactly what we need to start to ask: “cuo bono?”

What is called science is entirely likely instead to be politics, or a profit-making scheme. How, given human nature, could it not be so?

My pal warns us to “Look for teamwork”:

“The problems posed by COVID-19 are enormously complex. No one person understands enough to solve more than a small piece of the puzzle. Each member of a team contributes different skills and perspectives. Before a team publishes anything, its members have already caught and corrected countless mistakes. Mavericks often make foolish errors because they’ve missed out on constructive criticism they could have received by working with well-informed colleagues.”

I find that too to have been, in the present crisis, demonstrably bad advice. The handful of Internet mavericks I have followed have been consistently better guides than the WHO, the CDC, or other official sources. The loners seem to be right every time.

Why is that? For the contrary logic seems reasonable: many heads are better than one.

I think my friend is missing a factor or two. To begin with, all humans are not of equal intelligence.

The average person is necessarily of average intelligence; any work by committee draws everything towards the mediocre.

Surely, you might object, the other members of a group would at least be capable of recognizing the best idea from their number? To a certain extent, perhaps. But if a lone individual is significantly more intelligent than the group, it is entirely likely that they simply cannot understand his or her idea, and so cannot tell whether it is good. I believe studies have been done that show that when the IQ gap is more than about 15 points, on the standard scale, comprehension is lost. Imagine, to make the point, putting the Theory of Relativity before a room full of the intellectually challenged, if that is the currently acceptable term. Would they really be able to determine it is right?

The idea that will win out in any group will not, logically, be the best or most correct idea, but the idea that is most easily and generally comprehended. Rhetorical skill will prevail over expertise or knowledge. This is an eternal problem, one familiar to Plato and Socrates.

You may argue that this does not apply to scientists, because they are pre-selected to be especially knowledgeable and intelligent. That may be so; even if it is, the result of their consensus will always be mediocre in relation to their membership. The breakthroughs will not come from group work, but from some maverick.

And there is room to question that scientists as a group really are the best and brightest. The academic process means that they are evaluated and credentialed by other scientists. But who has validated them? There is an infinite regression here; it’s turtles all the way down.

There is a second consideration: as previously discussed here, it is easier for groups than for individuals working alone to succumb to delusional thinking. If a delusion is shared, it is reinforced. A bubble can be formed within which reality need never be confronted.

In the real world, work by committee is notoriously mediocre, when it is not misguided. Committee work has its value: primarily the political value of getting everyone invested in the project. But it is not an efficient way to handle any practical problem.

My friend advises that “anyone who claims to have found the key to understanding this disease is blowing smoke.”

I think this too is bad advice. I think the real world of scientific advance is indeed a series of “Eureka!” moments. Arthur Koestler wrote a great book, The Act of Creation, documenting that all major advances in mathematics and science, as much as in art, come suddenly from the visionary ether. Not from steady, incremental progress along some established trunk road of thought.

My friend advises us to look for humility.

“The news media and social media reward an air of confidence. Especially on social media, a lot of self-proclaimed experts are 100 per cent sure they’re right. But people may sound confident just because they overestimate their ability. You’re better off trusting people who recognize the limits of their knowledge. Good researchers are extremely careful not to claim any more than they can back up.”

This is sound advice, except for the misplaced word “self-proclaimed.” Omit that, and it works. It is in the nature of being an “expert” that you are making claims of special expertise—you are blowing your own horn. Those who claim expertise because they belong to a particular group of experts are no more humble, in real terms, than those who claim expertise on the basis of actual experiment or argument.

This is actually an appeal to authority, a logical fallacy.

It is true that academics of all stripes are notorious for being cautious in their claims when writing up their thinking for colleagues; for hedging everything they write with fine qualifications. Or even writing in such a way that it is impossible to detect any clear assertions at all. But is this out of humility, or a commitment to truth? Or is it a matter of political expediency? If you avoid making any clear assertions, you can always cover if attacked: either for being objectively wrong, or for political reasons. The vulgar phrase is “cover your ass.”

At the same time, academics in general—necessarily often the same academics—are uncommonly eager to make bold and sweeping claims when speaking to the press or the general public. They are always warning of some dire future if their urgent warnings are not heeded, and their expertise engaged.

This is surely simply a case of the tradesman hawking his wares. If they can get press, they get prestige; they get funding; they get fame and fortune.

Human nature did not pass scientists by, and it is sadly naïve to suppose so.

“Self-proclaimed” experts should be no more nor less suspect than those who jointly proclaim themselves experts; that is, the establishment scientists. The same principle applies.

The difference is that individual experts must compete in the open market, if only the free market of ideas. The group experts are effectively a cartel in restraint of trade.

If this all sounds depressing, the happy news is that the Internet gives us a new opportunity for a genuinely free exchange of ideas.