Experts 2: Questioning the Experts?

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life opens with a woman giving birth in a hospital. The camera gives us her point of view as her trolley-bed is wheeled into the theatre and as the two doctors shout commands to one another and the hospital staff. At one point she bravely asks ‘what can I do, doctor?’ – to which the doctors instantly reply ‘Nothing, dear – you’re not qualified!’ The point is clear: we aren’t supposed to resist, or even to try to help, the expert. We just have to lie back and let them do what they are trained and paid to do. Even something as normal and natural as giving birth is now carried out under the supervision of white-coated experts.

The problem with the cult of expertise is that we have no way really to check the expert's advice. We can get another opinion, but then it is just a case of expert against expert, and we are not necessarily better off. We just have to believe them: which means they have an incredible amount of power over us. I might possibly gain consolidation by finding my own area of expertise, so that at least I have something to bring to the social table. But this does not mitigate the feeling that I have that if the expert is wrong, I am liable to suffer for their mistakes – and there’s nothing I can do about it.

The case of climate change is a good example. Is it the case that the climate is changing because of human created environmental damage? Well, many of the experts are agreed that this is the case. I might say ‘science says so’; but when I do, I am just saying that the expert scientists are saying this at the moment. I personally have no idea whether it is or not in a direct sense. I am completely unable to evaluate the scientific data for myself – and, if I could, I wouldn't have time. So I am in the hands of the experts, who will decide government policies and how I should bag my rubbish. 

Now, you could have an attempt by experts to democratize their knowledge so that it becomes the possession of the masses. Al Gore’s lecture-film An Inconvenient Truth (2006) was an example of precisely this strategy. Clearly, Gore realized that blather of scientific jargon wasn’t going to win over non-experts at a deep level to the degree that their behaviours were transformed. So he packaged the expert information in a mass medium and used clever diagrams and animations to communicate his message.

But it isn’t easy to do successfully. Gore’s film was inevitably open to the accusation that he had bent the truth to fit the medium. While he was, according to scientists who reviewed the film, accurate in his main thesis and in many of the details, in some areas he was clearly guilty of rhetorical excess. The connection between hurricanes and climate change, for example, is a contentious matter amongst scientists. Yet the images of the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina provided an alarming backdrop to Gore’s message – one that was unjustified on the basis of the scientific evidence. Or at least: that’s what the experts I consulted said… 

So, the attempt to communicate expert knowledge in a non-expert way does not give a non-expert grounds to challenge the experts. I couldn’t justifiably contradict a climate-change scientist on the basis of a viewing of An Incontrovertible Truth. The film gives me knowledge that is agreed to be largely trustworthy, but watching it does not convey to me the kind of status and authority that we accord an expert.

But clearly, experts are not always right. For a start, it is almost in the nature of expert knowledge that it is disputed. Expert disagreement is to be expected, because the level of detail and the sophistication required of expertise, in almost any area, means there is room for differing interpretations. This is more likely to be the case in more speculative fields of knowledge, of course. Expert economists will make widely varying, even contradictory, pronouncements about the future. And clearly they can’t all be right, even though they are acknowledged experts in their field. Though they have all the qualifications in the world, they may be exactly wrong. 

What’s more, cognitive neuro-scientific studies have argued that the possession of expert knowledge may in fact make experts more prone to certain sorts of error. Psychologist Itiel E. Dror argues that through their long years of training, experts develop certain ‘cognitive architecture’ which enables them to quickly access the kind of knowledge they need. That’s what makes them expert. However, Dror writes:

These information processing mechanisms, the very making of expertise, entail computational trade-offs that sometimes result in paradoxical functional degradation. 

That is: all the short cuts that experts develop in their brain structure may result in a vulnerability to certain kinds of error. Experts rely on quickly surmising the context of information; but these very habits of mind 

restrict flexibility and control, may cause the experts to miss and ignore important information, introduce tunnel vision and bias and can cause other effects that degrade performance. Such phenomena are apparent in a wide range of expert domains, from medical professionals and forensic examiners, to military fighter pilots and financial traders.

Thirdly, experts may be as prone to groupthink as any other group of human beings. They may act in a collective way, such that a powerful set of underlying assumptions is held to be unchallengeable. This may have financial consequences in the area of research grants and publications and so forth – which makes for a powerful pressure on individual experts to conform to the assumptions of the group. Or it could be that a pre-existing ideological commitment leads to a skewing of the evidence away from what is in fact the case. The impact of Marxism on the academic world of Eastern Europe in the middle of the twentieth century is a case in point. 

Given the trust we place in expert knowledge, the consequences of expert error are often woeful. Consider the case of Sir Roy Meadow, the British professor of pediatrics who made his name as an expert in the field of child abuse. His name became associated with ‘Meadow’s Law’, which stated that ‘one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise’. Meadow appeared as an expert witness in a number of trials, and his testimony was instrumental in gaining convictions of a number of people who had lost babies to cot death. Among these was Sally Clark, a solicitor who was tried in 1999 for the murder of her two babies Christopher and Harry. Meadow testified that the odds of a family experiencing two cot deaths were 73,000,000 to 1. A far more likely explanation, he claimed, was that Clark had smothered her children while suffering from post-natal depression. This was later shown to be a statistical nonsense. Clark’s conviction was eventually overturned on a number of grounds and she was released from prison in 2003; but the damage to her was done, and she died of alcohol poisoning four years later. 

The flaws in Meadow’s expertise were discovered, but only through the rigorous application of expertise against him. One problem was endemic to the cult of experts: Meadow was an expert in his own field, but ranged in to an area – statistics - in which he was clearly only an amateur. Yet because of the aura of expertise, he was believed by intelligent and well-meaning people, from the police to the lawyers and the juries involved, whose job it was to scrutinize the evidence available. A person who knows a lot about one thing may easily convey the impression that they know a lot about everything, when in fact they do not at all.

But there’s no way around this impasse other than the rigorous application of…expert knowledge. The Meadow case shows us that expert knowledge has a narrowness which may give it blind spots. Exposure to other fields of expertise can remedy some of the damage an expert error may cause. However, it is a slow process of checking and re-checking data and of allowing public discussion of ideas. The best we can do is equip ourselves with the kind of healthy skepticism that prepares us for the discovery that what we considered to the considered consensus of expert opinion may turn out to be entirely mistaken. We can do no more that make ourselves aware of the humanness of all knowing.