Experts 4: The Getting of Wisdom b

The theologian at this point wants to say to the atheist or agnostic – ‘you have a working assumption of the universe’s coherence, but no reason to believe it in particular. There’s plenty in the universe that is mysterious and confounding: take the baffling business of quantum mechanics, for example. Why should we simply assume that it all makes sense, rather than that simply being a fantasy in which we indulge?’ The theologian, on the other hand, has a way of explaining why the mystery of the universe is only mysterious because of the limitations of our finite and terrestrial minds. This is not a proof of the existence of God, of course. But it is a choice for a kind of consistency.

The business of human knowing is also rightly described as an ‘ethical’ concern because human knowledge advances within certain ‘societies of knowledge’. That is, knowing things is a fundamentally and inescapably social activity. The relationships that help us to know things exist as traditions (one’s forebears in a discipline) and communities (one’s contemporaries). Even individual geniuses in the history of human knowledge built on the things that had been bequeathed to them by the generation before; and had to operate in relation to academic guilds and societies and so on. What awareness of your place in a tradition and a community helps you to see is that what human beings know and learn is profoundly linked to where we sit in relation to others. I used the word ‘ethical’ at this point because, wherever human communities are concerned, we are called upon to consider how we treat one another. Even if you are standing on the shoulders of a giant, and thus seeing further than the giant, you are still dependent on the giant. 

Let me take this thread of thought a little further. If we understand the importance of traditions and communities in helping us to know things, we will have to acknowledge how dependent we are not only on their accuracy of mind and commitment to the truth but also that, if there is a malevolent strain lurking within a tradition or a community, that we will be able to recognize it and weed it out. There is implicit in the ideas of tradition and community some vision of what it is to act rightly – an ethos, we might say.

Experts 4: The Getting of Wisdom a)

I have spoken about the limitations of expert knowledge not to prompt a kind of endless suspicion against it but so that we recognize it for what it is and what it gives us – and how dependent we are on it even though it doesn’t always deliver the certainty we want. I by no means would like to encourage faith in cranks and conspiracy theories. 

But expert knowledge is limited in a couple of other important ways that we often fail to recognize. Let’s return to Dr Thanatos’ surgery, where we find the good doctor allowing me to consult him about my brain tumour. Only, he’s not a ‘good’ doctor. I don’t mean that he is a bad doctor. No, he is simply bad. Because of some specialized research I have been doing, I instantly recognize him as a wanted man: he was once a torturer for a dictatorial South American regime that has been overturned. How do I feel now about putting my life in his hands? At one level, neither his expertise nor his skill is necessarily compromised by his grim track record. But there’s something profoundly disturbing about the thought of allowing such a person access to the status and authority of one of the expert professions. 

Why is this so disturbing? Well, an encounter with a former torturer will no doubt be disturbing, but that’s not what I had in mind. It’s unsettling because there’s an underlying cultural assumption that a member of one of the expert professions will be a generally respectable person in possession not only of expert knowledge but also of a number of virtues – honesty, integrity, compassion, not torturing people, and so on. But why should we assume this? We can, granted, assume that the person with his or her name on the metal plate next to the surgery is (or at least, was at one time) in possession of self-discipline and capable of hard work. Yet medical training is not a school for virtue; it is a school for medical knowledge. Perhaps there were a couple of ethics classes along the way, but that’s not the same thing as the cultivation of the kind of virtues of which I imagine a medical specialist to be in possession.

This is a problem for two reasons. One the one hand, expert knowledge is, as we have noted, a powerful weapon to wield within a community. It accrues trust. An expert who lacks virtue is a very dangerous individual indeed; and to the degree that any expert lacks virtue, there is a danger of our trust being misplaced or misused. On the other, we often give the expert in one field the right to speak about other fields, assuming that success in one thing is the same as getting life generally right. 

That is, we think that experts have wisdom when what they really have is knowledge. We can see it most crassly in the cult of celebrity, which holds up successful musicians, sports stars and actors as people whose life-skills are worth emulating. At the same time, we gawp at their drug addictions, weight loss/gain issues and broken relationships. But we also do allow ‘scientists’, for example, to pronounce on all manner of subjects. Richard Dawkins is a classic case: he is undoubtedly expert in his chosen field of evolutionary biology. But he is a rank amateur in the fields of history and philosophy. He is certainly not a specialist in geology and in astronomy. Nevertheless, his right to make pronouncements in these fields is simply granted to him because of the aura of his expertise. 

In a sense this is understandable, because we need information and analysis from across different fields if we are going to address some of life’s most pressing questions – such as the existence of God and the meaning of right and wrong. The concept of the ‘university’ was originally derived from the view that all knowledge was interlocking and overlapping; and thus it was beneficial to have students and teachers from all fields of knowledge working side by side in a single institution of learning. This ideal has become very much degraded in the present time, with the opening of separate schools for different disciplines and with economic forces ensuring that inter-disciplinary work is harder and harder to undertake. 

The integration of the disciplines of knowledge is an ethical and indeed ultimately a theological issue. Expert knowledge gained in a single area without reference to the other disciplines of knowledge is an open door for human pride. It feeds the illusion of a human omniscience. The other disciplines of knowledge can provide a proper balance to the hubris of the expert. And this depends on a kind of faith – a faith which can be understood in a secular way, although it has theological roots. This is a faith that the universe is a meaningful and integrated whole and that we can study it on the presumption that ultimately it makes sense, whether we can see that sense at this point in time or not. This working hypothesis of the universe’s coherence could never be grasped in its entirety, but human beings are still justified in holding to it because of their experiences of coherence and meaningfulness in the world. (tbc...)

Experts 3: Conspiracy Theories and Cranks

We have seen how vulnerable we are to the cult of expertise. Whose interests do experts serve? Are they practicing groupthink, or blinded by their narrowness? Why should I trust them? We don’t like the feeling of having to accept received opinion, either. 

And expert knowledge has in the past been overturned by outsiders and crackpots – people who weren’t considered experts by the experts. Whatever impression they might give, experts are not infallible. There are gaps in all knowledge. There are unexplained phenomena, statistical oddities, theoretical impossibilities and unexplored fields. 

There are three common temptations that flow from the evident limitations of expert knowledge. The first of these is to foster a stubborn skepticism towards all expert knowledge. This is the temptation of the climate-change denier. Admittedly, the smugness of climate-change scientists regarding their claims can be galling to the ordinary person. Likewise, it is sometimes easy to associate them with ideological and political interests which may have a distorting effect on their science. It is epistemologically right to hold the claims being made for the science of climate change at arm’s length, for, like all human knowledge there is room for error. 

But the persistent skeptic points to the fact that there are holes in the theory in question and to the incompleteness or the complexity of the available knowledge and claims that this means that the whole theory must be bunk. Where there is not 100% certainty, there is room for doubt. But that room may be a very small alcove in which you can barely fit a pot-plant. Indeed: where there is a claim for 100% certainty, we should be skeptical of the maths involved! 

The second temptation– which is not unrelated – is to cling to conspiracy theories. If expert opinion is slanted in one direction, then the conspiracy theorist claims that the slant is due to some secret agenda or bias. Expert knowledge is extremely difficult to outflank, especially if there is a strong consensus. This leads to the disempowerment of those not in the know. The conspiracy theory is an attempt to subvert the power of expertise by claiming that the pose of ‘expert’ knowledge has been assumed in order to mask the real truth. It may be claimed, for example, that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center never occurred, and that a conspiracy of government agencies pulled off an extraordinary fraud on the American public in front of the eyes of the world in order to provide a pretext for military action in the Middle East. Or, a young earth creationist may claim that the scientists who claim that the earth is old do so under the influence of a set of ideological assumptions that lead them to bracket out the real evidence – and that the worldwide scientific community, because of its bias towards atheism, places strong pressure on those who disagree. Perhaps this is better described as a ‘mass delusion’ theory, or a ‘mass ideological bias’ theory. Nevertheless, both are attempts to account for the way in which expert knowledge is weighted overwhelmingly against their view.

The fascinating thing about conspiracy theorists is the way in which they mimic the forms of expert knowledge that they are seeking to question. So, we find young earth creation ‘scientists’ parading their PhDs, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists consulting ‘experts’ and providing very detailed accounts of their ideas, complete with apparently plausible statistics and scientific information. Thus, conspiracy theorists both play the game of expert knowledge and at the same time seek to undermine it. If you’ve claimed that the whole guild of scientific experts is corrupt or fundamentally self-deceived, then why does having one of their qualifications matter a jot? 

The third epistemological temptation that is worth describing is the phenomenon of the ‘crank’. The crank is a person who holds stubbornly to their belief despite the overwhelming consensus of his or her contemporaries. The classic crank will spend years researching a theory that most experts in the field consider to be spurious or nonsense – becoming, in effect an expert in nonsense. Cranks are often oblivious to their misunderstandings of fundamental concepts in their chosen fields, but highly resistant to any attempt to clear these up. 

The trouble is, sometimes the cranks are right. Modern-day cranks love to compare themselves to Copernicus or Galileo as examples of scientists who were independent spirits in their own times, and were considered cranks by their contemporaries. There are more recent examples, too. One of these is J. Haren Bretz. In the 1920s, Bretz began to present evidence which challenged the prevailing view of geologists that the Earth’s features had been carved out by a gradual process of erosion and rock-forming over a vast span of time. What Bretz argued was that there were some significant events in geological history that could have an impact over a very short time. Volcanic eruptions or meteoric collisions could have dramatic, relatively instant effects on the Earth’s geological features. Bretz came to his conclusions after studying the Scablands in North-West America and determining that only a massive deluge of water could have accomplished the things he observed there. 

Now, Bretz did have a PhD in geology; but his original training had been in biology. When he first published his ideas, he was dismissed out of hand by the leaders in the field. Furthermore, when another geologist, Joseph Pardee, decided that Bretz was right, he was put under enormous pressure not to support him publically. Here was an egregious instance of groupthink at work. At a public forum of the Geological Society in Washington, Bretz was invited to present his theory. But he was opposed by an organized opposition of six expert, Ivy League geologists. It was an ambush, designed to humiliate Bretz and drive him from the field. It wasn’t until the 1950s, once the impact of the Ice Age had become more widely understood, that Bretz’s views were fully vindicated. When he was finally recognized for his contribution to geology in 1979 when he was 96, he rather ruefully commented: ‘my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over.’

Bretz was a crank who turned out to be right, because sometimes cranks are right. The experts sought to bully him and to censor his views. The trouble is that examples like that of Bretz, do not give us warrant to believe cranks (and not experts) simply because they, like Bretz, stand against prevailing orthodoxy. The reason Bretz was right was that he studied the evidence more carefully than his opponents. That the crank is sometimes right doesn’t mean the crank is always right.

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.