I recently knocked science journalist Chris Mooney for asserting that “You Have No Business Challenging Scientific Experts.” Non-experts have the right and even the duty, I retorted, to question scientific experts, who often get things wrong.
Far from reconsidering his stance, Mooney doubles down on it in a Washington Post column, “The science of why you really should listen to science and experts,” that defends not just scientific experts but experts in general. Mooney ends up not boosting experts’ credibility but undermining his own.
According to Mooney, a study by Yale law and psychology professor Dan Kahan and others found that judges and other lawyers show less ideological bias—or “identity-protective cognition”–in their application of the law than law students and lay people.
To my mind, the Kahan study merely shows that lawyers and judges know the law better than law students and non-lawyers. That’s reassuring, but surely it does not mean we should always trust lawyers’ legal advice. More than one third of current Representatives and one half of Senators have law degrees. Does Washington seem like a haven of rational discourse?
Mooney nonetheless insists that the Kahan study “fits nicely alongside a growing trend toward robustly defending and reaffirming the importance of experts.” As an example of this trend, Mooney cites the 2005 book Expert Political Judgment by political psychologist Philip Tetlock.
Mooney’s citation of Tetlock is bizarre, because Expert Political Judgment—far from a defense of experts—is a devastating critique of them. Tetlock reports on his long-term study of 280 professional pontificators about politics and economics. For almost 20 years, Tetlock tracked the experts’ prognostications about wars, economic collapses and other events. He concluded, as New Yorker writer Louis Menand put it, that the experts “were poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys.”
This is no laughing matter. Consider how “experts” in the government, academia and media helped enable the catastrophic U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the economic collapse of 2008. Example: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq expressed the hope that it would lead to “a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime.”
How can Mooney possibly interpret Tetlock’s book as a defense of experts? Here’s how. He seizes on Tetlock’s finding that some experts were better forecasters than others. They tended to be not “hedgehogs,” who explain the world in terms of one big unified theory, but “foxes,” according to Tetlock. Foxes, he writes, “are skeptical of grand schemes,” and “diffident about their own forecasting prowess.”
In other words, the most credible experts are those who, implicitly, warn us to be wary of experts. Mooney is oblivious to this irony. “So experts really do exist,” he insists, “and they really are different from non-experts. Now, all we have to do is listen to them.”
I prefer the conclusion of Menand, the New Yorker reviewer. He writes that “the best lesson of Tetlock’s book may be the one that he seems most reluctant to draw: Think for yourself.”
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which belongs to the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
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