How undependable are the experts?

We are in the middle of a huge economic crisis. Should we listen to the experts? Of course we should, because the economy and the financial sector are horrifically complicated. What happens when the experts disagree, however? To which experts should we listen? I took a stab at that question recently, but I remain unconvinced that any of the economics experts can be trusted. Yes, there are people like George Soros who have made a phenomenal amount of money during the crisis, but this makes me wonder whether he (and all of the other recent success stories) are smart or whether they are lucky. Today, Nicholas Kristof (in the NYT) reminds us that many experts (at least political experts) have a terrible track record. His opening sentence: "Ever wonder how financial experts could lead the world over the economic cliff?" He warns us of the “Dr. Fox effect,” named for a "pioneering series of psychology experiments in which an actor was paid to give a meaningless presentation to professional educators." Despite the fact that the lectures consisted of gibberish, they were well received. He mentions a study showing that "clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses." He also mentions a study by Philip Tetlock which determined that "The [82,000] predictions of [284] experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board." Those experts who were the most impressive to most people "provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites." I'm reminded of Alan Sokal's intentionally nonsensical article that he submitted to the postmodern journal, Social Text. See here for more of the details. BTW, if you want to generate your own postmodern bullshit, use this postmodernist bullshit generator (every time you hit the link, more impressive-sounding bullshit will be assembled automatically into an article). How far astray are we led by "experts"? Consider investment "experts." There are none worse. Entire industries are built on the thoroughly disproved notion that a stock-picker can consistently beat the market. Dan Smolin has made a career of proving that stock-picker experts are thoroughly and demonstrably terrible at what they claim to be. But many of us still run to these financial "experts" to help us pick the "right" stocks. Just think of the hundreds of political military experts who were similarly awful at their recommendations and predictions regarding the invasion of Iraq. They appeared hundreds of time on network TV during the few weeks prior to the invasion, all of them confident in their assessments and advice. Consider, also that fewer than 1% of them took anti-war stances. Consider, also, that many of these "experts" were secretly in positions to financially benefit from an invasion of Iraq. Consider the thousands of religious experts, from coast to coast, who loudly and confidently tell their religious followers that there is a heaven and that they will go there, without the tiniest big of evidence in support. The followers of fundamentalist preachers continue to listen to these guys even when they attack evolutionary biologists, even though these religious leaders have no training in science and no basic understanding of the principles of evolutionary biology. Everyone loves weather forecasters, right? These guys are wrong so incredibly often that no station dares to post their track records for those five-day forecasts they confidently present night after night. The list goes on and on. We insist on listening to the experts, medical experts, beauty experts, psychologists, their track records be damned. That's because they are the best that we've got, no matter how wrong they are how often. The bottom line is that we crave experts because we crave certainty, even where there isn't any. The confirmation bias causes us to rely heavily on experts hawking our own opinions, even when there is no evidence in support, as long as the expert dishes out those opinions with a loud confident voice. And a fancy business suit doesn't hurt either.

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As If We Didn’t Know

Politics dictated FDA policy? Say it isn't so! According to this NY Times piece, the Bush Administration (they get the blame because, after all, he was the Decider) bade the FDA to meddle with contraception when it suited a certain agenda. What I find so delightful about this, as with the Dover PA decision on Intelligent Design in the classroom, is that a Republican judge, this time a Reagan appointee, made the call. The thing is, contraception and all that it implies really ought to be a conservative issue. I mean, really---it has all the hallmarks of the last 60 years of conservative philosophy built on the rights of the individual, the freedom from interference being chief among them. You would think conservatives would have leapt on this a long time ago, staking it out as exemplary of the idea of American Individualism and the freedom to act as a moral agent, dictating one's own destiny and making determinations about how one will live one's life free from government meddling. Handing both men and women the tools---provided by the free market, to boot---to manage their own lives in accordance with their formulation as individuals of the American Dream should have been a slam dunk for conservatives. They should have been cheering for it since the days of Margaret Sanger. What is more, given the attitude of the communist states, which dismissed Sanger and the entire notion of family planning as a bourgeois, capitalist plot to undermine the growth of the collective, this should have been part and parcel of rearing a generation of people cumulatively opposed to Soviet style socialism and collectivism. Everything about the Choice movement smacks of good ol' fashion American Values! It is the perversity of the debate that is ironic, that it should be those who are castigated as liberal soldiers in the march to socialism and its destruction of all things individualist and true blue American who are the champions of the idea that people ought to have full say in the when and if of having children. How did this happen?

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Educational Ruins

Anyone who has actually visited and studied ruins knows that they are created from orderly structures by a particular combination of forces. First comes neglect, when people either lose appreciation for the value of the thing and stop maintaining it, or they simply abandon it. Next comes vandalism, when people actively damage the structure to scavenge materials and souvenirs, to leave their own mark, or to intentionally destroy it. The latter is usually for religious reasons, as in purging earlier figureheads like Hatshepsut, Trotsky or the Bamiyan Buddhas. But this post is about an institutional edifice. Education in the United States is falling into ruins. Sure, it still is funded in a nominal sort of way. But people have forgotten its value. They even vote against tax increases necessary to maintain current standards. Schools are closing; one K-12 building in my neighborhood is now condos. My Junior High school was razed for a housing development. Pharyngula points out how the University of Florida is now planning to shut down its geology department as a cost cutting measure. Geology is the science that gave Darwin the leg up to understand how natural selection works before anyone else. Geology and its understanding affects meteorology, biology, sociology, history, exo-planetary studies, and more. Florida is one of the states in which regular attempts are made to insert Creationism into school itineraries. And geology is the biggest stumbling block to accepting a Young Earth. But I hope that is not their underlying reason. It is simple neglect of education in general. But there is a strong vanadlism movement afoot in this country. Anti-science forces are working hard to put non-scientific ideas into science classes. Texas is a recurring battleground as school administrators attempt to keep up education credentials in spite of the onslaught. Recently, a doomed law is running the gauntlet in the Texas legislature to allow unaccreditable private schools to offer advanced degrees. See Hank's A Master’s in Creationism. If that seemed too harsh, try Pharyngula's If you fail an IQ test in Texas, do they automatically put you in the legislature? Hank is Australian. Yet he cares about how this sort of behavior is making the United States seem ever goofier. To let our once-admirable education system crumble is a step backwards for the world.

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Flooded With Data

I had an urge to think through some implications of a world-wide flood, such as the one Biblical Literalists claim happened a few thousand years ago. Let's suppose that it happened, that the entire world was inundated all at once to cover the highest mountain, and that all surviving land animals and short-range birds were preserved in a single boat. What would the ecological landscape look like? gray worldFirst, all land animals would only be found on a single connected land mass. There is no way that any crawling creature could have reached Australia or the Americas from the Middle East. Most especially tropical animals. Secondly, we expect to see floral panspermia. That is, the waters would have carried every species of seed to every land mass all at once. Vanilla and cocoa and peppercorns should all be found growing in the same places throughout human history. Same for and chile peppers and coffee and potatoes. Wheat and maize should also be seen as combined staples of every ancient diet. Or the opposite: The flood waters killed off all the seeds except what was carried on the ark. Therefore, only the plants found in the middle east could exist anywhere in the world. Also, all modern animal species should be represented in every geological flood stratum. After all, a single massive drowning event doesn't distinguish between creatures of comparable size like an allosaur and an elephant or a trilobite and a mouse. Surely there must be abundant examples of these combined fossils. So it is easy to prove that such a flood actually happened. In fact, it must have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt when Europeans first sailed to the Americas and found everything there to be just the same as back home.

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Freedom of Speech as Religion

I think it should go without saying (but of course, nothing does) that anytime someone wants to protect something from "denigration" or other forms of criticism, we should all grab hold of our rights and hang onto them with a death grip. To put this case most eloquently, I offer the following.

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