Reliance on Experts

Claire Standish: What's bizarre about you?
Allison Reynolds: He can't think for himself
Andrew Clark: She's right.
--The Breakfast Club

Miserable forecasts and costly overreaction to the COVID-19 situation once again demonstrate the mistake of depending on 'experts' to tell the public how to think. Although it has been recently freshened with discussions of agency problems and data manipulation by public health officials in the present context, the thread running thru these pages that discusses the adverse consequences of relying on expert opinions is long and deep.

I've pulled several posts from the thread for reflection and for future reference.

8/31/09 Argument against of outsourcing one's brain using the Obamacare context to demonstrate. Reflecting those conclusions ten+ years later demonstrates the power of thinking for oneself.

2/10/10 Review of The Treason of the Intellectuals, a 1920s work by French essayist Julien Benda that comments on early movements of the intellectual class away from disinterested pursuit of truth and toward being socially (and politically) connected power brokers of their day. Nothing has changed since, except maybe for the intensity of intellectual migration away from truth.

11/13/10 Uses the destruction wrought by intellectual Ellsworth Toohey in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead as context for reviews of work by both Hayek (1944, 1949) and Schumpeter (1942) that speculates why intellectuals tend to embrace socialistic ideologies. Reasons offered include blaming capitalism for self-held beliefs about being under-employed, lack of first-hand deep smarts about markets and private industry, and general attraction to utopian ideals of income equality and social justice.

4/29/12 Review of Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society, a well researched 2009 book that discusses a supply chain of sorts operated by those who generate and/or push ideas--many of them faulty--as an occupation.

10/2/12 Discussion of parallels between the Pharisees in Christ's time and modern intellectuals. Reflecting on the readings this past Lenten season, I was once again struck by just how much today's intellectual set resembles Modern Day Pharisees. The Lord is speaking to us.

7/29/18 Prof Williams offers examples of just how often the predictions of so-called experts have been "wrong beyond imagination." Soon, it seems, he'll have more whoppers for his list.

9/21/19 Circles back to the downside of not thinking for oneself. If you think that 'the science has been settled' w.r.t. to matters such as global warming or, now, contagious disease and how to address it, then you are vulnerable to being played by others.

We'll end with some concluding thoughts from the 2/10/10 post cited above:

"Perhaps relying on a subset of individuals to do the reasoning or thinking for the rest of society is not a particularly good division of labor.

"Rather than outsourcing their capacity for reason to those who are considered smart, perhaps individuals should diversify their skill sets to include thought processes that pursue the truth."