Why Experts Get It Wrong
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Don't trust experts? I'll take my chances. Know what's more blinding than knowledge? Having no idea what you're talking about! Like 96% of internet users, who think it's their god-given right to explain world events with their conspiracy-driven thinking, emotional ejections, and numbers off by one or more orders of magnitude.
Say what you will about my parents' generation; at least they knew not to form and promote opinions in fields they had no goddamn understanding of whatever. If you're in the top 1% of the population by intelligence, curiosity, and diligence (e.g. Richard Feynman) you will occasionally be able to scoop experts. Everyone else... should probably not be told at a young age that their opinions matter ex novo.
And my mother said: "Are you kidding? This is great! I'm going to use it all the time!"
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...
Otherwise, I personally find it more troubling that some people say "well, I haven't spent 20 years studying this I guess I just have to believe what I'm told". You can't just believe what you're told either, you have to know the confidence level of the underlying field. Is this a hard science? It is just a bunch of computer simulations studying something that has far too many variables to ever be rigorously tested?
The best thing we can do, IMO, is be open minded and not be so final about things that can't actually be tested.
Even among experts, there is often little agreement in some important fields. You mention monetary policy, yet economics is notorious for having huge disagreements among freshwater and saltwater economists on basic fundamentals. Let's not even get into the pseudo-science of nutrition. Salt will kill you! Cholesterol bad!
Fundamentally I would narrow down the problem with expertise into two broad issues: a) Much expert knowledge is taught and/or acquired in a very narrow & deep manner, there's very little integrative or synthesized world views, and so it's hard to communicate across these intellectual bulkheads and discover expert beliefs in a narrow discipline may make no sense in a broader context
b) Science and politics do not mix, even though we try to constantly. The results are usually disastrous.
Science and politics don't mix, but policy will have to become more scientific if society is going to continue to improve itself. I think the Chinese understand this. Many of those who've risen to expert status in the U.S. today have done so after years of public mistrust of science (starting in 1969) and adoption of the ex novo "democracy" I described. IOW, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Macroeconomics is one of the biggest pseudosciences out there. But I'd still rather have Bernanke answering to the four most bitterly opposed macro bloggers than the House committee he just had to answer to. We recently saw the public exert unprecedented pressure on the Fed, via a discourse that resembled raw sewage. Would you rather have Dodd-Frank, or something that originated at a mechanism design conference?
* Sigh: or writes a widely-cited blog.
On the other hand I'm actually kind of happy that the Internet has made a meritocracy of expertise via blogs and mailing lists - credentials are too easily abused.
This is like asking people to predict the result of a slightly skewed coin flip, without giving any odds, and afterwards proclaiming them wrong if the less likely side happened. In other words, this does not show that the predictions were "wrong" in any meaningful way.
Experts have a tricky road. The advice a good one gives is nuanced and filled with caveats. But people don't like that. They want definites. So there are some "experts" who sound like experts and they are dangerous. Especially when it comes to anything which involves taking action based on prediction. An expert's opinion is unreliable for forecasting, especially when compared to crowds or novices, basic algorithms and animals with simpler brains - e.g. little or no better than random. Human biases are too hard to get over, not to mention information limits and complexity of the process generating the probable events impossible to get a head around.
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Here is what one expert, Richard Feynman, has to say on the matter.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-ra...
".. a story about strawberry jam test .. Their scientific question was simple: Would random undergrads have the same preferences as the experts at the magazine? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?... "