Ersatz Expertise

To be called an expert in a field is quite remarkable. Yet being an expert these days is far from an easy task. Experts need to navigate problems like the distortion of their viewpoints to supplement a narrative, losing credibility on being just a tad bit incorrect, and making their voices heard in the surrounding cacophony. Almost everyone holds a tendency to believe that they are right regarding a concept despite conducting enough or any research at all in most cases. It is crucial to understand why we should listen to an expert, how should we listen to an expert and what should we ask the expert. This can help us understand where our knowledge lacks, improve our discernment and be more empathetic.

Since the dawn of mankind, we have always fought on what is right. Caveman Goggog fought with his mate whether he should touch fire or not, and he subsequently learned his lesson. Eastern philosophers wrote on how life is supposed to be lived, whereas their western counterparts pondered on what exactly life is supposed to mean. Years later, Shakespeare penned a soliloquy to ask if it is better to live or to die through his character Hamlet. Centrals Banks fought on whether they should pump money in the economy and destroy it, or withdraw cash from the economy and then destroy it. All these debates culminated in the apex of human understanding when Rapper Lil John asked ‘What’.

The understanding of what exactly knowledge is is studied in the branch of philosophy known as epistemology. A concept, known as scepticism is rather popular. If your brain is the thing which tells you everything, from what you feel to what you think to what you perceive, ask yourself how are you sure that your brain is not kept in a tube, where it is fed neuro-signals making you see what you see, hear what you hear, and procrastinate when you have to save yourself from being fired. It is impossible to prove that what you understand is not by your own free will, but by a computer feeding your brain about what is the right thing for you [1].

However, the majority of us never bothered to have a serious discussion on how one knows what is right or wrong with a proper guarantee, but we certainly been having debates on how right we are. Those who spoke popular truths and/or comforting lies have had their words spread far and beyond; their musings becoming staples of history. Not every opinion could reach thousands of people, as the exchange of ideas was withheld by geographical constraints. This all changed when in the late 1960s, a technological development saw that in the future if you didn’t have friends, you could press a bell icon to be in some form of a squad, aka, the internet. There is no other medium which allows for such freedom of expression. The internet is a blessing, or maybe not.

Platforms for free speech ensures that if you see an individual doing something you disagree with, you can easily throw a barrage of the choicest abuses you have in your lexicon. You can construct a well thought out comment and leave it there; otherwise, you can ask if anyone is watching this video in 20XX. The free rein provided by the internet is unmatched.

By allowing every voice with a decent internet connection to post their views, the internet facilitates for people with little to no knowledge on a particular topic to share their viewpoints on them. The signal-to-noise ratio gets even more attenuated by providing a platform for those who know nothing, a way to say everything. Whereas, people with actual knowledge of a subject need to put their views in a manner which has to be correct, sound sensible, and appeal to large parts of the populace to be acknowledged. Very much easier said than done.

What’s most disparaging is people who have legitimate expertise in their fields are most of the time mocked upon instead of being listened to and debated with. For almost every matter, there is a venture creator who believes he knows everything and has to argue on twitter about the most mundane stuff. Another facet of this issue lies in the fact that people want to hold opinions instead of learning. Witty comebacks which reinforce bias are celebrated instead of insightful comments.

We now try to look into various issues an expert faces. In a way, there is hardly any monetary incentive for an expert to make her/his knowledge public. Becoming an expert in any field takes time and money. Giving it for free is undoubtedly noble, but does not pay the bills. Truth hides behind a paywall in most cases. News sites which do their jobs correctly need a subscription fee to keep the boat of journalistic integrity afloat. Research papers are anything but cheap, with access costing a fortune for universities. There are calls for research papers to become free, and it will be one of those decisions which do not look fancy at the moment but will prove to become monumental after looking back.

Secondly, the situation gets muddled further by the expectations for what an ‘expert’ should know or not. Since a professional’s word is supposed to carry more weight, it becomes problematic for them to voice ideas about topics which have no clear answers and involve emotional complexities. It is a rather difficult thing for an expert to openly admit a lack of understanding for a specific topic of interest since it runs the risk of them being called incompetent, which is often the case.

The price of giving a wrong take, in the long run, is much higher than admitting uncertainty.

Finally, there is hardly any space given for errors when it comes to expert opinion, but the most constraining factor is the lack of time. This is evident with the pandemic. People need an exact date to know when they can roam around without any care. An expert showing any kind of reluctance in convening the public when they can remove their masks will be ignored and replaced by a person who can pinpoint which second the virus will disappear forever. A labyrinth of presumptuous opinions is built by phonies, leading the public astray from factualness and authenticity. With so many outlooks spewed from everywhere, what metric can we use to distinguish the charlatan from the scholar?

Is there a convincing method to attenuate the noise of the fake from the insight of a specialist? There is one, and it does not concern about the answers an expert gives, but rather, the kind of questions s/he asks. If the question is excellent, the expert will ponder about it before giving the answer. An adept person will always know the limits of her/his knowledge. This way one can distinguish a person who put the effort into understanding his field from a fraudster.

The other way of identifying a well-researched stance is by observing the conviction displayed by a person. Confident views can come from either the most informed person, or someone who falls under the minimum point of the Dunning Kruger effect[2]. Hence when dealing with opinions which carry a significant amount of self-assurance, it is a good idea to not adopt the viewpoint as the truth. Look forward to those experts who are willing to disclose that they don’t know about something in their field, as it fosters a culture of trust in place of half-truths being formulated to display assurance.

The expert may not know the solution, but s/he knows which questions are unanswered, which is more useful.

Experts can be wrong as well, which cannot be denied. There are various possibilities for them to give a mistaken verdict including over-confidence, coercion to provide a statement etc. To mitigate these issues, three things can be done,

1. Replacing highly specific questions with no clear answers by questions whose answers can give an objective viewpoint. A direct question for unsystematic and erratic topics will be met with an answer commensurate with the randomness of the issue.
2. For, e.g., asking if the vaccine for COVID-19 will be successful or not will be met with an unsure response. Modifying the question by asking if trials have shown any positive effects will be answered with assurance, as there is a definite answer to this question, unlike the previous one.
3. Fostering a culture where it is considered to be acceptable when an expert lacks sufficient data and/or knowledge to supply a solution. This also prevents forcing an expert to give half-baked solutions.
4. Observing discussions between experts as they are less likely to present incorrect information for the sake of giving a recommendation as they are less likely to do so in front of their peers who can catch them.

Before concluding, there is one final issue to be tackled. What happens if an expert says something you disagree with (considering you are not an expert in that field)? Our biases lead us to often vehemently reject their propositions when such a case happens. It becomes imperative to recognise that the ideas we withheld are never indeed our own ideas but influenced by the voices of thousands of others directly as well as indirectly. There is an ocean of information out there, but the water is too salty to drink and we must be ever willing to filter the right content from the wrong ones while being accepting of changing our viewpoints.