Expert opinion!

The following small excerpt from an interesting,(and well worth a read) article, supports the growing disquiet I experience every time somebody uses the word 'expert' to convince me to walk a dangerous/suicidal/stupid/nonsensical/incoherent path towards self-destruction:

In short, we are, as individuals and as groups, riddled with cognitive biases that go with being human. This is not, let me emphasise, confined to the poor and uneducated. Experts remain susceptible and can be very resistant to accepting their fallibility. In a wonderful book titled Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Philip Tetlock remarks: “Human performance suffers because we are deep down deterministic thinkers with an aversion to probabilistic strategies that accept the inevitability of error. We insist on looking for order in random sequences.” The book explains that political and geopolitical experts perform abysmally in making predictions in their own fields of expertise, but are overwhelmingly disinclined to acknowledge this fact

I can think of few things more effective in preventing excessive civilizational errors than to eradicate 'experts' from decision making positions and to handball that privilege instead to those deemed 'wise' not by their education (even though I am a believer in education!), but through lived and learned experience.

I particularly liked this comment about monkeys in the article:  "In reality, Tetlock discovered in longitudinal studies, even the best experts he could find performed not much better than chimps throwing darts at a board."

The article worth a read is found at: http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2011/10/learning-to-see-the-gorilla