January 17, 2008

Trusting the Experts

Posted by Eric at 1:16 pm | Category: Links, Politics, Science

Over at CoyoteBlog, I’ve made a few comments on this blog post in response to a quip that the author was skeptical about global warming. I’d like to repost my arguments here, since I think it’s a general reflection of my thoughts on science:

I think that trusting scientists on their views in their fields of expertise is generally a good idea, and if the IPCC says that global warming is starting to accelerate, I’m inclined to accept it; it’s really the only intelligent thing to do. Policy and normative notions, one can debate, even if you aren’t an expert, but for facts and other positive notions, I’ll stick to the experts, and they seem to say that global warming is real.

If everyone trusted the experts more, the world would be a better place. None of the pseudo-science homeopathy/complementary medicine nonsense, none of the liberalized ignorance of basic economic facts, and none of the nonsense of evolution denial.

Here, someone replied to me:

Your response would make sense if you didn’t take into account the idea that scientists get way more money to do research about catastrophic global warming versus natural equilibrium.

In addition, I don’t agree with the “trusting experts” argument because I have yet to see an approach to global warming based on the emerging field of complex adaptive systems. As one who studies this field, am I not an “expert”, shouldn’t you trust me? Because I’ve found that complex systems move towards different equilibriums, not tipping points. By classifying the global climate as a complex adaptive system, I have to disagree with the current so-called “experts” who claim there is a tipping point.

Personally, I think this whole argument of “trusting experts” is flawed because one is only an expert until somebody with a new theory comes along that is better. Let’s not forget the “experts” told us that the Earth was at the center of the universe, and they had the majority consensus. It used to be mind boggling to think otherwise.

“Trusting experts” is probably one of those things which will lead to the loss of individual liberty and further reinforces the point of this blog article

Thus, I replied,

Well, notice that I used the plural here. The views of an individual scientist are, for better or worse, his/her own views. The scientific consensus, on the other hand, represents the views of a large swath of scientists, and the competition between scientists for funding and publication generally means that, on the whole, the “most correct” interpretation tends to win. I don’t know how much I can trust an individual scientist’s views, but if a vast majority of scientists support a view, then I’ll stick with that one. I’m not addressing here the whole “tipping point” phrasing or alarmism that the particular journalist used in the above blog post. I’m talking about general skepticism about global warming. Unless I have specific, methodological problems with the general field’s reasoning, and have experience in in that field, I’d say that I will always accept the field’s scientific consensus on a subject.

There’s a word for people who, with absolutely no expertise, think that they have the answers in the face of tons of experts: crackpot. Lay people (i.e. non-scientists) who go against scientific consensus are the same as people who think that they can prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity wrong, or who think they’ve proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in two short sentences. They’re not brilliant critics; they’re raving madmen. Just because Rob is an expert in complex adaptive systems doesn’t mean he’s an expert in climate science. That’s like saying a mathematician is an expert in cryptography; yes, cryptography uses mathematics, but unless that mathematician has a focus on cryptography, they won’t know all the algorithms, all the details, all the issues involved. If a mathematician were to persist in making sweeping non-consensus claims about cryptography without reading about cryptography, he or she’d be a crackpot, regardless of how smart they are.

So if Rob is going to make some claim about climate science because he’s in a field he thinks is related, he’d better have much better reasons than “adaptive systems converge upon fixed points”, cause climate phase trajectories lie in a large-dimensional manifold, and in such situations, fixed points often abound; in addition, we don’t know the rate of convergence to the various fixed points, and presumably the ever-changing flux of the sun, geothermal activity, and rotation of the earth would prevent such steady-state convergence. Perhaps anthropogenic climate change is driven by the evolution of fixed points in certain directions; perhaps our introduction of greenhouse gases has led to some sort of bifurcation, and that’s leading to the increase in temperatures. Hey look, I can make vague generalities about climate science as a complex system, too! Do you believe me? I would hope you go to the experts instead.

Sure, some “experts” in the past have claimed that the Earth was in the center of the universe, perhaps, but they were not scientists; they didn’t follow the scientific method, they used state-mandated religious views to arrive at their conclusions; religion obviously is not a source of facts, and isn’t a way to find scientific truths.

The IPCC (a coalition of most climate scientists) thinks that currently, mankind’s contribute to the environment has caused a significant change in the climate, leading to a significant change in the world’s temperature compared to the past. The main objections to this that I’ve seen come from 1) people with no expertise, and 2) a few (very few) climate scientists. The people with no expertise include members of the press, politicians, random scientists from other fields, and so on. I don’t think they have valid points to make unless they really read the literature first. That the vast majority of climate scientists agree with the IPCCs statements nullifies my second concern.

And an expert in climate science is still an expert in climate science once new theories come about. Did physicists stop becoming physicists with the quantum mechanics revolution? No, they instead all became expert quantum physicists. Did they leave the theory up to the public to decide? No, they evaluated it themselves, because people intimately familiar with the experimental details and the underlying facts and methodologies are the best ones to evaluate new theories and evidence. Let the scientists in the field determine what theory is sound and what isn’t; I don’t think the uninformed public should.

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5 Responses to “Trusting the Experts”

  1. cmb Says:
    January 17th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    I’m a horrible person who’s posting an enormous comment.

    I know you’re not advocating blind faith here, but I think a large part of the problem is that there’s a level to which scientists lack patience with the general public. It takes time to try and explain anything in great detail, and so it’s very tempting for scientists to oversimplify. If you’re a member of the general public, that’s frustrating. It’s your right and maybe even your duty to question what the experts say. Just because they’re more experienced doesn’t necessarily mean they’re totally right. It just makes it more likely.

    Which is not to say that it isn’t useful to have experts, and that we shouldn’t take them seriously. But I think I’d rather have people out there questioning them and their theories before making significant decisions than just saying “Well, this whole field looks reasonable, and they sure know a lot more about it than me, so I’ll go along with it.” It’s arrogant of scientists to assume that the general public should just trust them, and even if they’re right. Part of an expert’s responsibility is to be able to justify themselves to a remotely reasonable lay person.

    Which is not to say that every lay person wants to hear what an expert has to say–let me tell you, if I ever don’t want to talk about what I do to a stranger, I tell them I’m an evolutionary biologist. There are some folks who will question me on this, obviously, and want to proselytize to me. And I’m polite to them, because just because my area of expertise is evolutionary biology doesn’t mean I know everything about it. And it drives me crazy that people don’t believe in something that’s been demonstrated so many times, but that doesn’t mean I wish they’d just trust what experts think.

    In the end, I think the world is better because people question experts rather then just go along with them. I think reasonable people who use their brains well wind up agreeing with the experts most of the time anyway and that that. Frankly, the problem is more that a lot of the people out there aren’t like that, but the ones who are make what the experts spend their lives obsessing over legitimate.

  2. Eric Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 12:55 am

    Even if people were logical (they aren’t), and even if people were wiling to listen (they usually aren’t), I think this would only work if everyone had an infinite amount of extra time in their lives.

    I’m a biologist, and I don’t even know all the stuff happening in biology. I don’t follow immunology very much, for example, and I definitely don’t know enough developmental biology to do stuff there. I don’t know enough chemistry to ask the right questions. I can’t critically review experts in those fields, because I don’t really have any valid points to raise. That’s just in biology; economics, physics, math, history, and so on, I don’t know enough to critically address issues in those fields. All I can do is be curious and ask questions.

    So, if everyone had time for infinite discourse, and didn’t have pressing policy issues to resolve and such, and actually had the stamina and the curiosity to understand everything, then sure, take the time, do the discourse so that everyone really understands the issues underlying everything. But really? People don’t. Politicians don’t. And politicians these days, for better or for worse, are being less like a representative republic and more like a puppet for the people. And people don’t care enough to know before they vote.

    To see all this, simply look at how the local school boards in Florida are doing with the new state science education standards. Some of them don’t even know what evolution is, and they’re against it. They didn’t take the time to even research what the hell their against!

    Yes, scientists are arrogant, and it’s somewhat scientists’ fault that we haven’t educated the public enough. But people, especially leaders, need to start trusting the experts. If even people like George Bush can equivocate about evolution, that’s a strong indicator that he doesn’t care what evidence and the experts say, he believes whatever the hell is most convenient for him to self-affirm his own goals. And that’s a problem.

  3. L2345 Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 5:29 am

    It’s possible you overestimate the capabilities of “climate science.” It is a young science. It has no track record. It is not amenable to experiment. Climate science in 2008 might be where microbiology was in 1850, or something like that.

    And anyway, the consensus of expert opinion is frequently wrong. We know more about medicine than we know about climate science, and yet, to quote a passage from “Overtreated” by Shannon Brownlee:

    “In the latter part of the twentieth century, dozens of common treatments, including tonsillectomy, the hysterectomy, the frontal lobotomy, the radical mastectomy, arthroscopic knee surgery for arthritis, X-ray screening for lung cancer, proton pump inhibitors for ulcers, hormone replacement therapy for menopause, and high-dose chemotherapy for breast cancer, to name just a few, have ultimately been shown to be unnecssary, ineffective, more dangerous than imagined, or sometimes more deadly than the diseases they were meant to treat.”

    Would you bet your year-2028 salary that the consensus predictions by today’s climate scientists for the next 20 years will have been found to come true, to within 10% of theirs predictions?

  4. Eric Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    It’s possible that climate science is wrong, but I don’t have any real basis for criticism of it. I don’t know anything about it, really. My knowledge of annual cycles, of solar heat flux, and whatnot is extraordinarily limited.

    I would not say that the consensus expert opinion is frequently wrong. They often get more things right than wrong; it’s just that the errors are the only things that people remember. And improvement on knowledge is inevitable in science; we’re not omniscient beings. We don’t start out with perfect theories. But we do start out with the best theories at the moment, and if I have to choose what theory is more likely to be true at any specific moment in time without any prior knowledge, I’d side with the experts, because I don’t really have any alternative argument. How do I know they’re wrong? I don’t. They might be wrong, but they have an equal or greater chance of being right; that’s what makes them experts.

    I would not argue that we know more about medicine than climate science. Medicine is still a vast open desert of knowledge. There is one Earth; there are billions of people, all with different genes, different environments, and different diseases. Most of medicine is extremely experimentally based; there are very few theories or models of how or why something works. They just do it and use it.

    And I would argue that a lot of the treatments you mentioned became unnecessary because of advances in technology. Now, we have the ability to detect things with a much higher sensitivity, and our surgical and medical techniques improve such that previous efforts may look barbaric. After all, aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen are basically obsolete, in that they’d never pass our safety and health requirements today; they were grandfathered in from an earlier, more barbaric time, when people bleeding out their innards was an acceptable risk.

  5. The Real Ben Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    To further Eric’s comment here, I feel it’s wrong to characterize science as a body of knowledge built around a consensus — it’s a process by which a body of knowledge is built. The scientific consensus, is just a bunch of people who think a certain way — there is NOTHING special about that, or else we should accept creationism at face value because a bunch of people think a certain way.

    But, the reason why we ought to listen to the scientific consensus is not because they are necessarily right, but because they arrived at that opinion through careful consideration of the available evidence. I would even go so far as to say they can be pretty frequently wrong (for years we taught the Central Dogma in biology which, we now know, is not completely accurate), but, because the essence of science is a skeptical/questioning one (as opposed to say religion which is one based on faith and not on testing every thing that is heard), a scientific consensus almost necessarily represents THE BEST OF WHAT WE KNOW. The fact that I can tell you that the Central Dogma is not completely accurate just goes to show that, once evidence for a previously unsupported claim is built, and stands the test of time such that it is NOT rejected by the scientific community, then the claim will build a scientific consensus — and come on, is there any doubt that the scientific community believes in RNA interference and Reverse Transcriptase?

    So, it’s not that we ought to value the scientific consensus because its infallible (if that’s the reason anyone’s valuing it, they’ll be pretty disappointed), we ought to value it because of the process by which it’s arrived at representing, in most cases (the issue with naming genes and proteins aside :-D), the only true “marketplace of ideas” in existence today.

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