The Federalist: The Death Of Expertise

[twa]

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[twa]

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[Riggo-toni]

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[LD0506]

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[twa]

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[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

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[AsburySkinsFan]

 

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[Jumbo]

so we'll try again, back to topic

 

[No Excuses]

As a scientist, I have long come to accept that I'm better off using my expertise in two capacities;

 

1. A professional setting amongst my colleagues where we understand the implications and limitations of our work.

 

2. As an educator to the youth to enable them to  go out into the world with the skills needed to understand complex systems and to wade through a sea of bull****

 

There are scientists who are good at reaching out to the general public and they serve an important role in terms of broadcasting knowledge to other people who are ALREADY interested in learning more.

 

There is a segment of the population, of mostly grown adults, that is wholly incapable of appreciating expertise, aware of their ignorance but too proud to acknowledge that others know more. There was a time I would try to engage this segment but I have come to learn that it is a colossal waste of time. Some people are too far gone.

 

IMO the best you can do is hope and work towards a future where the successive generations have less people who are proud to be ignorant loudmouths.

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

15 minutes ago, Jumbo said:

so we'll try again, back to topic

I am probably the least handy person on Earth and yet my parents always used to have me do jobs like repave the driveway or build a patio in the backyard. Invariably I'd screw up and they get mad at me but I was always like, "do you want this job done right or do you want it done by me?"

 

You're looking for intelligent conversation on ES? Dare to hope but prepare to be disappointed.

[gbear]

It is interesting reading this from the position I have as a patient advisor to the American Board of Internal Medicine as we begin to embrace patient centered care.  We are looking at the impacts of the patient becoming a partner in their healthcare rather than a subject upon whom the art of medicine is employed to better their health.  It's interesting to me because I find myself frequently commenting to the doctors there is no way most patients know enough to really understand the impacts of a treatment on their health as a whole.  We know what we experience, and we tend to assume what didn't happen could/would never have happened to us.  Many have little or no understanding of likelihoods, especially rare ones.  Our minds are not primed to understand such information. As a result, preventative care can be a very hard sell, and it takes only a little bit of fear mongering to send us down an anti-vaccination route.

 

Of course our body is a complex system (note: different from a complicated system which it also is).  We are still learning the down stream implications of many of the things we do to and with our bodies.  I recently gave a presentation to doctors, insurers, regulators and patients on patient generated data and how it can be used like we use "big data."  We can use it to assert a position or confirm a position.  Believe it or not, we are already doing both.  We are just in the infancy of understanding how best to use the huge trove of information, and one of the challenges is pulling in most uninformed perspectives into something useful. 

 

The ability to gleam and present such insights is where I predict the next generation of experts will arrive.  The best of them will be able to sift out the trash to present and stay current with the overall trends.  The hard part is recognizing the limits of our knowledge.  The Dunning-Kruger effect is real, and ironically one mentioned at the last board meeting.  When it comes to medicine, we have the added frustration coming from double complex system issues around both the complex system that is our health and the overlapping yet distinctly separate complex system that is our emotions about our health and healthcare. 

 

Still, we are coming a long way at a fast pace.  As our traditional study based medicine is either directed or confirmed by huge amounts of data, our knowledge is refined faster than ever.  Heck at the last meeting, the doctors were talking about the study in Stroke showing an increase in Alzheimer's for people who drink one or more diet soda a day.  It was mind breaking to them, and they were shocked by my only mild surprise.  I told them I stopped drinking coke zero because my headaches were worse, and when I switched back to regular coke I looked at other patients' info.  I was far from alone across neurological conditions to note worsening symptoms on diet sodas.  As a result I was less surprised than they at a link between diet sodas and neurological issues.  My knowledge was not based on a formal study, and I would never present it as fact.  However, a smarter person could have made the connection and presented a decent level of proof from expanding the small amount of research I did, and they could present something I would believe as much as my doctor telling me.  However, I need the doctor to tell me which of the millions of "facts" available to me are most likely to help me feel better and live the life I want to live better.  Alas, I don't have the base to make such distinctions well.  

 

That is why I need a doctor.  What's more, that is why I need the term doctor to convey a level of current expertise.  It is why I endorse the idea of a body of "experts" who can set a minimum bar to be called an expert in the field.  Note, that is what the American Board of Internal Medicine is.  It is a group of doctors (experts) who say to be accredited with them a doctor must know X. 

[Busch1724]

Almost everything that is not working  can be tied back to education or lack thereof. One critical issue I see from my position as a teacher is that there is not enough time to teach everything that we have to teach. The school year is only so long and only so much can be taught and this ever changing world makes it so much harder to teach things like knowing who and what are experts and why they are experts. 

[Kilmer17]

3 minutes ago, Busch1724 said:

Almost everything that is not working  can be tied back to education or lack thereof. One critical issue I see from my position as a teacher is that there is not enough time to teach everything that we have to teach. The school year is only so long and only so much can be taught and this ever changing world makes it so much harder to teach things like knowing who and what are experts and why they are experts. 

To continue that thought, all of our issues can be solved by more education and knowledge.  IE, we can accept that XXXX is failing because lack of education, but XXXX isnt a lost cause.  Their is always time to learn and improve.

 

Our nations shame is the way we treat educators.

[Busch1724]

Kilmer, this is true. Certainly I'm biased in some regards, but there is a treatment and perception that isn't true or fair. This isn't the thread to get into those reasons, but expertise is something so many dismiss if it challenges their stance on an issue. Climate denial is a big one!

[tshile]

Where I live educators are treated as baby sitters.

Parents think they know more about what is going on with their kid in class, than the people who spend 5 says a week with said kid in class as well as dozens of other kids and years of doing it.

Parents think educators should appreciate their current ranking on the wage scale because they 'get the summers off'

 

I don't know how the rest of the county is. And this isn't every parent here, for sure. But it's an entirely too large of a segment here.

 

Talking about the lack of critical thinking, or education in general, and not including how the rest of society views and thinks educators should be treated seems like a huge mistake to me.

[Vilandil Tasardur]

8 hours ago, No Excuses said:

As a scientist, I have long come to accept that I'm better off using my expertise in two capacities;

 

1. A professional setting amongst my colleagues where we understand the implications and limitations of our work.

 

2. As an educator to the youth to enable them to  go out into the world with the skills needed to understand complex systems and to wade through a sea of bull****

 

There are scientists who are good at reaching out to the general public and they serve an important role in terms of broadcasting knowledge to other people who are ALREADY interested in learning more.

 

There is a segment of the population, of mostly grown adults, that is wholly incapable of appreciating expertise, aware of their ignorance but too proud to acknowledge that others know more. There was a time I would try to engage this segment but I have come to learn that it is a colossal waste of time. Some people are too far gone.

 

IMO the best you can do is hope and work towards a future where the successive generations have less people who are proud to be ignorant loudmouths.

I really, really loved this article.

 

As an early career scientist (finishing PhD, currently 4 pubs), I see my role as heavily split between these two capacities. I often think of it in marketing terms: a big part of what I do is B to B; I need to convince other scientists that my research and my brand is top notch to build collaborations and career opportunities. But a large part also has to be B to C marketing, communicating to the public why what we do is awesome and should be interesting for them. 

 

I think that the latter is important, at least in no small part because many institutions now employ educators in lieu of researchers (or worse, expect a scientist to wear both hats).

 

But I think you're absolutely right that it's not worth wasting your time on trying to educate those that have chosen you are wrong. My in-laws for example, are convinced that evolution is a hoax, that fossils were put there by the devil, and that I am perpetuating conspiracy because my industry is "rolling in billions of grant money" and that we admitting we're wrong would be akin to turning off the spicket. Accordingly, they vote to defund science at every possible opportunity.

 

I'm not going to waste one second of my time arguing with my in-laws. They've made up their mind, and have decided that they know more than me because I am (a) a child (in their minds), and (b) involved in a mass conspiracy to rob small business owners of their hard earned dollars. 

[zoony]

I think what we are seeing largely is that knowledge is cheap.  It will only get cheaper

 

Wisdom is the problem.

 

I submit as exhibit A thru Z every Ron Paul supporter, ever

[PeterMP]

11 minutes ago, Vilandil Tasardur said:

But I think you're absolutely right that it's not worth wasting your time on trying to educate those that have chosen you are wrong. My in-laws for example, are convinced that evolution is a hoax, that fossils were put there by the devil, and that I am perpetuating conspiracy because my industry is "rolling in billions of grant money" and that we admitting we're wrong would be akin to turning off the spicket. Accordingly, they vote to defund science at every possible opportunity.

 

I'm not going to waste one second of my time arguing with my in-laws. They've made up their mind, and have decided that they know more than me because I am (a) a child (in their minds), and (b) involved in a mass conspiracy to rob small business owners of their hard earned dollars. 

 

I will point out that most Christians that I've engaged with when you take the approach from a Biblical stand point will reject the idea of a trickster God.  It is hard to reconcile the idea of the good shepherd seeking out the single lost sheep and the father celebrating the return of the prodigal son with the idea of a trickster God.

 

Would the good sheperd allow another shepherd to set traps for his sheep to lead them astray?  Or a wolf to set traps to lead them into the wolfs den?

 

No the good shepherd would remove those traps.

 

Would the father have allowed a wall be built around his property to prevent the prodigal son from returning?  No, the father would have gone out and torn down any wall that would have prevented the return of the lost son.

[Vilandil Tasardur]

1 minute ago, PeterMP said:

 

I will point out that most Christians that I've engaged with when you take the approach from a Biblical stand point will reject the idea of a trickster God.  It is hard to reconcile the idea of the good shepherd seeking out the single lost sheep and the father celebrating the return of the prodigal son with the idea of a trickster God.

 

Would the good sheperd allow another shepherd to set traps for his sheep to lead them astray?  Or a wolf to set traps to lead them into the wolfs den?

 

No the good shepherd would remove those traps.

 

Would the father have allowed a wall be built around his property to prevent the prodigal son from returning?  No, the father would have gone out and torn down any wall that would have prevented the return of the lost son.

I like this; and I may yet try it. Though my mother in law once spend half an hour telling me about this guy that came to her church that I would have "really liked and been very impressed by" because he explained how scientists lie about the age of the earth by skewing all the numbers to stretch 10,000 years into billions and that "he could do all the math and stuff you'd have believed him!". 

 

I think the article hits the nail on the head with regards to conversation being exhausting. In my case, I can't even consider having it. 

[PeterMP]

5 minutes ago, Vilandil Tasardur said:

I like this; and I may yet try it. Though my mother in law once spend half an hour telling me about this guy that came to her church that I would have "really liked and been very impressed by" because he explained how scientists lie about the age of the earth by skewing all the numbers to stretch 10,000 years into billions and that "he could do all the math and stuff you'd have believed him!". 

 

I think the article hits the nail on the head with regards to conversation being exhausting. In my case, I can't even consider having it. 

 

ASF had one of the better and most simplistic answers to this one that I've ever seen.  How far away is the farthest star that you can see?  How fast does light travel?  Unless God did something like make the universe with the light already on the way, there is no way we could see those stars.  Why would God make stars and make light from them visible to us unless he wanted to trick us?

 

Which brings you back full circle to why would God want to trick us about the age of the universe.

[tshile]

There are people that will follow that logic and ponder.

 

There are people that will follow that logic and become enraged.

 

I seem to know mostly the later. I couldn't imagine having that conversation at the family dinner. My wife already catches a bunch of **** about me for pointing out various things that have been said that were... well, not well thought through.