How to use expertsand when not to Noreena Hertz
it’s Monday morning in Washington the
President of the United States is
sitting in the Oval Office assessing
whether or not to strike al Qaeda in
Yemen at number 10 Downing Street David
Cameron is trying to work out whether to
cut more public sector jobs in order to
stave off a double-dip recession in
Madrid Maria Gonzalez is standing at the
door listening to her baby crying and
crying trying to work out whether she
should let it cry until it falls asleep
or pick it up and hold it and I am
sitting by my father’s bedside in
hospital trying to work out whether I
should let him drink the one and a half
liter bottle of water that his doctors
just came and came in and said you must
make him drink today my father’s been
milled by mouth for a week or whether by
giving him this bottle I might actually
kill him we face momentous decisions
with important consequences throughout
our lives and we have strategies for
dealing with these decisions we talk
things over with our friends we scared
the internet we search through books but
still even in this age of Google and
TripAdvisor and Amazon recommends it
still experts that we rely upon most
especially when the stakes are high and
the decision really matters because in a
world of data deluge and extreme
complexity we believe that experts are
more able to process information than we
can that they are able to come to better
conclusions than we could come to on our
own and in an age that is sometimes
nowadays frightening or confuse
Singh we feel reassured by the almost
parental like authority of experts who
tell us so clearly what it is we can and
cannot do but I believe that this is a
big problem a problem with potentially
dangerous consequences for us as a
society as a culture and as individuals
it’s not that experts have not massively
contributed to the world of course they
have the problem lies with us we’ve
become addicted to experts we’ve become
addicted to their certainty their
assuredness their definitiveness and in
the process we have ceded our
responsibility substituting our
intellect and our intelligence for their
supposed words of wisdom we’ve
surrendered our power trading off our
discomfort with uncertainty for the
illusion of certainty that they provide
this is no exaggeration in a recent
experiment a group of adults had their
brain scanned in an MRI machine as they
were listening to experts speak the
results were quite extraordinary as they
listened to the experts voices the
independent decision-making parts of
their brains switched off it literally
flatlined and they listened to whatever
the experts said and took their advice
however right or wrong the experts do
get things wrong did you know that
studies show that doctors miss diagnose
four times out of ten did you know that
if you file your tax returns yourself
you’re statistically more likely to be
filing them correctly than if you get a
tax advisor to do it for
yay and then there’s of course the
example that we’re all too aware of of
financial experts getting it so wrong
that we’re living through the worst
recession since the 1930s for the sake
of our health our wealth and our
collective security it’s imperative that
we keep the independent decision-making
parts of our brains switched on and I’m
saying this as an economist who over the
past few years has focused my research
on what it is we think and who it is we
trust and why but also and I’m aware of
the irony here as an expert myself as a
professor as somebody who advises prime
ministers heads of big companies
international organizations but an
expert who believes that the role of
experts needs to change that we need to
become more open-minded more democratic
and be more open to people rebelling
against our points of view so in order
to help you understand where I’m coming
from let me bring you into my world the
world of experts now there are of course
exceptions wonderful civilization
enhancing exceptions but what my
research has shown me is that experts
tend on the whole to form very rigid
camps that within these camps a dominant
perspective emerges that often silences
opposition that experts move with the
prevailing winds often hero-worshipping
their own gurus Alan Greenspan’s
proclamations that the years of economic
growth would go on and on not challenged
by his peers until after the crisis of
course
you see we also learn that experts are
located a governed by the social and
cultural norms of their times whether it
be the doctors in Victorian England say
who sent women to asylums for expressing
sexual desire or the psychiatrists in
the United States who up until 1973 was
still categorizing homosexuality as a
mental illness and what all this means
is that paradigms take far too long to
shift that complexity and nuance are
ignored and also that money talks
because we’ve all seen the evidence of
pharmaceutical companies funding studies
of drugs that conveniently leave out
their worst side effects or studies
funded by food companies of of their new
products massively exaggerating the
health benefits of the products they’re
about to bring by market a study showed
that food companies exaggerated
typically seven times more than an
independent study and we’ve also got to
be aware that experts of course also
make mistakes they make mistakes every
single day mistakes born out of
carelessness a recent study in the
archives of surgery reported surgeons
removing healthy ovaries operating on
the wrong side of the brain carrying out
procedures on the wrong hand
elbow eye foot and also mistakes born
out of thinking errors a common thinking
error of radiologists for example when
they look at CT scans is that they’re
overly influenced by whatever it is that
the referring physician has said that he
aspects the patient’s problem to be so
if a radiologist is looking at the scan
of a patient with suspected pneumonia
say what happens is that if they see
evidence of pneumonia on the scan
they literally stop looking at it
thereby missing the tumor sitting three
inches below on the patient’s lungs I’ve
shared with you so far some insights
into the world of experts these are of
course not the only insights I could
share but I hope they give you a clearer
sense at least of why we need to stop
Cowtown to them why we need to rebel and
why we need to switch our independent
decision-making capabilities on but how
can we do this well for the sake of time
I want to focus on just three strategies
first we’ve got to be ready and willing
to take experts on and dispense with
this notion of them as modern-day
apostles this doesn’t mean having to get
a PhD in every single subject you’ll be
relieved to hear but it does mean
persisting in the face of their
inevitable annoyance when for example we
want them to explain things to us in
language that we can actually understand
why was it that when I had an operation
my doctor said to me beware miss hurts
of hyperpyrexia when he could have just
as easily said watch out for a high
fever you see being ready to take
experts on is about also being willing
to dig behind their graphs their
equations their forecasts their
prophecies and being armed with the
questions to do that questions like what
are the assumptions that underpin this
what is the evidence
upon which this is based what has your
investigation focused on and what has it
ignored it recently came out that
experts trialing drugs before they come
to market typically trial drugs first
primarily on male animals and then
primarily on men it seems that they’ve
somehow overlooked the fact that over
half the world’s population are women
and women have drawn the short medical
straw because it now turns out that many
of these drugs don’t work nearly as well
on women as they do on men and the drugs
that do work well work so well that
they’re actively harmful for women to
take being a rebel is about recognizing
that experts assumptions and their
methodologies can easily be flawed
second we need to create the space for
what I call managed descent if we are to
shift paradigms if we are to make
breakthroughs if we are to destroy myths
we need to create an environment in
which expert ideas are battling it out
in which we’re bringing in new diverse
discordant heretical views into the
discussion fearlessly in the knowledge
that progress comes about not only from
the creation of ideas but also from
their destruction and also from the
knowledge that by surrounding ourselves
by divergent discordant heretical views
all the research now shows us that this
actually makes us smarter encouraging
dissent is a rebellious notion because
it goes against our very instincts which
are to surround ourselves with opinions
and advice that we already believe or
want to be
true and that’s why I talk about the
need to actively manage dissent Google’s
CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical
practitioner of this philosophy in
meetings he looks out for the person in
the room arms crossed looking a bit
bemused and draws them into the
discussion trying to see if they indeed
are the person with a different opinion
so that they have dissent within the
room managing dissent is about
recognizing the value of disagreement
discord and difference but we need to go
even further we need to fundamentally
redefine who it is that experts are the
conventional notion is that experts are
people with advanced degrees fancy
titles diplomas best-selling books high
status individuals but just imagine if
we were to junk this nation of expertise
as some sort of elite cadre and instead
embrace the notion of democratized
expertise whereby expertise was not just
the preserve of surgeons and CEOs but
also shopgirls yeah best by the consumer
electronics company gets all its
employees the cleaners the shop
assistants the people in the back office
not just its forecasting team to place
bets
yes bets on things like whether or not a
product is going to sell well before
Christmas on whether new customers new
ideas are going to be or should be taken
on by the company on whether a project
will come in on time by leveraging and
by embracing the expertise within the
company best buy was able to
discover for example that the store
that it was going to open in China it’s
big grand store was not going to open on
time because when it asked its staff all
its staff to place their bets on whether
they thought the store would open on
time or not a group from the finance
department placed all their chips on
that not happening
it turns out that they were where as no
one else within the company was of a
technological blip that neither the
forecasting experts nor the experts on
the ground on China were even aware of
the strategies that I have discussed
this evening embracing dissent taking
experts on democratizing expertise
rebellious strategies are strategies
that I think would serve us all well to
embrace as we try to deal with the
challenges of these very confusing
complex difficult times for if we keep
our independent decision-making part of
our brains switched on if we challenge
experts if we’re skeptical if we devolve
Authority if we are rebellious but also
if we become much more comfortable with
nuance uncertainty and doubt and if we
allow our experts to express themselves
using those terms too we will set
ourselves up much better for the
challenges of the 21st century for now
more than ever is not the time to be
blindly following blindly accepting
blindly trusting now is the time to face
the world with eyes wide open yes using
experts to help us figure things out for
sure I don’t want to completely do
myself out of a job here
but being aware of their limitations and
of course also our own thank you