WHY EXPERTS ARE OFTEN DEAD WRONG
(How experts have been flagrantly and famously wrong in warfare, psychiatry, surgery, and political prognostications.)
WHY EXPERTS ARE OFTEN DEAD WRONG
(How experts have been flagrantly and famously wrong in warfare, psychiatry, surgery, and political prognostications.)
By
David Gottfried
Many supporters of tyrannous Trump seem uneducated. Their lack of formal schooling often coexists with hostility to expert opinion. I think Trump is a hideous man, and I deplore his politics. However, like some Trumpers, I deplore the notion that experts have a monopoly on wisdom. Furthermore, I would go so far as to say that very often a non-expert is better than an expert in understanding the very field in which an expert’s knowledge supposedly lies.
Experts very often are educated to view certain subject matter in only one way. Since they have been taught for years that, for example, A equals B, they may close their minds to evidence that sometimes A equals C. They have invested time and money and made a career out of seeing their subject in a certain way. And so they will be averse to recognizing new principles that were not part of their education.
For example, if one is a Freudian psychiatrist who believes that homosexuality is a disease, one may be very reluctant to entertain new ideas because a) one has spent tons of money getting medical training which pathologized homosexuality, b) one’s colleagues in the profession all say that homosexuality is a disease, c) one’s income is based on the idea that people should be cured of their homosexuality, and d) one doesn’t have the nerve to say that one’s life work was a mistake. This is one of the reasons why so many psychiatrists and analysts took so long to revise their views of the subject.
Similarly, when Pasteur said that germs caused disease, and that we should therefore sterilize things before we operate, other doctors, and the experts in the field of medicine, said he was a fool. If they had admitted that his theories were valid, they would have implicitly conceded that their lack of hygiene and failure to sterilize equipment had killed many patients.
In the early 1960’s, most Americans thought that victory in Vietnam would be a cinch because the experts – Rusk, Mc Bundy, Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- said so. And they gave us a debacle. The experts were intimately familiar with how we had won World War Two – actually the Soviet Union won that war – and they stupidly applied their expert and irrelevant knowledge of large tank battles to Vietnam, where the war was in large measure a guerilla war.
In France, in the 1930’s, the leading generals were often in their 80’s. They grew up in an age when great horsemanship made for great victories. Some generals were insistent that France maintain a great cavalry -- and Hitler’ stuka dive bombers shattered France in a month. Likewise, on the eve of World War Two, the French generals built a strong system of static fortifications known as the Maginot line because World War One was characterized by static lines. The Germans had an easy solution: The Germans simply entered France through the Ardennes Forest, which was North of the northern terminus of the Maginot line.
Likewise, I found that in law school people who had the least familiarity with business and commerce got the highest marks in contracts, commercial law and corporate law. This is because they were not constrained by preconceived notions of how things had to be and were more capable of making insightful arguments in these fields.
Also, by being an expert, one might suffer from tunnel vision. Because one is an expert one may prematurely close his eyes to many insights outside of his field.
For example, most avid followers of politics thought Lyndon Johnson would easily capture the 1968 Democratic Presidential nomination. Norman Podhoretz said, in “Breaking Ranks,” that they got it wrong because they were so glued to politics that they were oblivious to the profound ways in which extra political phenomena can shape politics. More specifically, the political experts were not cognizant of the youth movement, the infectious rebellious enthusiasm for Rock N Roll and the new mood percolating through vast sectors of society which eventually influenced politics.
The expert’s tendency toward tunnel vision is part and parcel of the compartmentalization of knowledge in the academy. For example, most people when they study philosophy are blind to science and they do not know how science influenced philosophical thought. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for example, was a boon to existentialism.