Are experts often wrong? Sometimes? And, if wrong, why and how?

For a few weeks, I have been reading reviews of the book Wrong: Why experts* keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more by David Freedman. I chose not to purchase it, but ordered Wrong from the library; I am number nine on the holds list with the library only owning three copies, so I will not be reading the book soon.

Nevertheless, I thought some of you would want to know about Wrong. It does sound like a good read. Here's an excerpt from a review in The Globe and Mail:

When we hear that someone is an expert – or even, less grandiosely, a professor, scientist, economist, or forecaster – if they are talking about their domain of interest, we usually assume they are right. But science and business journalist David Freedman suggests we might be better off to assume they are wrong.

His latest book is titled Wrong. It’s an all-out assault on experts, and, perhaps more significantly, our mindsets, which give the experts more licence than they deserve.

Take medical journals, which normally have experts counter-checking the latest studies by other experts to make sure through peer review that the study is solid. But John Ioannidis, a doctor and researcher whose specialty is calculating the chances that a medical study’s results are false – an expert, in a sense, on the wrongness of other experts – has found that two out of three times the studies are wrong. And that is the score just with the most prestigious medical publications, which maybe shouldn’t surprise us because we are used to getting contradictory studies from them on things like wine or coffee’s health implications.

More generally, Mr. Freedman says, “expert wisdom usually turns out to be at best highly contested and ephemeral and at worst flat-out wrong.” In some ways, that’s not totally surprising. ...

Comments

[Trina Hoefling]

Oooh, let's coffee talk after you get through the book, Stephanie! I think I can expertly say that I agree with the expert, Sir Freedman!
Are we in an RD Laing poem? I trust the conclusion is at least partly to become educated and healthily skeptical consumers of expertise?

[StephanieWestAllen]

Hi, Trina. I will let you know after the book comes to me from the library and I read it. Coffee sounds good for discussing it.