What Would We Do Without Experts?

I work in the insurance industry.

Shakespeare's Dick the butcher said "... Kill all the lawyers".

He was wrong. We should kill all the actuaries.

look back through the last century and actuaries stand alone in the level of damage they have wrought compared to the other white collars.

Based on their 'wisdom', multi-trillion dollar entitlement debt have been created around the globe:

1. They fixed social security retirement age at 65 back in the 1930s hen it should have been adjusted for life expectancy - it would be closer to eighty today.

2. Their cost estimates for Medicare in 1965 for 2005 missed by 10,000 percent.

And on and on.

They base their predictions for the future based on past experience. That's like driving a car looking out the back window.

Monday; I am drinking 1.4 cups of coffee, because I read a study promising it would help my liver.
Tuesday; I will NOT drink any coffee, because I read it causes pancreatic cancer
Wednesday; I will resume drinking 10 cups of coffee per day, because it was found to protect against heart disease.
Thursday; I will throw-out all my coffee, because I saw a program linking coffee to kidney stones
Friday; I will buy a Venti-sized coffee at Starbucks (I threw all of mine out yesterday), because I read that coffee helps flush "toxins" out of the human body,

Saturday; I have scheduled my first ever coffee enema ... symbolic of all the coffee studies that have been shoved into my various orafices

My prediction is an easy one. The trumpster cultists will all be embarrassed, and none of them will admit it. No way to tell who would have been the best pick, but it was easy to tell who was most feared; Walker, Perry, Cruz, Carson all drew serious flak. Drawing flak means you are over the target.

As for how Trump would actually perform as a president, only 2 things you can say at this point. He is no Reagan, and too soon to tell on anything else. Trump was around during both Carter and Reagan, so safe to say he has seen the effects of policy. Also safe to say, he sat on the sidelines till very late in the game. Apart from political donations to the Clintons.

Enoch Powell was correct.

Computer models are the crystal balls of the 21st century.

Just like a crystal ball, the information provided is based on the agenda of the charlatan controlling it.

Anyone who does not contemplate outcomes of societies and what direction that takes are fools. As a business owner I always did this through necessity not idle curiosity. The various 'influencers' change but that simply reinforces the need for regular review. It is an inexact exercise but that does not discount the need.

Most people want predictable outcomes but the essence of life is dealing with the variables. Human progress has now evolved to a high tech innovative state where disruption is fast and can be devastating. No one knows where it will all end.

Yep, the word expert is meaningless when it comes to speculative science. It is not even close to the precision and accuracy of real experts in science, trades and technology. The speculative science experts, usually humanities and social science areas but not exclusively, are professional guessers. Their work is based on WAGs and SWAGs : wild ass guesses and scientific wild ass guesses. In a rational world they'd be as harmless as astrologers and tarot card readers but they've convinced the political class that their WAGs and SWAGs are essential. For some reason (professional courtesy?) real experts don't challenge them.

Personally, I think that despite education and secularism people still default to a pre-Renaissance mindset. Superstition, religious behaviour, belief in the power of clerics, the need to be ruled, guilt and redemption, etc. You can physically take humans out of the dark ages but you cannot take ancient evolutionary instincts out of the human mind.

Oh Dear NME 666 is off his meds again. On a more serious note, because really who cares what NME 666 ingests or spews, the fact is that the "experts" are like the false prophets written about in the Old Testament. The king would call for his experts (he called them prophets) and the prophets would feed the king the information he wanted to hear, whether it was long life or success in war or whatever. We have the same today when our 'prophets' (we call them experts) tell the king and the masses what the king wants them to hear. The world is burning up (AGW) the nation will go bankrupt (Brexit) Everything will shut down (Y2K) etc etc etc. As has been pointed out innumerable times: Those who don't learn from history - repeat it.

Selling predictions of the future is the oldest, best selling scam ever. Appreciating that there even is a future sets us apart from the animals. Abusing the desire of people to have somebody, ANYBODY, confidently tell them the future is a disgusting, exploitative part of human nature

Astrologers read historical patterns, correlate star and planet alignments to earthbound events. Astrologers then take these historical patterns and extrapolate future events from past correlations.

Replace astrologers with climatologists/Karl Marx/shaman
Replace "star and planet alignments" with tree and ice rings/available information from the library of London/vein patterns on a correctly slaughtered lambs' liver.

Oracles, Prophets, John Edward...wrap your predictions in enough mumbojumbo, some (sometimes enough) people will believe anything

“The Met Office, badly burned by the failure of its long-range forecasts a few years ago……….
………..Half way through May it said this about the coming summer: “the outlook suggests the chances of above – or below – average rainfall are approximately similar.”…………
……….Even then, it added a disclaimer: “this is not a normal weather forecast. It’s an experimental and complex outlook based on probabilities”.

If that’s not a sophisticated “expert” bullshit?..........What is?