Experts and the Power of Self-Deception
Experts are ordinary human beings, with all the fallibilities that come with membership in our species. Like everyone else, experts sometimes suppress truth and disseminate falsehoods for self-preservation or personal gain. Sometimes, they do so in service to some larger cause. Experts, short on time or resources, may cut corners, publishing information they hope is correct, while knowing it may not be. In all these situations, the expert knows his or her information is or may be false.
More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception.
Another good essay by Robert F. Graboyes, who is generous with his free content. Pour a coffee and consider subscribing to his always excellent substack.
So how does one navigate the disparate claims and theories that zip around the internet? The most important question you must ask yourself is this: What is the evidence and what is its quality?
It’s easy to lose sight of the evidence amid high emotions and motivated reasoning. But it’s your only tether to planet earth. It’s the only thing that’ll give you a decent chance of finding the truth.
“Russia Gate” is an excellent example. For all the hoopla thrown up by MSNBC and CNN, including golden girl Rachel Maddow, it was easy to miss that the evidence was shoddy at best. Had these networks taken a truly skeptical and methodical look at the evidence, they might have backed off a bit and saved themselves a lot of embarrasement. But they had the smell of blood in their nostrils, and tough questions about the quality of the evidence were not likely popular.
Madcow was not an expert in anything except how to present a propaganda line. But what’s quoted above is quite wrong.
“More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception.”
Expert according to whom? Themselves? The world is full of self-opinionated twits who pretend to some expertise. Self deception has little to do with the physical sciences and engineering where the consequences of getting it wrong are immediate and visible. Running a complicated piece of equipment like large construction equipment or a modern power generating station quickly sorts out who knows what they are doing.
You are certainly right about evidence. The problem is that much of the public has no basis on which to determine what constitutes evidence let alone whether or not it is accurate and relevant. This in turn is largely a consequence of the degraded state of all modern education: primary to post-secondary.
Expertise has little to do with titles and everything to do with who can actually perform some task.
But this nuancing aside, I agree with you. Emotion and motivated reasoning has nothing to do with something like operating a nuclear power plant.
Now do the Kung Flu death statistics.
Blah, blah, blah…
20, 30, 40 years ago, peer review could be marginally trusted. Now? It’s shit. Politically motivated, bought off, job-preserving.
I don’t need a “peer-reviewed” paper to tell me what is good or bad. I have this little thing called, “common dog-fukc” that is far more accurate than 90% of the “peer-reviewed” crap out there.
“Peer review” is better described as “Groupthink” or “Pal review”. If they really want to test papers, they should use something like the “Tenth Man” process. “Peer review” today is nothing more than keeping control of the “science”.
Most major journals now are double blind, meaning the authors and reviewers do not know who each other are.
Further, many scientific fields are so wide spread geographically these days — researchers can come from anywhere on earth — that researchers don’t know each other the way they used to.
In short, the allegation of “pal review” is pretty much out of date.
“Most major journals now are double blind, meaning the authors and reviewers do not know who each other are.”
Yes, or SO THEY CLAIM. And you believe them, don’t you?
“In short, the allegation of “pal review” is pretty much out of date.”
Keep trying. Trust, once shattered, takes a lot of time and effort to rebuild.
Fred From BC:
I believe it because I am journal editor. And I write and review papers. And most journals are indeed double blind.
If they lied about it, they wouldn’t be able to hide it, would they? All the authors and reviewers would instantly know and call them on it. If all you have is made-up insubstantiated nonsense like that then you’re just desperate.
Read the first sentence in these Instructions To Authors:
https://library.seg.org/page/gpysa7/ifa/instructions
When I hear the term, “peer review”, I immediately think of a room full of proctologists at their annual convention, sniffing each other’s index fingers, all in agreement with one another that what they’re smelling is something other than the obvious.
Eskimo, with all due respect, I doubt you know the first thing about peer review.
Thus the proliferation of peer-reviewed scientific papers whose conclusions cannot be reproduced.
Your personal experience is not enough to answer most — pretty much all — scientific or medical questions. You do not have access to enough data, that data is not collected in an unbiased manner, and you do not have the statistical tools to analyze the data properly.
There’s a reason why medical science uses large-scale, controlled, double-blind studies.
“If they lied about it, they wouldn’t be able to hide it, would they? All the authors and reviewers would instantly know and call them on it. ”
Oh, sure they would. They’d never LIE, right? For the money?
Please. You are as naive as a child.
Fred, the killer rodent is an expert don’t ya know, he just told us so.
You think authors and reviewers get paid? That’s hilarious.
You’re making crap up wholesale. You haven’t a clue about the how scientific papers get published.
VOWG:
I do enjoy the blasé way you guys lecture everyone on the weaknesses of the scientific process without having a clue how it works.
Your personal experience is not enough to answer most — pretty much all — scientific or medical questions.
I can come closer than many of your so-called “ex-spurts”.
You do not have access to enough data…
Oh, like, say, tree rings from a single specimen, upon which Globull Warmists climbed w/ religious fervour, holding the hockey stick on high? That massive, overwhelming amount of data? Dendrocrinologists the planet over hung their heads in shame the day that peer reviewed paper came out. All the while Globull Warmists celebrated…
…that data is not collected in an unbiased manner…
See the above.
…and you do not have the statistical tools to analyze the data properly.
Again, see the above.
There’s a reason why medical science uses large-scale, controlled, double-blind studies.
It matters not how massive the scale of the study, nor how disparate the reviewers are if they are merely nodding their heads in unison. That’s the elephant in the room that you continue to ignore or are wilfully blind to in your continuous defence of contemporary peer review. It is nigh impossible to convince someone to be critical of anything upon which their job depends.
No I’m sorry you don’t. It can take tens of thousands of cases — and in some cases far, far more — to build enough statistical confidence for many medical findings.
And if you don’t know what statistical confidence or how it is calculated, well…
I recently watched the medical industry lie, cheat, thieve & steal during the coof. That’s all the evidence I need to know the entire system is corruptable. Like I noted, when everyone is nodding their heads to some pre-approved agenda, peer review means nothing.
Just like this guy. I could have told you his premises were crap at minute 2. Now the papers are finally getting pulled, and not because they failed peer review:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/08/04/race-hoax-florida-state-u-fires-prof-for-faking-data-on-systemic-racism-as-multiple-papers-are-retracted/
Like this? – and not only newspapers
https://i.redd.it/c61ti8kvpbl51.png
Evidence and quality of same is moot. The point is to drive a destructive myopic narrative no matter how absurd, perverted or callously false. After that is established and policy is derived from it and cemented in place, say, “Oops.”
Reversing the policy would be a humiliation to the expert class so it cannot be done, much like how Islam is humiliated when one breaks free of Islam’s conquest of you.
Alright, if you reject evidence, how do you decide what is (likely) true?
“Alright, if you reject evidence, how do you decide what is (likely) true?”
That’s easy. Determine the viewpoint of the people who are being paid (through grants, book sales, speaking fees, regular paychecks or whatever) to push the false narrative by corrupting the evidence and assume that the exact *opposite* of what they are saying is (likely) true.
Experts?.. Read their titles and you will know what way the expertise is going to break.. Its right in their names for Gods sake.. The Minister of Environment AND Climate Change.. I wonder what he is all about.. Oh my gosh, he is banning my car.. WTF, never saw that coming..
I’m sure he didn’t turn over a single rock to come to that conclusion.. Read his title.. Do you need a bigger font?.. A sustainably expert is a recycling whore $$$ A climate scientist plays video games all day to fund themselves.. What’s not to get?.. They mark their own papers..
Of all the occupations in the world, scientists are the most likely to actually believe what they think and the factual world around them must be wrong somehow. The NYT put out a video a few years ago about Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb and how Paul, despite his predictions had failed during the flowing decades, he to this day has convinced himself that in principle his science was sound. Kind of like the proverbial round peg in a square hole by a renowned scientist holding his believe that he was right for 5 decades.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8XOF3SOu8I&list=FLvxc96KYMjbMJmr74EeTE-A&index=11
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
“So how does one navigate the disparate claims and theories that zip around the internet? ”
A sense of smell helps. You know … catching a whiff of bullshit and recognizing it for what it is.
People underestimates the power of a functioning bullshit detector. Understanding people, patterns, history and odd behavior is often enough to trigger the BS alarm.
People telling you not to think for yourself or do your own research and just do as you’re told is a tactic that has been used at least since the middle ages by religious organizations, hippy era cults and modern day politicians and “experts”. It should be a big warning signal to a functional BS detector. Using fear, guilt, threats and shame to force compliance is another warning.
“A sense of smell helps. You know … catching a whiff of bullshit and recognizing it for what it is.”
Follow the money. Is the person trying to convince me of something that seems unlikely or improbable being paid to do so? If so, I ignore them.
There’s truth behind the saying that “science advances one funeral at a time”.
Generally people that claim the title of experts are, like most people, simply regurgitating received knowledge. They rarely have an original, nonconformist thought. At least not one they’d be willing to share and then risk being ostracized by the other conformists who dominate a field of study.
Once the “expert” is firmly entrenched in conformity, they simply cannot break free…even with overwhelming evidence contrary to conventional wisdom. The idea of being wrong for years or decades is too difficult for their ego to bear. It’s easier to go to the grave without ever admitting or considering an error in judgment. Explaining the first quote about science advancing one funeral at a time.
Very much back in the day, but I do recall this definition of an “expert” and – as I recall from a Nobel laureate:
Ex = former
Spert – a squirt under pressure.
I think the definition stands.
Actually it is easy to spot the imposters.
Those who claim to be expert are not.
Some who deny being expert actually are,but recognition of the expertise is only gained through working with them ..
We are awash in self proclaimed “Experts”,perhaps we should demand refunds of all who so claim and then fail…
The Tax Payers would hardly have a pension to pay..As most of our expert minions are very high priced failures.
Dread Covid Theatre is one of the worst examples in decades.
If our Public Health Officials are “Experts” they are either evil,because the knew what they were doing or incompetent because they did not.
And as Summer progresses we are being treated to Forest Fire Fighting as done by Government Experts…
Every Albertan knows that expertise..Slave Lake, Fort MacMurray…Next…
The casualty rate is going to increase,because these too are Government Certified Experts..
lm a septuagenarian high functioning autistic.
what a ride its been, but whew. lm at a point where the reflex ‘take a step back and analyze this thing’ has long been the norm. l have a knack for numbers, mebbe 20 ph #s any one time. 2 digit multiplication in my head using tricks.
l was hopeless ‘reading’ people, didnt know such a thing existed until l read a book ‘how to read a person like a book’ and then investigated subliminal manipulation esp advertising.
all the while leaning more on increased experience, additional formal training, proven techniques, a knack and willingness to devise unique situation problem solving.
then in 2007 fed up with inadequate pay and discrimination like you wuddent BELIEVE . . . . . l pulled that ace out of my sleeve and got a disability pension. my gf’s friends would demand to know where they could get some of that ass backwards syndrome (sounds like aspergers l can laugh now!!) and a pension.
anyway histrionics aside, real early l learned to assess evidence, seek conflict of interest in the woodwork, meticulous with the numbers, in a very successful way set aside bias and wish list and concentrate on what l *thought* would happen less readily what l wanted. overlap, all the better. if l’m expecting a crisis, its a heads up. lm batting over 800 with the accuracy of hunches.
good stuff and bad.
autism gave me a career to be proud of, a general def above average instinct and knack for electrical systems, down to board level if ya know the lingo. not a day’s formal training, except the digital hardware course l signed up and dropped out of at a community college where l was teaching desktop applications.
Interesting story.Good for you
Eric Weinstein PhD, physics ,has written scathingly how the era of peer Reviewed papers devastated scientific discovery during the last 40 years. His Pinned Tweet is a graph showing the growth of Peer Review.
Scientific journals have also become a large part of the censorship industrial complex. Julian Schwinger who won a Nobel in physics had 8 papers refused by the American Physical Review on cold fusion.
You might have thought they would have published at least one, because he was a giant in 20th century physics. There is no free inquiry, if ideas can’t be discussed.
Not Even Trying is s book with a similar theme. ” Experts” have taken s hit in recent years, and rightly so..
experts.
used to draw blood for pretty much anything.
and claim pathogens dont exist.
lobotomies.
short term environmentally induced DNA changes.
I think a big problem is all the mediocre brains occupying positions of influence in institutions that we rely on for expertise. Many of these people are cogs in the bureaucracy. They simply rely on direction that they get from higher ups. No original thinking,and little willingness to research potentially problematical issues. Much of what we experienced from health agencies during the Covid Pandemic came from just this type of bureaucratic follower.
Go along. Get along. Keep your head down. Don’t rock the boat. If you accidently actually do something, make sure it requires more headcount. Wash your coffee cup. Keep your job ’til retirement. Cash in.
That’s the job description of a bureaucrat, LindaL. Did I leave anything out?
l have found statistical probability singularly fascinating since the 1/2 course l took at Brock U 1983 or so on my way to a comp sci degree. the part about how it boils down to ‘96% accurate 19 times out of 20’ the irrefutable precision and trustworthiness applied to randomness and still it coughs up a very reliable result based on the power of numbers.
l have viewed things thru that test of accuracy ever since. like for instance, what are the odds of organizations and societies ‘going along to get along’ all winding up on the path to extinction because not one of the participants is popping their head up to see where theyre all headed.
deutchland 1930s early 40s.
etc.
p.s tq to LindaL for the compliment. all true. it really is very different perspective with autism.
officially a ‘disability’ but in reality, not so much so. the ‘disability’ exists solely in the overall societal response to the misfit. which fueled my decision to cease the struggle, ‘go along to get along’ and cash in a CPP disability pension.
it was funny, the final pages of the final chapter. l called the CPP folks mondy tuesday wednesday to provide some confirmation but cdnt get thru. so thursday l call just before lunch hour at the exact moment to get ‘caught’ on the phone by the boss who fired me on the spot.
so that nite l called up and pointed out that week and day l had done everything ordered and more and that he was on the phone 50 times a day. so the next day l get rehired.
getting a lift home after work with his wife driving and kid in the car l quipped how his dad fired me the day before. so she fired me.
fired from the same job 2 days in a row typical with autism.
cpl weeks later l got a direct deposit of some $15000 so then l called up the EX-boss 1 more time explained he’s still paying me out of his taxes but l dont gotta do the work anymore.
l was forever coming up with new ways doing stuff. l was on an electrical job Stoney Creek, they built a med lab right next to the city limits Hamilton. the problem was rebar. me the grunt had the task of boring holes in the concrete block to run the conduit. rebar made it a 2 hour task as opposed to 10 minutes.
so l pull out my stud finder mark the rebar and never a prob since.
curious l was, how this particular problem was allowed to exist until l came along, go along to get along that is.
the fact l recollect a lot of detail in my work and career history is also linked to the nature of autism.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” — Richard Feynman
roaddog, I have always found that the ability to read and understand what one is reading is very important to discerning the truth.
As a blacklisted scientist I could tell you a lot of things about experts. But you apparently already know them anyway.
In the climate science field, you can only be an “expert” if you subscribe to the party line on climate change. It’s handy that the party line keeps changing from situation to situation. This year’s heat and drought is equally valid as last year’s cold and wet, the actual cause and effect doesn’t matter, the articulation of a scary sounding paradigm is what matters.
In climate science, you can pretty much assume that any statement beginning with “in the future we can expect more and more” to be followed by a brief description of a weather event that happened a few times before, happened again yesterday, and may or may not happen again.
“In the climate science field, you can only be an “expert” if you subscribe to the party line on climate change.”
EXACTLY. Well said.
Liars, almost every one of them (especially the journal editors).
+++Fred
In the circles in which I move, NOBODY uses the term “expert” to describe someone with better than average familiarity with a field of endeavour, and to “self-describe” as an expert” would be a mortal faux pas.
The preferred, rather “dry” term RKI (Reasonably Knowledgeable Individual” is preferred at best,. Otherwise, general acknowledgement is given that “person X” really knows their 5h1t.
As the old joke goes:
“Expert”
Ex (X); an unknown quantity
“Spurt”; a drip under pressure.
The experts I need and respect tend to be able to build things or fix things. Experts at spouting BS are neither respected nor required.
Just the tip of the iceberg, here….and after wading through a lot of MSM articles about the ClimateGate scandal that *did not even mention* the blatant, shameless attacks on the scientific journals and the peer review process itself:
(from RealClearPolitics)
But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the “peer review” process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor”-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II’s knights. Michael Mann replies:
I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”
You can also see from these e-mails the scientists’ panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, “It’s one thing to lose Climate Research. We can’t afford to lose GRL.” Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.” That’s exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there.”
Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that “All of them know the sorts of things to say…without any prompting.”
So it’s no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN’s IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming.
This scandal goes beyond scientific journals and into other media used to promote the global warming dogma. For example, RealClimate.org has been billed as an objective website at which global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. But in the CRU e-mails, the global warming establishment boasts that RealClimate is in their pocket.
I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through…. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include.
[T]hink of RC as a resource that is at your disposal…. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t get to use the RC comments as a megaphone.
And anyone doubting that the mainstream media is in on it, too, should check out New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin’s toadying apologia for the CRU e-mails, masquerading as a news report.
The picture that emerges is simple. In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping “hockey stick,” every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as “unscientific” precisely because it threatens the established dogma.
For more than a decade, we’ve been told that there is a scientific “consensus” that humans are causing global warming, that “the debate is over” and all “legitimate” scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this “consensus” really means. What it means is: the fix is in.
This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It’s the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being “confused” by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.