We often treat anything printed in an authoritative journal or asserted by an expert to be informative. Although authorities and experts do tend to be far better informed about their subjects than the average person, we still cannot assume that whatever they say is informative or even true . All you have to do to learn why we have no justification is to read what authoritative foreign journals and experts have to say about your own country. The influential journal Le monde diplomatique once published an article whose author claimed that Canada had no constitution, but rather “a collection of texts with the force of a constitution”, and that these onstitutional texts could not be challenged in lower courts . Well, the latest of this collection of texts explicitly defines it as the national constitution, and it explicitly gives all courts the power to review all matters of law, which of course includes the constitution.
Our lives are rife today with experts and expert opinions. The news media are constantly presenting experts and their opinions about every topic under the sun, the implication being that an expert=s opinion is more informative than the opinion of someone who is not an expert..
For an assertion to be informative to us, though, we have to have some idea of the likelihood that it’s true. If the expert is an expert on gardening or cooking, verifying the accuracy of what he or she says is fairly easy. If, however, the expert is an expert on politics or medicine or some other field which requires special or complicated knowledge which you do not have, you may well have no way of verifying his or her opinion. A few years ago we saw experts queuing up to predict that the stock market would rise, if not forever, at least for a long, long time to come. Certainly these experts made arguments for their positions, but usually they were adducing as evidence for their opinion facts which the ordinary person could not verify.
Another problem about expert forecasts is that the experts are rarely experts in forecasting. J. Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green have observed that the scientific forecasts we are often encouraged to believe in are too often forecasts by scientists rather than forecasts arrived at scientifically.
Another problem is that experts are not impersonal compendia of information but human beings who advocate certain disputed positions in their field. They are advocates for ideas which other experts in their fields dispute. The Western intellectual tradition is to have as many people as possible arguing about ideas. Many of these ideas have the same quality that ideas about what was going to happen on January 1, 2000 had – they are founded on data which are not fully understood.
We can hardly expect experts to be perfect. If we cannot expect them to be perfect, then we have to assess the soundness of their opinions. If we are unable to assess the soundness of their opinions, then their opinions are not informative to us. They may well be valid, but if we cannot verify that they are valid then they are not informative. At the same time as all those experts were predicting that the stock market would rise forever, some experts were predicting that the bubble was going to burst. Those experts were right, but most of us had no way of verifying that they were. Therefore, even though they were right, they were not providing us with information.
First article in the uninformation series
Next: Information is not identical with experience
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