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FreWron 10-08-117 |
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Wrong How
Experts* Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them David
H. Freedman New
York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010, 295 pp. ISBN
978-0-316-02378-8 |
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Freedman is a science and business journalist and
the author of A Perfect Mess and
other books. After building a pretty
strong case that we can’t trust the experts (scientists, finance wizards,
doctors, celebrity CEO’s, high profile consultants and others), he struggles
to help us know when to doubt and when to trust. The notes may sound like exaggeration, but
his research supports much of what he says (if you can believe a researcher. He addresses the believability of his book
in an appendix. dlm) Introduction The bulk of the book consists of examples of
expertise gone wrong in medicine, science, finance, child rearing,
government, sports, and entertainment, and how and why it happens. “The fact is, expert wisdom usually turns
out to be at best highly contested and ephemeral, and at worst flat-out
wrong.” (7) “Perhaps a reasonable
model for expert advice is … ‘punctuated wrongness’—that is, experts usually
mislead us, but every once in a while they come up with truly helpful
advice.” (10) 1. Some Expert Observations “But underlying these often authoritative- and
confident-seeming conclusions is a rat’s nest of confusion and misdirection
largely stemming from one big question: what do you measure? (21) “On what do Dr. Phil and Oprah base their widely
heeded advice about the way we should lead our lives, other than on experience,
intuition, and common sense?” “When
medical researchers and other scientists lack data, they’re generally out of
business. Other sorts of experts are
free to—or in some cases are simply forced to—forge bravely forward, shooting
from the hip.” (28) Some traps for experts: bias, corruption,
irrational thinking, pandering to the audience, ineptitude, lack of
oversight, and automaticity. These include doctors ordering unnecessary tests,
sometimes from labs in which they are investors. Many informal experts advance exotic,
logic-defying, hard-evidence-free ideas, especially in finance. Diet gimmicks are mostly proven through the
experience of millions not to work. We
seem to have an insatiable appetite for gimmicks that claim to make it easy
to lose weight. In spite of thousands
of tests, most performance-enhancing drugs go undetected. Law enforcement took 463 children from a
cult in Texas on the basis that 9% of the children had experienced a bone
fracture. Pediatrician estimates of
population-wide bone fractures among all children run up to 50%. “The simple fact is that most informal experts
can spew out conclusions without much fear of being intercepted by wiser or
more careful parties. Who’s filtering
the recommendations of investment gurus? … Who’s going to poke your car
mechanic on the shoulder and tell him that he’s replacing a perfectly good
fuel injector? …in the short run, most informal experts can get away with
quite a bit, and do all the time.” (34)
2. The Trouble with Scientists, Part 1. “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be
called research, would it?” (37, quoting Einstein) “…Researchers routinely rely on flawed evidence
in coming to their conclusions and in working to convince us that those
conclusions are right. To put it
another way, scientists are often deceptively sloppy in making and analyzing
measurements.” (39) Some ways they go wrong: measuring what doesn’t
matter, mismeasuring, tossing out inconvenient
data, moving the goalposts, being confounded, juggling the numbers, getting
paid to get it wrong. [These sound
quite serious and I’m sure you instinctively doubt the above, but just to be
fair, read his examples. dlm] In some fields scientists almost always end up
looking under the streetlight (named after the joke of looking where the
light is brighter instead of where you think you lost your keys). This means indirect measurements, measuring
something you can measure as an indicator of what you really want to
know. Such surrogate measurements
often tend to lead researchers awry.
Sometimes they can get really creative, especially in studying human
behavior. In medicine, studying groups that do not
represent the population or projecting results from animals to humans often
leads experts to make enthusiastic pronouncements that don’t work out. Even in the best of studies of human populations
there are so many interconnected variables in people’s lives that it is
difficult to determine that one factor is the main cause of some behavior,
condition or achievement. Multiple
studies with conflicting results raise many questions about cause and
effect. “It isn’t just fancy analytical footwork that
distorts study conclusions—sometimes it’s more like slipping on a banana
peel.” (64) “But there’s just no getting around it:
statistically speaking, being on the payroll of a company cranks up the risk
of gamed study results.” “And the
problem may be worse than it looks, because companies often disguise that
they are behind certain findings by paying university researchers to put
their names on studies actually conducted and written up by the companies
themselves—so-called ghost authorship.” (65) 3. The Certainty Principle There are reasons why we are often very much
attracted to an answer that is wrong.
For example, we like and
tend to seek out medical advice that is definite. It simplifies our options and
thinking. However, medical advice very
often should be qualified. Often expert advice that sounds nearly epiphanic when you hear it may fall apart on close
inspection. So the management guru
confidently says to set aside an hour a day to return phone calls, which
sounds great until you realize you have no control over when other people are
available to talk on the phone! Advice sounds appealing when it seems simple and
clear-cut, confident, universal, upbeat, actionable, palatable, when it make
dramatic claims and is accompanied by a compelling story, when it is
supported by numbers, and when it promises to prevent something that has
already happened (shutting the barn door after the horse is out). We look for the twelve steps, the seven habits,
or the one-step recipe. We like a
clear right answer from someone full of confidence. If it’s one-size-fits-all, we don’t have to
evaluate all the options. We prefer
advice that is positive. If it’s
negative we may simply refuse to believe it (like the link between smoking
and lung cancer). If it tells us
clearly what to do in a simple formula, we like it (You can make friends by
simply smiling and listening.). If it
fits in with our current biases and prejudices and validates what we already
believe, we like it. “We happen to be complex creatures living in a
complex world, so why would we expect answers to any interesting questions to be simple? … And that gives us a
clue to recognizing advice that’s likely to be right or at least on the right
track: it will be complex, it will come with many qualifications, and it will
be highly dependent on conditions.” (81) 4. The Idiocy of Crowds We expect groups to be better than individuals
but the author says no. “Just one
problem: the general effectiveness of groups, teamwork, collaboration, and
consensus is largely a myth. Crowds, far from being reliably wise, turn out
to be at least as good at discouraging and suppressing the production and
dissemination of excellent work as highlighting it, and tend to bring some of
the worst work to the top. Not only do
group effects usually fail to protect us from flawed expertise but they
introduce entirely new kinds of defects above and beyond what experts inflict
on us. Crowds aren’t the solution to
bad expert advice; they’re a big part of the problem.” (89) Efficiency is impaired: the larger the group, the
less gets done. The most effective
groups are extremely small, like three people. Groups are frequently dominated by people
who are belligerent, persuasive, persistent, manipulative, or forceful,
swaying even those with doubts, because most of us don’t want to be the lone
holdout. Once a majority opinion is
formed, people are reluctant to argue against it because cooperation and
agreement seem so important. “There’s
a tendency for people in the field to believe in things if they’ve been told
this is how it is, and they’ll see it that way even if the reality is
different.” (97, quoting Christopher Gillberg, a
child psychiatrist [an expert. dlm] “Groups amplify bias, squash minority points of
view, and can even overcome the correct point of view when it’s the majority
view…. In most situations, truth doesn’t
win out in groups.” (98, quoting Robert MacCoun, a
decision-making researcher [expert]). “The long U.S. housing bubble that burst toward
the end of 2007, nearly wrecking the world’s economies and leading to the
worst recession since the 1930s, is a striking example of how expert
communities can nurture and maintain utterly wrong and even near-delusional
thinking.” (98) “Group successes, according to research, tend to
depend on certain conditions: that a group is highly diverse, for example,
and that there is little or no interaction between its members on the subject
at hand.” (101) 5. The Trouble with Scientists, Part 2 “Reality is that which, when you stop believing
in it, doesn’t go away.” (104, Philip k. Dick) “Researchers need to publish impressive findings
to keep their careers alive, and some seem unable to come up with those
findings via honest work.” (108) “It may seem strange to say it, but experts are
rarely interested in getting at the truth, whatever it may be. What they want to do is prove that certain
things are true. Which things? Well, whatever they happen to believe is
true, for whatever reasons, or whatever will benefit their careers or status
or funding the most.” (113) “Francis Bacon noted in the late sixteenth
century that preconceived ideas shape observation, causing people, for
example, to take special notice of phenomena and measurements that confirm a
belief while ignoring those that contradict it.” (114) Why do some scientists manage to get it right so
often? Some people end up with
interesting, positive, and right results because they somehow manage to adopt
the right biases, to correctly intuit which interesting, groundbreaking ideas
are likely to hold up. (115) 6. Experts and Organizations There are counterproductive sides to the faddish
nature of management advice, including the retraining, meetings, paperwork,
supervision and consultant meddling to get each new program up and
running. “These ideas make big claims
that push entrepreneurs to swing for the fences. But it leads to cutting corners on all the
other things you have to do to build a company that’s going to be successful
in the long run. The short-term payoff
that can accrue from following this advice can blind a company to the fact
that eventually it will be punished for it.” (134, quoting Eric Goldman,
director of Santa Clara University’s High Tech Law Institute) There is one strategy for winning big: take big
risks. Unfortunately this is the same
strategy for losing big. (143) “Even if you identify the right companies and
study them closely, you can’t figure out how to be like them. It’s not like billiards….” (145) 7. Experts and the Media People typically absorb expert wisdom via the
mass media. “The media don’t, by and
large, exist solely to tell us what’s right and true; they exist to get us to
read about, watch, and listen to them, and that often means selecting and
presenting expert findings in a way that is entertaining, provocative, useful
sounding, and otherwise satisfyingly resonant.” (150) The media doesn’t do a good job of
filtering out the bogus. Journalism is likely to “amplify the likely
wrongness of a finding by exaggerating its significance; ignoring the
qualifications, limits, and uncertainties…, and cheerleading for significant
lifestyle changes based on it without further investigation or any real
perspective.” (155-56) “But more often
the media simply draw the most resonant, provocative, and colorful—and
therefore most likely to be wrong—findings from a pool of journal-published
research that already has a high wrongness rate.” (158) “But, more important, the media consistently fail
to highlight how untrustworthy studies turn out to be in general.” (161) 8. The Internet and the Technology of Expertise Many current popular books are telling us this:
“Thanks to the Internet, anyone can in theory get precisely the expert advice
they want and need, and anyone can in theory be the expert who provides
it.” “The fact is, most of what Google
returns in such a search is likely to be irrelevant
or wrong.” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt
has said that the Internet is in danger of becoming a cesspool of false and
misleading information because anyone can post anything they want online
without any review. Good advice tends
to be swamped by a much larger array of useless, misleading, subpar
stuff. (171) “Having to sit through contradictory and often
inappropriate online medical advice has become a sort of public health
problem in its own right.” (173) Those
who are more informed and better educated can better sort through the
information while everyone else drowns in second-rate information. (175)
9. Eleven Simple Never-Fail Rules for Not Being Misled By Experts The title of this chapter should put you on your
guard. This is the type of advice
everyone falls for. There are no such
rules. It’s not that easy. First tip: Be wary with regard to any
expert pronouncement. (215) It isn’t that you shouldn’t do what the
experts say, but be wary of giant, sweeping decisions without listening to
experts at all. It is generally good
to follow consensus expert advice that seems well supported, is not terribly
burdensome to implement, and appears to have little downside, such as “Don’t
text while driving.” Be extra wary of expert advice if it is
You might want to ignore expert advice that is
mildly resonant (appeals to our common sense, makes life easier, or promises
to solve a pressing problem), is provocative (turns conventional wisdom
upside down), gets a lot of positive attention (perhaps has been skillfully
spun), is quickly embraced by other experts (who succumb to the bandwagon),
appears in a prestigious journal (no guarantee), or is backed by an expert
with big credentials. Characteristics of more trustworthy advice:
·
“It’s heavy on qualifying
statements.” Those who describe the
limits and weak points of the research are thereby furnishing evidence for
credibility. ·
“It’s candid about refutational evidence.”
It is open about other studies that give contrary evidence. ·
“It provides some context
for the research.” It provides the
background. ·
“It provides perspective.” It helps us understand what the information
means and doesn’t mean, its limitations and relevance. ·
“It includes candid, blunt
comments.” It expresses the expert’s
own doubts and skepticism. (220-228) |
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recommendations are welcome.