I’m a molecular biologist (bioinformatics & biostats). I have a front-row seat to all kinds of statistical fallacies and misinterpretations of data every day. I can’t speak about economics, but certainly biomedical science has been guilty of misinterpreting data and overstating its certainty about research findings. It’s surely even worse on the corporate pharma side because of the incentive structure there.

But still, “people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers…with a better track record than these policymaking goons.” Really? I only know about medicine, but I daresay doctors and medical researchers have made SOME actual progress in the last 80 years. I observe that people may often criticize medical advice in regards to relatively inconsequential issues like diet, but if they have cancer or a heart attack, they’ll head straight to the hospital.

You admit the “IYI typically get the first-order logic right”, but don’t understand the full system under study (biology, economics, whatever) in its full complexity. Well…duh. Any honest academic would admit that. And yet, isn’t partial understanding *on average* better than throwing your hands up and asking your grandmother?

I agree that it’s embarassing and bad when researchers make one policy prescription and later have to reverse themselves: fat vs sugar, for instance. There are two answers to this: one is that researchers should emphasize the caveats and uncertainty more than they do. But also, the fact that science reverses itself occasionally means it’s *working*. At least our theories are usually falsifiable. The whole idea of science is that we gradually reduce our ignorance over time — which implies that we must have a great deal of ignorance to start with.

We cannot make decisions as individuals or as a society without models of how things work. Surely flawed but fundamentally data-driven models are better than no models (or the “Grandma” model)? Is your problem with overly confident experts who turn out wrong, or with the idea of expertise itself?