Identifying the Experts
I have certain credentials concerning the study and practice of law. But you should not pay attention to me if I speak on intellectual property law because that was never my field of expertise. If you want to know about IP law, you should seek the words and counsel of lawyers who have studied and practiced in that area. There are countless other areas of law that despite my being a lawyer I know almost nothing about. Similarly, on the topic of infectious diseases, we should not deem statements from medical doctors who are not infectious disease experts as equivalent to those from medical doctors who spend their time studying the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of infectious diseases.
Experts can be wrong — in fact, they often are, simply because of human fallibility, incomplete information, and other non-nefarious reasons. And when they are wrong, as usually discovered from their own study and the work of their peers, they change their positions if they are intellectually honest. But an appeal to the authority of a credential — in law, medicine, engineering, or whatever — without regard to differences in fields of study and practice within those broad topics is not adequate proof that the actual experts are wrong.
We have all faced having someone speak on a topic about which we know a lot and they know almost nothing, but they talk as if they are an expert. We recognize their foolishness. Our problem is when the subject is one in which we know almost nothing. It is a hard thing to overcome our predispositions to believe the person who says what we want to hear and to disbelieve the person who says what we don’t want to hear. We must learn to identify the true experts. They are usually the ones who have spent years studying the matter and continue to study it, ask more questions than they answer, seek out those smarter than them, contribute in the field, teach others, and admit these things: they have been wrong before, some information is unknown or unknowable, and others are the experts in other fields.
