The Curse of the Experts

As a general rule I trust experts. I would much rather have a brain surgeon working on my skull than a plumber or even a General Practitioner MD. I would also rather have a plumber working on my faucet than a brain surgeon.

But there are some things beyond the capabilities of even the most learned experts. A brain surgeon will quickly admit that there are diseases or injuries that are beyond his abilities to fix, or in many cases to even understand. There are simply many things in life that are as yet beyond human understanding and thus the search for knowledge continues. Everyone accepts this and everyone knows that the more complex the field of endeavour the less likely the experts are to "have the answer."

Often times experts opinions and pronouncements are given too much credence by the general public because well, "they're the experts". Even though the experts opinion may be based on hubris, arrogance, ideology or a host of other human characteristics having nothing to do with the opinion they pronounce from on high.

Sometimes experts are not really experts at all or at the very most they are accorded the mantle of expert due to their stature in society. Al Gore is such an expert, people give him credit for being an expert on global warming simply because he is public figure, a politician who has been heavily involved with environmental issues for decades, so in a sense he is an expert. But his expertise is driven not by facts and evidence but rather by ideology. A perfect example of this, as if we needed more, came to light recently.

"It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol," Reuters reported Gore saying during a green energy summit in Athens. "First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small."

This is a very true statement by the former Vice President, but as we all know it is not what he was saying in his other profession as a politician :

"I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress -- at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it," Gore said during a Dec. 1, 1998, speech to a Farm Journal conference. "The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be."

And Mr Gore admits his motivation in the past:

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

As the author of this article points out:

To gain votes, Gore pushed an idea that was widely thought to be environmentally beneficial, but which skeptics claimed was actually the opposite....

So here we have a non-expert who is accorded the title of expert pushing a destructive idea upon society for self serving purposes and yet he is still treated not only as an expert but somehow as deserving of respect. This despite the ever growing awareness that ethanol as well as other bio-fuels could be one of the most egregious policy decisions of the twentieth century for a host of reasons.

We'll get back to the global warming/climate change experts in a bit but let's look at another complicated field for a bit-economics. I am sure that many lay people look at economics the same way they look at math. If you plug in the numbers and you do the calculations correctly, you will end up with correct answer. Actually nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is "the economy" is about literally billions of individuals making countless transactions based upon an infinite number of motivations. All of which is far beyond the calculating powers of the most sophisticated computers less alone the brains of the most distinguished experts in the field of economics. If this were not true we would not have had the financial meltdown which led to what is being referred to by those same experts a the "great recession."

Even though many of the "experts" were aware of the dangers based upon the principles of economic understanding at their disposal, they not only could not stop it, in many cases they accelerated and deepened the "crisis" through their actions or inaction's, why? Because they were motivated in some cases by hubris, arrogance or ideology.

 Just as Al Gore promoted ethanol due to his limited understanding of the consequences combined with his ideological bent and his self-serving needs, so too did people like Ben Bernake, Hank Paulson, Allan Greenspan, Barny Frank and a host of characters in both the public and private sector make "expert" decisions which not only contributed to, but deepened the crisis. This is how we got TARP which was sold as a way to buy up  bad mortgages and stem the housing crisis, thus the name Toxic Asset Relief Program, but was instead used as a device to infuse liquidity into the financial system to promote lending and ultimately as a slush fund for the wizards of political finance. How is all that going two years later?

Not only did the experts sell a plan to our elected officials that they did not implement in the manner for which they sold it, they printed literally trillions of dollars in order to spur the economy deepening an already out of control debt problem. Now that all this tinkering with "the economy" has failed to spur the  economy what is their new plan....print more money and create more debt. For what purpose? To spur the economy.

So now how do these same experts see all this tinkering with the economy playing out?

The Federal Reserve lowered its economic forecast as it moved to provide a controversial stimulus early this month and predicted unemployment could be higher than normal even when the economy is at full throttle again.

Just as our expert politicians  brought us their stimulus which was supposed to keep unemployment below eight percent, the Federal Reserve is left with asserting that in their expert opinion, things would have been worse had they not done what they had done. Really.

That is the wonderful thing about being an expert on a subject which is beyond human control, you are never really wrong, you just claim success for whatever occurs and move on. Which brings us back to the global warming/climate change experts.

Study could mean greater anticipated global warming

Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect. The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models predict that global mean cloud cover will increase in a warmer climate and the increased reflection of solar radiation will limit the predicted global warming. Other models predict reduced cloudiness and magnified warming.

Remember my description of the economy above? ...literally billions of individuals making countless transactions based upon an infinite number of motivations. All of which is far beyond the calculating powers of the most sophisticated computers less alone the brains of the most distinguished experts in the field . Even more so for the study of the climate. The climate is the result of billions of natural occurrences interacting with each other over varying time frames causing an infinite number of outcomes, All of which is far beyond the calculating powers of the most sophisticated computers less alone the brains of the most distinguished experts in the field . Or as the lead author of this study points out on just this one very important aspect of the climate system:

"All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate. It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."

It has always been widely known that the key to the entire global warming debate centered around clouds yet for years the experts have asserted that they know what is going to happen a century from now when they know there are "serious deficiencies" about  the component which  is the "most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."  As Anthony Watts so aptly put it  "Old climate models do a bad job with clouds, so a new model says 'warming must be worse' "
 
In all three of the examples above, experts or presumed to be experts made assertions which greatly influenced far reaching policies. Policies that greatly affect virtually everyone in the world and in fact generations of peoples.   All three cases rely on highly questionable foundations and in fact common sense argues against all three :
 
You do not burn food for fuel in a world whose population is growing and which a large portion is malnourished.
 
You do not fight a debt crisis in an economy  riddled with debt by creating more debt.
 
You do not make statements of fact based on models that are provably wrong, 
 
 And most important of all you do not presume to know the unknowable or to control the uncontrollable.

But these examples are just the tip of the iceberg.  Throughout society and all across the globe experts are relying upon false premises to enact policies which are obviously unsustainable. False assumptions leading to incorrect conclusion which lack common sense, relying on a masturbation of the intellect that only the self-obsessed can fathom but the conclusion of which defy reality.

So how have we reached the point where the people we need to be able to trust have become the most untrustworthy of all? Hubris, arrogance and ideology. These traits are not corrected through an education of the mind, indeed an over reliance upon the intellect has led to this, no the education that is needed is an education of the spirit. Humility, just a touch of humility would have saved the world from the curse of the experts we are now being inflicted with.

I fear that the world is about to be humbled for the sins of the arrogant who presume to know the yet unknowable and to control that which is uncontrollable. Thus it has been in the past and so it shall be again.