I included this in the Links Dump portion of the week-in-review, but I did want to comment a bit more on this episode of Josh Barro’s new podcast:
I generally agree with the thrust of the discussion, and like Barro’s formulation that experts can tell you what’s likely to happen if you implement a particular policy, but that the choice of what policy to implement is separate from expertise. That implementation decision draws on values and priorities and other elements that aren’t really the domain of subject-matter experts. And I agree that a lot of our current crisis of faith in institutional expertise comes from people blurring that distinction in various ways.
There was a bit at the end where they turned to a slightly different question of experts expanding their remit, namely the question of people who are subject-matter experts in one domain trying to speak authoritatively on matters outside the fields in which they’re acknowledged experts. Tom Nichols pushes back on this a little, arguing that there’s nothing wrong with people offering opinions on subjects outside their domain of expertise, but then that’s really just another distinction that’s getting blurred to the overall detriment of institutional and expert prestige. I basically agree with his position, but also think this is an area where a lot of public intellectuals need to be clearer about the difference between the two. And media organizations should be better about including those caveats, rather than stripping them out because qualified statements are boring.
I ended up a little bit fixated on this question, though, because commenting on fields where I lack the formal qualifications to claim Authority statue is a big part of what I do. The most obvious example is the new book I’m relentlessly flogging here, where I write about a wide range of topics that I’m nowhere near expert status on. There’s a review coming where the author correctly calls out a number of smallish factual errors in my presentation of some bits of history from a particular era, and I’m sure there are other mistakes. (The review also compliments the book for getting other things right, so it’s positive on net…) I am not a historian of any of the time periods or cultures I discuss in the book, just a guy trying his best to make sense of a huge mass of other people’s scholarly work, and there will inevitably be places where I get it a little wrong (or arguably wrong, in places where genuine experts disagree), or where the larger purpose of the book demands I simplify complex issues a little more than experts might like.
But this crops up in less formal work, too. I achieved a bit of notoriety some time back for writing a piece about under-inflated footballs for The Conversation. This got me sporadic emails from aggrieved Patriots fans for years, but has also led to other requests from major media organizations to talk about football— most recently looking at a video clip for an ESPN story about Trent Williams. I’ve also done enough talking-head segments for various tv shows to have an IMDB entry, very few of which involve me talking about anything directly related to the research I did to earn my Ph.D..
Now, to some degree, this can be written off as typical physicist behavior— wading into other fields and claiming to have made paradigm-shifting discoveries is a well-known occupational hazard. But I think there’s also a kind of proximity to actual expertise, here— most of what I get asked to comment on is stuff that’s within the general sphere of competence of anybody who can teach introductory college physics. Yeah, I’m not really an expert on the physics of football— for that, you want Tim Gay— but I’m good enough for the really basic questions I tend to get asked. It’s like the slightly tortured Cast Away example that Nichols makes in the podcast— the absolute worst dentist in the United States is still worlds better than hitting yourself in the face with an ice skate.
There is arguably a bit of a problem with the tendency to conflate disparate areas of scientific expertise in particular, which I think we’re more prone to than other areas. I remember talking with a colleague in physics who was a couple years behind me at Williams, and after getting his Ph.D. spent a year or two on Capitol Hill through one of the fellowship programs run by professional societies. He talked about being asked to give an expert opinion on some issue way outside of physics— stem cells, maybe— and saying “Whoa, I’m a physicist, not a biomedical researcher [or whatever].” They replied “No, you’re the Science Guy, and this is Science. You figure it out.” I suspect they provide for a bit more granularity of domains when it comes to domestic politics…
But that kind of comes around to the other story I always think of when this issue comes up, when an editor asked me to write a piece on something at the edge of my actual knowledge area. I said something like “I don’t know; there are other people who know this area better, maybe you should ask one of them.” She replied with something along the lines of “Yes, they probably know the field better, but I know you will get us a piece that’s written at the right level, and on deadline. I can’t be sure any of them will do that.”
That’s a comment I come back to a lot when I get asked to weigh in on weird things that are outside my formal areas of expertise. And I think there’s probably a sense in which this kind of thing counts as a kind of ancillary expertise. Producing clean copy on deadline is a skill, and talking reasonably cogently on camera is a skill. Just being willing to do those things when asked is a kind of a skill (he types, making a mental note to answer a neglected email from a tv booker). Sometimes when choosing an expert, you may need to give precedence to those areas of “expertise” over narrow subject-matter expertise. It’s that question of priorities and values that Barro raised, again.
Coming at this from the position of the maybe-expert, I think the trick is finding the right balance between willingness and availability on the one hand, and actual knowledge on the other. It’s not hard to come up with prominent examples of people from a physical-science background who feel a little too free to jump in front of a camera weigh in on anything and everything that relates to science, and end up saying stupid things as a result. They provide a useful cautionary reference— I do make an effort to avoid Being That Guy. How well I’m succeeding is a question for someone else to answer…
That’s a little self-indulgent, I realize, so here’s a pretty picture from a recent ski outing to make up for it:
And here are some buttons:
If you just want to yell at me, the comments will be open.