Unsubstantiated appeals to authority

Browsing through the opinion section of the BMJ, as I am apt to do, I found this letter from David Oliver. Essentially, the letter is telling people to stay in their lanes and leave the experting to the experts. We are suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect, you see, and we are eroding the trust people have in experts.

“Combating the Dunning-Kruger effect requires a willingness to reflect, to challenge oneself or be challenged, to get objective feedback, and to improve our knowledge or skill and learn from people with more expertise. But I guess that, psychologically, that feels like a less safe space”

David Oliver, self-proclaimed expert in psychology explaining how to combat the Dunning-Kruger effect to us laymen

Needless to say, I find his argument quite bland. He does not bring forward data or even examples to show this is a widespread phenomenon among the skeptics, nor does he put any effort into disproving any widely cited claims that we are making. Rather, he sticks to generalities and an unsubstantiated appeal to authority.

The authority — experts — is not directly named. Does he mean virologists? He cannot mean that because to tell people to trust all virologists, he would have to be a virologist. After all, if he is not a virologist, how can he know enough about virology to know that the experts are correct? Wouldn’t his limited knowledge of the subject imply that he is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Ah.

He must mean the specialists in geriatrics and general internal medicine, which is his field. Because it’s the only field we can be sure he knows enough about to speak on the issue. Right? Or can we give him the benefit of the doubt and say that after two and a half years of the pandemic being front of mind for most people that, maybe, he learned a thing or two?

I used to know a physicist that freely admitted he wasn’t an expert outside of his field. “Sometimes,” he once said, “we have to delegate our decision making to experts because there is simply not enough time in the day to learn about every new subject that interests us”. Quite true. Sometimes. But for the important decisions, we should take the time to learn about new subjects that interest — and impact — us.

Frankly, for most of us, two and a half years of deep research is worth more than that single lecture or at best single course that David took decades ago on coronaviruses, which likely had little to do with SARS-type viruses. That doesn’t make us “experts” on the subject — far from it, but we bring something else to the table. Many of the people that David is criticizing have backgrounds in fields far more relevant to the subject at hand because we are looking at the hard data, not the nuances of genome translation. Data is our field and David could learn a lot from the people with more expertise in it than him.

Part of the problem with people like David is they may have received the same speech I did from my physicist friend at some point in their lives, but the “sometimes” must have been dropped from the start of it. The sometimes is the most important part because it ensures that we are not prescriptive in our thinking. Not everything can be left to those that “know everything already” or we would come up with little in the way of new discoveries. The old, and perhaps worn out, example of blind trust in authority is the story of Galileo who had the audacity to believe that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

“Ah”, David might say, “but he was an expert!”

That would be wrong, of course — those who dared to look up the sky were intruding on a field monopolized by the Catholic Church. The heavens were their expertise. They might have even used a similar argument to David to disprove Galileo’s observations:

“However, some of the most confident debaters are often way outside the mainstream of expertise in the field they’re commenting on or seeking to influence, even if they’re scientifically literate and skilled in analysing (and sometimes very selectively presenting) data to bolster particular lines of argument”

David Oliver argues against the skeptics by quoting the Catholic Church circa 1633

I am not singling out religious institutions; science has been equally (or more) dismissive to new ideas.

Many of you will be familiar with Ignaz Semmelweis’ contribution to medicine, though he is not a household name. He proposed the insane idea that doctors should wash their hands between patients. The proposal was not just initially dismissed but punished and ridiculed. Eventually, this lead to him suffering a mental breakdown and being committed to (and soon after dying in) a mental asylum by his expert colleagues, who, like David, knew better.

"Mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished".

Timothy Leary on the “Semmelweis reflex”

In fact, the story of Ignaz Semmelweis is far from unique in science. Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory of continental drift, is another (though far from the only other) example. Since he was an outsider to the field of geology, the ample evidence he presented was ignored until long after his death. Not an expert, you see. Scientists these days are, of course, able to measure continental drift directly using GPS satellites. Still, David is right, Wegener should have stayed in his lane and listened to the geologists. How silly of him.