Experts vs Amateurs

What is an expert and what is an amateur? Is the expert better than the amateur? Are experts credible? Who decides who is an expert? Can an amateur be reliable when opining on a topic?

In the midst of this COVID pandemic we have a limited number of experts and a massive number of amateurs. Should we trust the experts? One need look no farther that the London group and the University of Washington group. All predicted massive death counts, London in the millions, and here we sit with a count less than a flu outbreak and an economy in free fall. Yet the powers to be select their chosen experts and follow the "science"

However, science is a truly combative field. A group may present a result and a conclusion and no sooner do we get some other group refuting that with more data. Retractions run rampant in our professional literature and reproducible results are all too often far and few between. Thus, should we trust these experts without question?

Let us briefly examine some definitions.

What is an expert and what is an amateur? Generally, an expert is someone who is paid by a third party to perform certain actions, such as teaching, law, medicine, science, based upon their training and acceptance by the paying party. There are Expert Witnesses at trials, and the law is quite clear on who can be an expert. In the US system such experts are confronted by the opposing party and testify at trial and are cross examined. These Expert Witnesses can face a brutal examination of their training, bona fides, personal lives and whatever the other side may use to impeach their opinions. Academic experts on the otherhand follow a dramatically different path. They must comply with the then existing norms of their fields. New ideas in academia, especially ones contradicting existing norms may be an anathema. Thus, we often see in Academia a lemming effect of large groups espousing common ideas. Rarely do we see the outlier.

In contrast an amateur is one who may have been educated and even an accepted expert in another field who use their skills in a field in which they receive no third-party compensation. Amateurs are now belittled because the Academy does not engage them. However, one need look no further than Darwin and Einstein, both amateurs when the did their seminal work. Darwin was not an academic, his work was independent. Einstein in 1905 was a Patent Clerk. Look at Watson and Crick, one a post-doc and the other a doctoral student. Neither yet fully accepted in the clan. Thus, not all amateurs are alike, but they should be judged on their merits not on their paychecks.

Now experts may themselves be limited. The more "expert" a person is the more likely they are expert quite deeply in their own paradigms, to use the Khunian term. They have a world view and everything must true up with that world view.

In contrast the well-educated amateur may have a much broader view, and an expertise readily applied to many areas. Take a venture capitalist. They look at a broad base of new technologies. They invest their own money, the proverbial skin in the game if you will, and thus must perform due diligence on the proposed investment. Thus, the must know the market, the technology, the people and the psychology of the people, the financial models and the like. VCs must have a broad and ever-changing set of intellectual assets to deal with an ever-changing technology base. Thus, one may ask; would not a VC be more useful that an academic in looking at a dramatically new pandemic such as COVID?

Now there are critics such as the one who opined below[1]:

Which is why I find myself increasingly obsessed with the rise of the so-called “COVID influencer” or armchair epidemiologist. These men — and they are, largely, men — are legitimate experts in other fields. They are lawyers, former reporters and thriller writers, Silicon Valley technologists, newspaper columnists, economists and doctors who specialize in different parts of medicine. Their utter belief in their own cognitive abilities gives them the false sense that their speculation, and predictive powers, are more informed than the rest of ours.

Normally, the consequences vary from annoying to infuriating, especially if you are a woman with expertise being mansplained by someone who knows less than you do. But when such displays of massive overconfidence and wrongheadedness reach the highest echelons of government, it can be downright dangerous. These behavioral displays were famously described in a December 1999 paper titled “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” by two social psychologists at Cornell University, David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The effect they described was — and is — so pervasive that it’s now named after them: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Now what is this Dunning-Kruger Effect. According to Wikipedia, I chose this as the most available so bear with me, it is:

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence[2]

From their paper they note:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

It is worth parsing this a bit. First the Wiki definition is kind. It limits those to be critiqued. Whereas the psychologists view is panhuman. They state again:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains.

That is not limited to those of limited expertise in other domains but all people, except perhaps the so-called "experts". Thus, one could infer from this definition that say one trained in engineering and medicine should have no opinion of the law or finance unless they were trained. That begs another question; how far should they be trained? Do they need doctoral degrees, post-docs, faculty positions, Nobel Prizes. Perhaps these two experts themselves have fallen into the very trap they accuse the rest of humanity of?

In the above, it is clear that the first author presents their bona fides as one who first off has a problem with men. Then the author seems to indicate that since someone who is an expert in some other field cannot under any circumstances opine on epidemiology. After all the psychologists have spoken. They are Academic experts, whereas our VC as noted above is just rich as a result of their broad-based expertise. VCs often have great insight into the obvious whereas Academic Experts have knowledge of the arcane.

Wrongheadedness is an interesting turn of phrase.  I will not try to project the author's venom onto any specific person but it is clear that this pandemic is a complex and multifaceted stochastic process. Namely as I once said in the Preface of my first book, "The world is filled with uncertainty." and little did I knowhow true that would be. This pandemic is truly uncertain. It is uncertain to have it is transmitted. It most likely is complex. It is uncertain as to its pathology. It is uncertain as to its prevalence. No models seem to meet the ability to predict anything. The models lack socioeconomic, psychometric, and other factors which are dominant. Say we really do not know is fine, but people regrettably demand answers and unfortunately there are a wrath of Academics to opine with answers. Just having MIT or Harvard on your paycheck does not guarantee that your answer is true, and in fact you and not falling under the aforementioned condition, you are just wrong and have too much hubris as an expert.

Let us return to Kruger-Dunning. They stated:

Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Simply stated, if you permit me, it says: they don’t know it and they don't know they don't know it, whatever it is.

I would agree that such an effect may occur. On need just sit in any bar in the Bronx and one gets lots of these folks. I observed this in my youth. Go and listen to a cable news program, any new program in fact, and one has a massive amount of these people. But that is not how science is done. Science is done in a true combative mode of conjecture and fact, of one set of these battling another and the barrier between expert and amateur is truly non-existent. Einstein was not totally rejected in 1905 because he was a Patent Clerk. His papers were not stylistically overburdened as were so many German academics. They were brilliantly simple and clear.

Thus, is there are place for these amateurs? I would argue more today than ever before. The current pandemic is filled with unknowns. Let everyone have a swing at them. A credible amateur or even an expert should more than agree with that. Lawyers, doctors, VCs and yes engineers and physicians may have insight into the obvious that the academic expert is blind to. Denigrating experts in other fields is not only a rather hostile approach it is in my opinion a self-denigrating statement of one's personal inferiority.

We need all hands-on-deck if you will. Both amateurs and experts.

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[1] https://www.insidehook.com/article/news-opinion/david-dunning-armchair-epidemiologists-coronavirus

[2] Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.