The limitation of experts
2013-11-01
Whenever we spend too much time looking for an expert. When we have an
expectation that someone out there knows the subject so deeply that they will
be able to advise us to make the right decision. When this happens, we are in
danger of making a poor decision.
The number of experts in the world has increased in proportion with our
ability to communicate easily. Some 'experts' even offer courses on how to be
experts. Others put themselves out as guides to the world of experts, the meta
experts who help you navigate the experts. All in all we are awash with
experts on any topic we can imagine.
Perhaps the growth of experts is in line with the amount of information
available to us. The world appears more complex with data on just about every
topic imaginable starting at wikipedia and spreading through portals, blogs,
Linkedin and Twitter. Decisions appear a lot harder with so many choices. It
is natural to want to find guides to help us navigate.
Unfortunately the expert guides do not have a good track record of getting
their decisions right. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock
interviewed 284 experts who are paid for offering advice about political and
economic trends. He gathered more than 80,000 predictions over 20 years. The
outcome was that these paid experts performed worse when compared to assigning
equal probabilities to each of their predictions. This very serious study on
the success of experts in politics and economics confirms the numerous
instances where monkeys throwing darts beat professional money managers (see
Forbes
and
Toronto's Globe and
Mail
for two
examples).
Listening to an expert who has spent time studying a particular area is
useful. Making a decision based on the decision they would make is not. At the
end of the day we are left with ourselves and our decisions. The experts
provide context, we have to live with our own decisions.
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