Great, another excuse for the undereducated masses to weigh in on critical decisions in energy policy, monetary policy, and other areas where quantitative training should be very well required.<p>Don't trust experts? I'll take my chances. Know what's more blinding than knowledge? Having no idea what you're talking about! Like 96% of internet users, who think it's their god-given right to explain world events with their conspiracy-driven thinking, emotional ejections, and numbers off by one or more orders of magnitude.<p>Say what you will about my parents' generation; at least they knew not to form and promote opinions in fields they had no goddamn understanding of whatever. If you're in the top 1% of the population by intelligence, curiosity, and diligence (e.g. Richard Feynman) you will occasionally be able to scoop experts. Everyone else... should probably not be told at a young age that their opinions matter ex novo.
<i>Ravi Mehta is not vaguely surprised that most high-profile basketball "experts" screwed up their Final Four predictions. Overall, of 5.9 million brackets submitted to ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge by those following the games, only 192 had Butler meeting Virginia Commonwealth in Saturday's semi-finals.</i><p>This is like asking people to predict the result of a slightly skewed coin flip, without giving any odds, and afterwards proclaiming them wrong if the less likely side happened. In other words, this does not show that the predictions were "wrong" in any meaningful way.
It only makes sense to have experts on topics that are <i>clearly</i> objectively and experimentally verifiable. Otherwise there is no way to identify truth and we abuse statistics to go in circles - this would be okay except it has the consequences of tarnishing the view of all science as wishy washy in public opinion. Note that in time, topics can move to become objective subjects.<p>Experts have a tricky road. The advice a good one gives is nuanced and filled with caveats. But people don't like that. They want definites. So there are some "experts" who sound like experts and they are dangerous. Especially when it comes to anything which involves taking action based on prediction. An <i>expert's opinion</i> is unreliable for forecasting, especially when compared to crowds or novices, basic algorithms and animals with simpler brains - e.g. little or no better than random. Human biases are too hard to get over, not to mention information limits and complexity of the process generating the probable events impossible to get a head around.<p>---------<p>Here is what one expert, Richard Feynman, has to say on the matter.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPunpjeFaiQ" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPunpjeFaiQ</a>
my favorite:<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-radio-hosts/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/we-are-all-talk-ra...</a><p><i>".. a story about strawberry jam test .. Their scientific question was simple: Would random undergrads have the same preferences as the experts at the magazine? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?... "</i>