I often complain about “rule by experts” — the idea that some saintly genius can figure out the best path, and the rest of us should follow it. <\/p>\n
It’s a deadly idea. Nobody is that smart or that saintly. Somehow or other, the ignorant masses, making their own decisions based on faulty logic and bad data, tend to collectively muddle their way through things better than the experts can ever predict or determine. This gets into the mysterious wisdom of crowds.<\/a> <\/p>\n But there are times for experts. Like when you’re having a pandemic. But you can’t rely on only one kind of expert.<\/i> <\/p>\n I’m reminded of the dispute between dermatologists and regular doctors over sun exposure. Dermatologists want us to stay out of the sun and wear sunscreen all the time, while regular doctors say Vitamin D deficiency is a far more serious problem than skin cancer. <\/p>\n IOW, just as the man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, every expert has his own set of biases as well. The infectious disease people aren’t going to look at the problem from the perspective of the economists, or the police, or the civil libertarians, or …. <\/p>\n Lockdowns may have made sense from the perspective of an infectious disease expert, but other experts knew they were going to cause other problems. One simple example is the increase in alcohol-related deaths.<\/a> Although there were a lot of other casualties of the lockdowns. <\/p>\n I hope we’ve learned this lesson and never again let one set of experts make the decisions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often complain about “rule by experts” — the idea that some saintly genius can figure out the best path, and the rest of us should follow it. It’s a deadly idea. Nobody is that smart or that saintly. Somehow or other, the ignorant masses, making their own decisions based on faulty logic and bad … Continue reading “Too few experts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2441"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2444,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2441\/revisions\/2444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}