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The rise of social media means that experts willing to share their knowledge are more accessible to the public. One might think that communication between experts and decision-makers should be very good. But this is not the case.
Outlets are flooded with self-appointed 'experts' who lack real expertise. In every domain where decision-makers need experts or specialized knowledge, they will compete with those who don't have relevant knowledge.
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Real experts are often confident in their claims, but in the private market, the opposite can be more common.
Mixing the information of the pundit, scholar, and consultant creates information noise that makes it difficult for decision-makers to know what to do.
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When communicating scientific knowledge to policymakers and the public, there are three levels of questions:
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Knowing which questions fall into which category requires expertise. Politicians and executives might be experts in the area of decision-making, but they are seldom experts in the areas where they make decisions.
When there are decisions that require an expert perspective, the real experts might admit that they don't know, making the decision-maker vulnerable to uninformed experts who convince them that they have the answers.
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True expertise means knowing the limits of one's knowledge.
Institutions can be designed to encourage real experts to admit uncertainty. The key lies in whether the question was answerable in the first place. Good experts should be willing to say they don't know because it is an unanswerable question. Once the competent experts are saying they don't know, incompetent experts may follow suit.
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Quételet, the mathematician turned astronomer who was performing social physics miracles as the central figure of Belgium science, got better in his game by learning probability theory and making use of his polymath brain. His work included estimations and calculations using the available data and his mathematical and statistical skills. Instead of counting everyone to know the population, Quételet used some reasonable estimates and then multiplied the number of births per year with the ratio of the total population to the annual births.
The new methodology was published in Quételet’s books in the 19th century, like Social Physics (1835) and its newer editions, and caught the imagination of the public. Concepts like the Average Man and the Bell Curve (a normal probability of distribution) simplified complex statistics and made it accessible to the world while being easily quotable and comparable.
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Jean-Paul Sartre touched on this paradox when he stated: "This is indeed what linguists and psychologists have perceived … they believed that they discovered a circle in the formulation of speaking, for in order to speak it is necessary to know one's thought. But how can we know this thought as a reality made explicit and fixed in concepts except precisely by speaking it?"