Should Smart People's Opinions Have More Weight?

 

Evolution

I was pretty self confident when I got out of college. I didn’t make super grades but I had other interests. I spent a lot of time with friends. I read a lot. I spent a lot of time playing in the orchestra and in doing my comedy routines. But when I went to med school I decided to get serious. I wanted to be a good doctor, so I studied hard and tried to do my best. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t do much better than average. Suddenly I realized that there were just a lot of people smarter than me. It was devastating. I went to the dean and told him I wanted to repeat my freshman year. He told me that I didn’t have to learn everything. What made a good doctor was how he (or she) kept learning after med school. He told me that he wasn’t at the top of his class either. So I continued, doing as well as I could. 

I always remembered that, and throughout my career, I tried to keep reviewing my patients’ conditions, and keeping up with new advances in medicine. But, in the back of my mind, the fear remained that I wasn’t good enough, or that someone smarter might have found something I missed. Some doctors get more confident as they age. Some continue practicing into their nineties. In my case, I continued to doubt myself and as soon as I thought my memory was slipping, I retired. 

I enjoy writing, and I have opinions about almost everything, but the same issue continues to bother me. What right do I have to disagree with someone smarter than me? I realize that you can find smart people on either side of every issue, but that’s no excuse. A smart person has a tremendous advantage. He (or she) can remember more facts related to a given issue.  He can make a better case for his opinion. But there are disadvantages too. A smart person can filter out the facts that don’t support his opinion. And he can rationalize an opinion that’s not supported by the facts. In every field of science, smart people tend to rise to the top. They don’t necessarily take leadership positions, either because they don’t want to, or because they aren’t outgoing, or if, like my wise cousin Steve, they know enough to see that every issue has different sides so they try to remain open minded.  

Also there are many factors that effect people’s opinions regardless of how smart they are. There’s prejudice of all kinds: racial, religious, social. There’s the effect of culture. That’s why Christianity is the main religion in the US and Europe, and Islam is predominant in the mid-east. Then there’s situational effects. I saw it in Vietnam, where the American soldiers tended to look down on Vietnamese lives as worth less than ours, and now in Gaza where the Israelis think their lives are worth more than the Palestinians, attempting to justify killing over 67,000 Palestinians out of revenge for Hamas’ murder of a little over 1000 Israelis. Then there’s money. People with a lot of money often use it to campaign and influence people to support their interests, which may not agree with the interests of the population. 

It's tempting to become egotistical and think you’re smarter than you are, especially if you don’t talk to a lot of people. That’s my situation now.  I’m retired and only have my wise cousin Steve to reign in my self-confidence. Also when you see a smart person who supports your views on TV or read a book that agrees with you, you have a tendency to think you’re just as smart as they are. If you were talking to them in person, you would find out you can’t come up with nearly as clear an argument as they, or as a smart person with the opposite opinion, so you tend to just listen to those who agree with you, and the more you hear, the more confident you are that they (you) are right. Maybe that’s why our society is so polarized. People just listen to those who agree with them, and they are isolated from those who disagree.   

So what can I do? We live in a democracy – so far – so we can vote to express our opinions. In fact, I think we have to vote, to keep unscrupulous people from having their way. Voting is not foolproof. Polls may be wrong, and the majority of people may be misled by lies, selective reporting, or their own prejudices and culture. 

I think the answer is to be very, very careful. Try to verify facts and eliminate prejudice from your reasoning. Listen to smart people, and also those who aren’t so smart. You never know who’s going to be right. Also don’t close your mind. People believed in creationism for millennia before Darwin came along with his theory of evolution. And, I'll have to admit, I still pay more attention to the opinions of smart people. I think if they are honest and have access to the facts, their opinions are worth more than mine. 

Steve, My Wise Cousin Replies

Steve McLean and Robin Gunning

Here's my wise cousin Steve's response to my last blog about the scientific method:

Robin: 

   You question whether the scientific method can be used to examine Trump and his policies. The SM can’t be used to study an irrational process – except to show that it is irrational. I don’t really think that the SM can be used to test human motivations.  You say Trump wants to be a dictator, but he is too old to matter.  He wants more money, but he has more already than he can use.  There is no benefit, so why does he pursue these things. Humans do things that don’t benefit themselves – or anyone else.  People steal because they want something without paying for it – they benefit.  People murder because someone is in their way or for revenge – they benefit.  But – explain vandalism.  People destroy things belonging to others – no one benefits. Vandalism isn’t logical.                                            When I was going through puberty, I didn’t understand why the girls preferred the bad boys (who didn’t treat them with respect).  They rejected the good boys.  That is illogical unless somehow evolution created the preference (we’ve talked about this before).         SM – opinion has no weight in the process.  SM – unverified data is no data.  SM – the testing has to be repeatable.  SM – failure tells you something (trial and error).  SM – when statistics are utilized they have to be used carefully-very carefully-very, very carefully.         Your last sentence starts with IF.  I don’t think as long as people try to take advantage over the other side – IF is possible.  SM is about a fair, unbiassed process.  Fair is subjective.  All's fair in love and war.    I liked your blog.  Keep ‘em coming.  We need more like that.

Steve

Comment: 

Steve's comments abut my blog are a good example of "peer review," getting others' opinions, or  critiques.  I think it is one of the most valuable parts of the scientific method.

My wise cousin Steve is absolutely right. "The scientific method can't be used to evaluate an irrational process - except (he goes on to say) to show that it is irrational." 

That was my point. That the first step in the SM is to make observations. If your data, observations are false, "opinion has no weight," and "unverified data is no data," then you can't go any farther with the SM. Maybe I was too liberal in calling my evaluation of Trump's actions SM. What I should have said was that it's important to realize that if you start with false data, your conclusions are false as well. I don't know why Trump does stuff, or why girls seem to like "bad boys," but I can still say that Trump's deployment of troops and girls hooking up with bad boys are mistakes, because their conclusions are based on false assumptions. 

  Also, we should all try not to try to "take advantage over the other side" by not listening to their arguments. 

Robin

  

The Scientific Method

 

Political events have recently been downright nonsense: shutting down the government to avoid helping people pay for health care, or sending troops into Washington, DC or Chicago, Ill. where there’s no crisis, or firing experienced experts from important public positions. Almost every day I ask myself: “Why did they do that?” or “Who benefits from that?”  And then they do a poll, which shows that a good part of the population supports it. 

I guess Trump is behind it. Some say he wants to be a dictator. Others say he just wants to make money. Others say he’s courting support from the wealthy. None of that makes sense to me. Trump is old. Even if he became a dictator he wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. He already has a lot of money, and so do his wealthy supporters. As for the population, why do they support him even though his policies hurt them. None of this makes any sense to me, so I ask myself: “What would my wise cousin Steve say?” 

I think he would say: “Use the scientific method.” He’s fanatical about the benefits of the scientific method. It might not give you an answer to why Trump does this or that, or to why people support him, but it might give you a way of judging his policies, or actions. What is the scientific method, anyway? 

It’s a process that’s been developed by scientists over the last three or four centuries to evaluate ideas. It involves making careful observations, developing a hypothesis which explains the observations, testing your hypothesis by experiments, and then reporting your results. The process may require expertise. For example if the subject is technical, experts may have to study for years to obtain the background necessary to even understand a small area of science. Also the process needs input from other experts in the field or in related fields. Your observations may be wrong, or colored by your personal experience. Your hypothesis may have already been disproved in the past, so testing it again may not be necessary, and finally,  your experiment may be flawed in some way. 

What has that got to do with politics, you say? Well, take for example, sending Federal troops and National Guard to Washington, DC. You don’t need an expert to observe that there’s no serious problem with law and order in DC. There’s actually been a fall in crime over the last year. Local authorities say that police can handle crime and don’t need help from the federal government. 

That should be the end of the problem. Simple. Crime is down. There’s no need for Federal troops, but Trump is also sending troops into Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Ill., and Memphis, Tennessee. Let’s use the scientific method. Observation shows that there’s no big problem with law and order in any of these cities, but they are all led by Democratics. So it’s a politically motivated action, to solve a problem created by lies, to support Trump’s political agenda.  We don’t need to go any farther. 

So what good is the scientific method if we can’t trust our leaders? We’re not all experts on crime, or immigration, or economy, or health care. We don’t always know if we’re being lied to, and there’s also the technique of just reporting news that support your point of view. I think you can still trust the major media news, but for specific questions you can look at reports by both left and right leaning media. That’s what my wise cousin does. You can also look at AI sources. 

The scientific method also weighs the opinions of experts more than those of ordinary citizens. That makes sense because they know more about their field of interest.  In their book: “Good Economics for Hard Times,” Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo cite a survey of economists about whether the North American Free Trade Agreement improved the average person’s well being. 95% answered “yes.” When the same question was asked of representatives of the general public, only 45% responded “yes.” When you look at Trump appointees, they are not experts, or even people whose opinions reflect those of most experts in their field. You’ve got a TV host as Secretary of Defense, and a vaccine denier as Secretary of Health. What have they got in common? They’re both sycophants, yes men. The same can be said for almost all Trump appointees, and furthermore, Trump has fired the experts, experienced people already in government, or he has indiscriminately fired large groups of government workers, regardless of their experience or expertise. 

What can we do? The first thing is to become aware of the problem. Don’t just trust the opinions or even the ‘facts’ reported by people in power. Look at each issue from both sides, and look stuff up. As my wise cousin Steve says: “The more you learn, the more you can sympathize with others’ opinions.” If we can get past the first step in the scientific method, if we can trust our observations, then maybe we can go on to the other steps: making reasonable hypotheses, and testing them. Then and only then can we have reasonable discussions about what to do. If we’ve learned to trust each other, and can agree on what’s true and what’s false, then our discussions will be more respectful.