Bring In The Experts

Some recent reading has me thinking about expertise and secondarily, people’s capacity for change and their decision making about the world. The first was an Ideas piece in the Boston Globe (sorry about the paywall) mainly about Henry A. Cotton; here’s the Wikipedia article on him. The summary: Cotton was a highly respected physician and psychiatrist in the first decades of the twentieth century. He promoted a theory that psychosis was caused by infection. (Recall that the “germ theory” of disease dates from the 1860s.) In the 1920’s Cotton opened a hospital that performed various surgeries – mainly removal of some or all of a patient’s teeth – as a way to cure psychosis. Despite the absence of evidence or tangible successes, the medical establishment of the day strongly supported Cotton. Of course today everyone sees this was always obvious nonsense.

There’s little conclusion or recommendation in the Globe piece, beyond a caution on the perils of groupthink, and the dangers of institutional incentives:

It is a hallmark of moments like this that some people, the key players, become trapped in a sort of ideological death spiral: They double and triple down, captive to the brutal sunk cost fallacy …

The next piece on expertise I just saw today. It’s from Adam Mastroianni, who’s Substack is entitled Experimental History. His latest piece: How to get 7th graders to Smoke. The summary here: In 1989 more than 2,800 7th grade students were enlisted in a program to compare the effectiveness of different anti-smoking and anti-drug programs. To this layman the programs seem like reasonable things to have tried. But, one of these programs caused the participants to smoke more than those who were in no program at all. Mastroianni also recounts the ineffectiveness of other, well-known programs:

“Scared Straight” programs, where at-risk youth go to prisons and get yelled at by prisoners, famously do not work and maybe make students more likely to commit crimes.

The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E) program I had to do in elementary school, where a cop came to class and told us about all the drugs we weren’t supposed to take, also doesn’t do anything.

A big trial of mindfulness training in UK schools maybe made kids a bit more depressed, and two attempts to teach psychotherapy principles to students in Australia both failed.

This is somewhat scary. Cotton was in the the 1920s, when science, and the ethics of science, were in their respective infancies. But Mastroianni’s examples were in the 80s and 90s – hadn’t we figured out a lot of stuff by then? So maybe experts are all BS, and we’re just as well-off trusting some rando with a laptop – let’s choose Aaron Rodgers just for yucks – who does his own research, as we are trusting people with PhDs.

Not so fast. Mastroianni goes where the Globe article should have gone, which is to point out: Changing people is hard. Extremely hard. Yet over and over, all of us assume it is an easy thing to do. Imagine the relatives of Cotton’s patients. Their child, or their uncle, or their spouse was unable to function in the world. They’ve tried everything. Then this venerable physician offers a way out, it just requires removing some teeth. Is that too much of a price to pay? Hundreds of people who went to Cotton thought it was not. But, they were blinded by the false assumption that change is possible and even easy.

Mastroianni’s answer – which I like – is that we need more science, in a purer, preconceived-notions-free form:

The philosopher Michael Strevens argues that science requires humans to adopt an “alien mindset”—you have to ignore common sense, the wisdom of the ancients, the literal word of God, etc. Why would anyone toss out everything they know and instead try to learn things by putting rotten meat in a jar? Science took so long to develop, Strevens says, because it seemed stupid.

I say: we must become even stupider. If all of our intuitions, theories, and knowledge cause us to run programs that make tweens do more drugs—well, then, we oughta ditch our intuitions, theories, and knowledge!

There is a danger here. Depending on the field, there’s variously developed bodies of foundational principles, supported by facts and repeatability. We don’t want attention-seeking contrarians discarding those in favor of pie-in-the-sky hypotheses. But overall I think the “stupider is better” test for science is hopeful – as a species, our record for things that actually help us understand ourselves could use a boost.

Till next time …