A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (17 page)

The term
expert
is normally reserved for people who have undertaken special training, devoted a large amount of time to developing their expertise (e.g., MDs, airline pilots, musicians, or athletes), and whose abilities or knowledge are considered high relative to others’
.
As such, expertise is a social judgment—we’re comparing one person’s skill to the skill level of other people in the world. Expertise is relative. Einstein was an expert on physics sixty years ago; he would probably not be considered one if he were still alive today and hadn’t added to his knowledge base what Stephen Hawking and so many other physicists now know. Expertise also falls along a continuum. Although John Young is one of only twelve people to have walked on the moon, it would probably not be accurate to say that Captain Young is an
expert
on moonwalking, although he knows more about it than almost anyone else in the world.

Individuals with similar training and levels of expertise will not necessarily agree with one another, and even if they do, these experts are not always right. Many thousands of expert financial analysts make predictions about stock prices that are completely
wrong, and some small number of novices turn out to be right. Every British record company famously rejected the Beatles’ demo tape, and a young producer with no expertise in popular music, George Martin, signed them to EMI. Xerox PARC, the inventors of the graphical interface computer, didn’t see any future for personal computers; Steve Jobs, who had no business experience at all, thought they were wrong. The success of newcomers in these domains is generally understood to be because stock prices and popular taste are highly unpredictable and chaotic. Stuff happens. So it’s not that experts are never wrong, it’s just that, statistically, they’re more likely to be right.

Many inventors and innovators were told “it will never work” by experts, with the Wright brothers and their fellow would-be inventors of motorized flight being an example
par excellence
. The Wright brothers were high school dropouts, with no formal training in aeronautics or physics. Many experts with formal training declared that heavier-than-air flight would never be possible. The Wrights were self-taught, and their perseverance made them de facto experts themselves when they built a functional heavier-than-air airplane, and proved the other experts wrong. Michael Lewis’s baseball story
Moneyball
shows how someone can beat the experts by rejecting conventional wisdom and applying logic and statistical analysis to an old problem; Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane built a competitive team by using player performance metrics that other teams undervalued, bringing his team to the playoffs two years in a row, and substantially increasing the team’s worth.

Experts are often licensed, or hold advanced degrees, or are recognized by other authorities. A Toyota factory-certified mechanic can be considered an expert on Toyotas. The independent or
self-taught mechanic down the street may have just as much expertise, and may well be better and cheaper. It’s just that the odds aren’t as good, and it can be difficult to figure that out for yourself. It’s just averages: The average licensed Toyota mechanic is going to know more about fixing your Toyota than the average independent. Of course, there are exceptions and you have to bring your own logic to bear on this. I knew a Mercedes mechanic who worked for a Mercedes dealership for twenty-five years and was among their most celebrated and top-rated mechanics. He wanted to shorten his commute and be his own boss so he opened up his own shop. His thirty-five years of experience (by the time I knew him) gave him more expertise than many of the dealer’s younger mechanics. Or another case: An independent may specialize in certain repairs that the dealer rarely performs, such as transmission overhaul or reupholstering. You’re better off having your differential rebuilt by an independent who does five of those a month than a dealer who probably only did it once in vocational school. It’s like the saying about surgeons: If you need one, you want the doctor who has performed the same operation you’re going to get two hundred times, not once or twice, no matter how well those couple of operations went.

In science, technology, and medicine, experts’ work appears in peer-reviewed journals (more on those in a moment) or on patents. They may have been recognized with awards such as a Nobel Prize, an Order of the British Empire, or a National Medal of Science. In business, experts may have had experience such as running or starting a company, or amassing a fortune (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates). Of course, there are smaller distinctions as well—salesperson of the month, auto mechanic of the year, community “best of” awards (e.g., best Mexican restaurant, best roofing contractor).

In the arts and humanities, experts may hold university positions or their expertise may be acknowledged by those with university or governmental positions, or by expert panels. These expert panels are typically formed by soliciting advice from previous winners and well-placed scouts—this is how the Nobel and the MacArthur “genius” award nomination and selection panels are constituted.

If people in the arts and humanities have won a prize, such as the Nobel, Pulitzer, Kennedy Center Honors, Polaris Music Prize, Juno, National Book Award, Newbery, or Man Booker Prize, we conclude they are among the experts at their craft. Peer awards are especially useful in judging expertise. ASCAP, an association whose membership is limited to professional songwriters, composers, and music publishers, presents awards voted on by its members; the award is meaningful because those who bestow it constitute a panel of peer experts. The Grammys and the Academy Awards are similarly voted on by peers within the music and film industry, respectively.

You might be thinking, “Wait a minute. There are always elements of politics and personal taste in such awards. My favorite actor/singer/writer/dancer has never won an award, and I’ll bet I could find thousands of people who think she’s as good as this year’s award winner.” But that’s a different matter
.
The award system is generally biased toward ensuring that every winner is deserving, which is not the same as saying that every deserving person is a winner. (Recall the discussion of asymmetries earlier.) Those who are recognized by bona fide, respectable awards have usually risen to a level of expertise. (Again, there are exceptions, such as the awarding of a Grammy in 1990, which was later retracted, to lip-syncers Milli Vanilli; or the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to
Washington Post
reporter Janet Cooke, which was withdrawn two days later when it was discovered that the winning story was fraudulent. Novelist Gabriel García Márquez quipped that Cooke should’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature.
) When an expert has been found guilty of fraud, does it negate their expertise? Perhaps. It certainly impacts their credibility—now that you know they’ve lied once, you should be on guard that they may lie again.

Expertise Is Typically Narrow

Dr. Roy Meadow, the pediatrician who testified in the case of the alleged baby killer Sally Clark, had no expertise in medical statistics or epidemiology. He
was
in the medical profession, and the prosecutor who put him on the stand undoubtedly hoped that jurors would assume he had this expertise. William Shockley was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics as one of three inventors of the transistor. Later in life, he promoted strongly racist views that took hold, probably because people assumed that if he was smart enough to win a Nobel, he must know things that others don’t. Gordon Shaw, who “discovered” the now widely discredited Mozart effect, was a physicist who lacked training in behavioral science; people probably figured, as they did with Shockley, “He’s a physicist—he must be really smart.” But intelligence and experience tend to be domain-specific, contrary to the popular belief that intelligence is a single, unified quantity. The best Toyota mechanic in the world may not be able to diagnose what’s wrong with your VW, and the best tax attorney may not be able to give the best advice for a breach-of-contract suit. A physicist is probably not the best person to ask about social science.

There’s a special place in our hearts (but hopefully not our rational minds) for actors who use their character’s image to hawk products. As believable as Sam Waterston was as the trustworthy, ethical district attorney Jack McCoy in
Law & Order
, as an actor he has no special insight into banking and investments, although his commercials for TD Ameritrade were compelling. A generation earlier, Robert Young, who was much loved on TV’s
Marcus Welby, M.D.
, did commercials for Sanka. Actors Chris Robinson (
General Hospital
) and Peter Bergman (
All My Children
) hawked Vicks Formula 44; due to FTC regulations (the so-called white coat rule) the actors had to speak a disclaimer that became a widely known catchphrase: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” Apparently, gullible viewers mistook the actors’ authority in a television drama for authority in the real world of medicine.

Source Hierarchy

Some publications are more likely to consult true experts than others, and there exists a hierarchy of information sources. Some sources are simply more consistently reliable than others. In academia, peer-reviewed articles are generally more accurate than books, and books by major publishers are generally more accurate than self-published books (because major publishers are more likely to review and edit the material and have a greater financial incentive to do so). Award-winning newspapers such as the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post
, and the
Wall Street Journal
earned their reputations by being consistently accurate in their coverage of news. They strive to obtain independent verifications for any news story. If one government official tells them something, they get
corroboration from another. If a scientist makes a claim, they contact other scientists who don’t have any stake in the finding to hear independent opinions. They do make mistakes; even
Times
reporters have been found guilty of fabrications, and the “newspaper of record” prints errata every day.
Some people, including Noam Chomsky, have argued that the
Times
is a vessel of propaganda, reporting news about the U.S. government without a proper amount of skepticism. But again, like with auto mechanics, it’s a matter of averages—the great majority of what you read in the
New York Times
is likelier to be true than what you read in, for example, the
New York Post
.

Reputable sources want to be certain of facts before publishing them. Many sources have emerged on the Web that do not hold to the same standards, and in some cases, they can break news stories and do so accurately before the more traditional and cautious media do. Many of us learned of Michael Jackson’s death from TMZ.com before the traditional media reported it. TMZ was willing to run the story based on less evidence than were the
Los Angeles Times
or NBC. In that particular case, TMZ turned out to be right, but you can’t count on this sort of reporting.

A number of celebrity death reports that circulated on Twitter were found to be false. In 2015 alone, these included Carlos Santana, James Earl Jones, Charles Manson, and Jackie Chan.
A 2011 fake tweet caused a sell-off of shares for the company Audience, Inc., during which its stock lost 25 percent. Twitter itself saw its shares climb 8 percent—temporarily—after false rumors of a takeover were tweeted, based on a bogus website made to look a great deal like Bloomberg.com’s. As the
Wall Street Journal
reported, “
The use of false rumors and news reports to manipulate stocks is a
centuries-old ruse. The difference today is that the sheer ubiquity and amount of information that courses through markets makes it difficult for traders operating at high speeds to avoid a well-crafted hoax.” And it happens to the best of us. Veteran reporter (and part of a team of journalists that was awarded a 1999 Pulitzer Prize)
Jonathan Capehart wrote a story for the
Washington Post
based on a tweet by a nonexistent congressman in a nonexistent district.

As with graphs and statistics, we don’t want to blindly believe everything we encounter from a good source, nor do we want to automatically reject everything from a questionable source. You shouldn’t trust everything you read in the
New York Times
, or reject everything you read on TMZ
.
Where something appears goes to the credibility of the claim. And, as in a court trial, you don’t want to rely on a single witness, you want corroborating evidence.

The Website Domain

The three-digit suffix of the URL indicates the domain. It pays to familiarize yourself with the domains in your country because some of the domains have restrictions, and that can help you establish a site’s credibility for a given topic. In the United States, for example, .edu is reserved for nonprofit educational institutions like Stanford.edu (Stanford University); .gov is reserved for official government agencies like CDC.gov (the Centers for Disease Control); .mil for U.S. military organizations, like army.mil. The most famous is probably .com, which is used for commercial enterprises like GeneralMotors.com. Others include .net, .nyc, and .management, which carry no restrictions (!). Caveat emptor. BestElectricalService.nyc might actually be in New Jersey (and their employees might not even be licensed to work in New York); AlphaAnd OmegaConsulting.management may not know the first or the last thing about management.

Knowing the domain can also help to identify any potential bias. You’re more likely to find a neutral report from an educational or nonprofit study (found on a .edu, .gov, or .org site) than on a commercial site, although such sites may also host student blogs and unsupported opinions. And educational and nonprofits are not without bias: They may present information in a way that maximizes donations or public support for their mission. Pfizer.com may be biased in their discussions about drugs made by competing companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline, and Glaxo of course may be biased toward their own products.