Video Transcript: How to Use Experts and When Not To

It's Monday morning. In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting  in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen. At  Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut  more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession. In Madrid,  Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying,  trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up  and hold it. And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out  whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his  doctors just came in and said, "You must make him drink today," -- my father's  been nil by mouth for a week -- or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might  actually kill him. We face momentous decisions with important consequences  throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions.  We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through  books. But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon  Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most -- especially when the  stakes are high and the decision really matters. Because in a world of data  deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to  process information than we can -- that they are able to come to better  conclusions than we could come to on our own. And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do. But I  believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous  consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals. It's not that  experts have not massively contributed to the world -- of course they have. The  problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we  have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for  their supposed words of wisdom. We've surrendered our power, trading off our  discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide. This is  no exaggeration. In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains  scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak. The results were quite extraordinary. As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off. It literally flat-lined. And they  listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or  wrong. But experts do get things wrong. Did you know that studies show that  doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know that if you file your tax  returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if  you get a tax adviser to do it for you? And then there's, of course, the example  that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living  through the worst recession since the 1930s. For the sake of our health, our  wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent  decision-making parts of our brains switched on. And I'm saying this as an 

economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is  we think and who it is we trust and why, but also -- and I'm aware of the irony  here -- as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime  ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert  who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become  more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling  against our points of view. So in order to help you understand where I'm coming  from, let me bring you into my world, the world of experts. Now there are, of  course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions. But what my  research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid  camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often  silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero worshipping their own gurus. Alan Greenspan's proclamations that the years of  economic growth would go on and on, not challenged by his peers, until after  the crisis, of course. You see, we also learn that experts are located, are  governed, by the social and cultural norms of their times -- whether it be the  doctors in Victorian England, say, who sent women to asylums for expressing  sexual desire, or the psychiatrists in the United States who, up until 1973, were  still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. And what all this means is  that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks -- because we've all seen the evidence of  pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out  their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new  products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're  about to bring by market. The study showed that food companies exaggerated  typically seven times more than an independent study. And we've also got to be  aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes. They make mistakes every  single day -- mistakes born out of carelessness. A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong  side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot,  and also mistakes born out of thinking errors. A common thinking error of  radiologists, for example -- when they look at CT scans -- is that they're overly  influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he  suspects the patient's problem to be. So if a radiologist is looking at the scan  of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see  evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it -- thereby  missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs. I've shared  with you so far some insights into the world of experts. These are, of course,  not the only insights I could share, but I hope they give you a clear sense at  least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them, why we need to rebel and why  we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on. But how  can we do this? Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies.

First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this  notion of them as modern-day apostles. This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D. in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear. But it does mean persisting in  the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to  explain things to us in language that we can actually understand. Why was it  that, when I had an operation, my doctor said to me, "Beware, Ms. Hertz, of  hyperpyrexia," when he could have just as easily said, "Watch out for a high  fever." You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig  behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being  armed with the questions to do that -- questions like: What are the assumptions  that underpin this? What is the evidence upon which this is based? What has  your investigation focused on? And what has it ignored? It recently came out  that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first,  primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men. It seems that they've  somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women.  And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that  many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men --  and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for  women to take. Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions  and their methodologies can easily be flawed. Second, we need to create the  space for what I call "managed dissent." If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an  environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in  new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the  knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but  also from their destruction -- and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding  ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views. All the research now shows  us that this actually makes us smarter. Encouraging dissent is a rebellious  notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround  ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true.  And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent. Google CEO  Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy. In meetings, he looks  out for the person in the room -- arms crossed, looking a bit bemused -- and  draws them into the discussion, trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion, so that they have dissent within the room. Managing dissent  is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. But we  need to go even further. We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that  experts are. The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced  degrees, fancy titles, diplomas, best-selling books -- high-status individuals. But  just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite  cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise -- whereby  expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls 

-- yeah. Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees --  the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its  forecasting team -- to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a  product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas  are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will  come in on time. By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the  company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was  going to open in China -- its big, grand store -- was not going to open on time.  Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they  thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance  department placed all their chips on that not happening. It turned out that they  were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip  that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China,  were even aware of. The strategies that I have discussed this evening --  embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious  strategies -- are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we  try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times.  For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on,  if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are  rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance,  uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves  using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century. For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following,  blindly accepting, blindly trusting. Now is the time to face the world with eyes  wide open -- yes, using experts to help us figure things out, for sure -- I don't  want to completely do myself out of a job here -- but being aware of their  limitations and, of course, also our own. Thank you.