We pay them for their time and hope they have expertise. I remember a brake job one place kept getting wrong and charging me more money each time I came in to use they ‘warranty’ they said they had. I spent so much money I had a friend teach me how to repair brakes and for years after, I fixed my own brakes when they needed it, because these ‘experts’ couldn’t fix my brakes. My friend and I did in about an hour, and the subsequent money I saved not using those experts was large.
I have a chronic cough from problems in my throat. It started after a very bad cold in 1998. I spent 15 years going from doctor to doctor looking for a cure. Then I gave up. The doctors would all do the same thing–give me prilosec for acid reflux I didn’t have, or say it was my pepper habit and stick a vid tube down my throat to look for ‘redness’, proclaiming that it was caused by my eating hot peppers. Or they would say I had asthma and give me an inhaler, Then they would say I didn’t have asthma. They changed my blood pressure med. None of that worked. And each doctor did the same, even after I told them my story. in about 2013, I went to an ENT told him my story, that prilosec didn’t work and he prescribed prilosec for me. I told him that it didn’t work and he said, 'This is where we must start" and I quit going to doctors and didn’t fill that prescription
In 2016 my cough sounded like TB and my wife finally nudged me to go to another ENT. I told him my story of all the things I had been given which didn’t work and said “If you prescribe prilosec, I am walking right out that door”. And he said, “Sounds like you have viral vegal neuropathy.” After 18 years I finally heard something new from the medical community. In 3 months my cough was gone after his treatments. So, no, you will have a hard time convincing me experts are good Thousands of others like me who have conditions that doctors don’t believe because they dont’ actually LISTEN to the patient or believe the patient have the same doubts about expertise.
And I will point out that you have not run across Phillip Tetlock’s work on expertise. Experts are correct about 55% of the time. Forbes had a wonderful article on him
“Tetlock then cranked all those numbers through every kind of statistical thresher, flail, and grinder you can imagine, and the result was clear: Experts don’t actually exist. Specifically, experts were no better than nonexperts at predicting the future. They weren’t even as good as computer programs that merely extrapolate the past. The best experts could not explain more than 20% of the variability in outcomes, but crude algorithms could explain 25% to 30%, and sophisticated algorithms could explain 47%. Consider what this means. On all sorts of questions you care about-Where will the Dow be in two years? Will the federal deficit balloon as baby-boomers retire?-your judgment is as good as the experts’. Not almost as good. Every bit as good."
"Which is not to say that experts are no different from you :! and me. They’re very different. For example, they’re much more confident in their predictions than nonexperts are, though they obviously have no reason to be. For example, the members of the American Political Science Association predicted in August 2000 that a Gore victory was a slam dunk.” Geoffrey Colvin, “Ditch the ‘Experts’” Fortune, Feb 6, 2006, p. 44
“Another part of the answer is especially troubling for the media. The awfulness of Tetlock’s experts was almost uniform whether they had doctorates or bachelor’s degrees, lots of experience or little, access to classified data or none. He found but one consistent differentiator: fame. The more famous the experts, the worse they performed. And of course it’s those of us in TV, radio and Newpapers, magazines, and on the web who bestow that fame.” Geoffrey Colvin, “Ditch the ‘Experts’” Fortune, Feb 6, 2006, p. 44
“In one part of this study, Tetlock asked experts years ago to predict outcomes on seven different issues. In 1988, for example, he asked 38 Soviet experts whether the Communist Party would still be in power in 1993; and he asked 34 American political experts in 1992 whether President Bush would be re-elected later that year."
"After the events occurred, Tetlock then re-contacted the experts to ask them about their predictions. In all seven scenarios, only slightly more than half of the experts correctly predicted the events that occurred. Still, even those who were wrong had been quite confident in their predictions. Experts who said they were 80 percent or more confident in their predictions were correct only 45 percent of the time.”
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/1999/C/199902734.html
As I recall, Hillary is now our president…All the experts said so, thus it must be true.