Abstract
This paper explores the socio-epistemic practice of shopping for experts. I argue that expert shopping is particularly likely to occur on what Thi Nguyen calls cognitive islands (i.e., domains of expertise that are both subtle and isolated). To support my argument, I focus on macroeconomics. First, I make a prima-facie case for thinking that macroeconomics is a cognitive island. Then, I argue that ordinary people are particularly likely to engage in expert shopping when it comes to macroeconomic matters. In particular, I distinguish between two kinds of expert shopping, which I call cynical and wishful, and introduce the notion of assisted expert shopping, which occurs when people or organizations shop for experts on behalf of other people. I argue that assisted expert shopping can sometime result in what I call a propagandistic use of expertise. Finally, I critically examine some possible reasons for optimism and find them wanting. I conclude by suggesting that that much of what I said about shopping for macroeconomic experts might also apply mutatis mutandis to other policy-relevant domains of expertise.
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Notes
I should note that this remark is likely to apply only to non-technical, categorical forecasts (e.g., ‘Temperatures will drop significantly tomorrow’) and not to probabilistic or technical forecasts (e.g., ‘There is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow’, or ‘The effects of the cold front will last through the weekend’).
Of course, ordinary citizens might be able to indirectly corroborate the claim by asking a friend who knows enough about nuclear physics or by searching for the half-life of Uranium-235 on the internet, but neither of those count as direct verifications.
For our purposes, the following rough-and-ready characterization of levels of economic expertise will suffice. A genuine economic expert is someone who holds a postgraduate degree in economics. A semi-expert in economics is someone who has taken some university-level courses in economics. A pseudo-expert is someone who has relatively superficial knowledge of economics but acts as if they are a genuine expert. And, finally, those whom I refer to as ‘ordinary people’ have no expertise at all in macroeconomics (understood both broadly and strictly) (i.e., they have never taken an economics course, read an economics textbook, etc.).
For an overview of different accounts of expertise, see (Watson, 2021).
While Nguyen does speculate that macroeconomics might be a cognitive island (Nguyen 2020b, 2808), he does not argue for that claim.
Estimates of core inflation, for example, are based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is the calculated average of prices of a basket of goods. The CPI, thus, depends on both the composition of the basket as well as on the weights assigned to different goods.
See, e.g., (Blanchard, 2007).
The car driving analogy is often used by central bankers and economists to explain monetary policy to the general public (see, e.g., (Beckworth, 2017)).
See (Bernanke, 2004) for a discussion.
Although even this is not undisputed (see, e.g., (Gadea, Gómez-Loscos, and Pérez-Quirós forthcoming)).
As suggested, for example, in (Bernanke, 2004).
I am very grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for suggesting this line of argument.
Those who find my prima facie case for the conclusion that macroeconomics is a cognitive island unpersuasive might still find what I say in what follows interesting, as I suspect that what I say about macroeconomics might apply mutatis mutandis to other fields of expertise that seem to be cognitive islands (e.g., climate science).
In theory, one would expect people to select experts wisely when they rely on these experts’ opinions to make decisions that directly affect their own economic welfare. Unfortunately, the fact that people sometimes fall of dishonest financial advisors and financiers seems to show that what I call wishful expert shopping might occur even in cases in which people’s economic welfare is directly at stake. However, I do not discuss this issue in this paper.
See, e.g., the remarks by President Bush (White House 2006) or the opinion piece by then Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (Frist, 2006).
One possibility, for example, would be to rely on the opinions of neutral (genuine) experts. I’ll discuss this option in §5 below.
I should note that I am not necessarily passing a moral judgment on cynical expert shopping. For example, it could be argued that the role of the defense lawyer in an adversarial system is to show that there is reasonable doubt about the defendant guilt. On this view, it might be morally acceptable for a defense lawyer to engage in cynical expert shopping (at least insofar as the defense lawyer has no reason to believe that the expert is in bad faith). However, even if cynical expert morally permissible in certain contexts, it might still be problematic from a social point of view, as it might contribute to the erosion of trust in genuine experts.
Given the similarities between what I call expert shopping and what Nguyen (2020b) calls a runaway personal echo chamber, it might be worth comparing briefly the two phenomena. According to Nguyen, in a personal runaway echo chamber, “one’s own flawed expertise will lead one to trust bad experts, which will reinforce one’s mistaken beliefs and sensibilities” (Nguyen, 2020b, 2805). One of the key differences between runaway echo chambers and expert shopping is that expert-shoppers are not necessarily motivated by a mistaken confidence in their own level of expertise. Consider two of the cases of expert shopping I have mentioned so far—i.e., that of the defense lawyer and that of the patient. Presumably, the defense lawyer’s choice of expert is not motivated by an excessive confidence in her own expertise in, say, blood spatter analysis but by a desire to win the case and the patient’s choice of expert is not motivated by a mistaken confidence in his own expertise in, say, oncology but by a desire to get better. I think that the best approach is to think of runaway echo chambers as a phenomenon that can arise from a third kind of expert shopping, which we might call overconfident expert shopping and which is motivated by an excessive confidence in one’s expertise in the field (and in the opinions based on that alleged expertise). So, for example, the first-year economics student who dismisses the opinions of a professional economist on the basis of his own basic knowledge of economics is engaging in overconfident expert shopping. On the other hand, the first-year philosophy student who believes those economists whose view better fit her own personal beliefs about how people behave, and society works, or they better suit her ideological, social, or political allegiances is engaging in wishful expert shopping. Both are choosing experts on the basis of what they already believe (or would like to believe), but the first student is doing so due to an excessive confidence in his own expertise in economics, while the second one is doing so in spite of her (admitted) lack of expertise in economics. I think there are a number of reasons to prefer this approach to Nguyen’s own approach. The first is that both wishful and overconfident expert shopping can (in their more extreme forms) lead to something akin to what Nguyen calls a runaway echo chamber; however, on Nguyen’s approach, only what I call overconfident expert shopping can give rise to a runaway echo chamber. The second is that, in the real world, it might be often difficult to distinguish between overconfident and wishful expert shopping (as we need to understand what exactly motivates the expert-shopper in order to distinguish between the two). The third is that, in the real world, the two motivations can be present in the same expert-shopper (given that a lack of expertise is, unfortunately, compatible with a high opinion in one’s level of expertise). The last (and, admittedly, least important) reason is that ‘runaway echo chamber’ is not a particularly felicitous label, as, according to Nguyen’s own characterization of an echo chamber as ‘a social epistemic structure in which other relevant voices have been actively discredited’ (Nguyen, 2020a, 142), a runaway (personal) echo chamber would not count as a (social) echo chamber. (I would like to thank one of the reviewers for this journal for persuading me to rethink the relationship between expert shopping and runaway echo chambers.)
Although they might also lead to an overall decrease in mortality (see, e.g., (Ruhm, 2000)).
A field is deceptively subtle to the extent to which it is subtle but ordinary people are under the mistaken impression that it is not. As I suggest in the main text, healthcare seems to be deceptively subtle. For example, people tend to draw unwarranted causal conclusions about the effectiveness of a treatment from its being correlated with an improvement of a condition. Nguyen (forthcoming) discusses a number of other ways in which fields can be deceptively subtle (although he does not use that label).
Although see §5 for a couple of suggestions in this direction.
On closer scrutiny, the analogy with cereal selection is closer than I suggested above. After all, the store management decides which varieties of cereals are sold in the store and how prominently the different boxes of cereals are displayed on its shelves.
Not all media organizations cherry-pick their (presumed) experts to the same degree. Readers of the New York Times, for example, tend to be exposed to a broader range of opinions about economic policy than viewers of Fox News or MSNBC, or readers the Wall Street Journal.
While people or organizations who engage in cynical expert shopping often do so to persuade some audience, cynical expert shopping is not necessarily assisted expert shopping. The distinguishing feature of (cynical) assisted expert shopping is that the assistant exploits the trust that the client has in them while the cynical expert shopper does not necessarily do that. For example, the defense lawyer who engages in cynical expert shopping is not exploiting the trust that the jurors have in them (at least assuming that jurors do not tend to trust defense lawyers more than prosecutors).
See, e.g., (Wallison 2015).
See https://www.cbo.gov/about/overview. Accessed October 7, 2021. See also (2 USC §602).
The Director of the CBO is appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate on the recommendation of the Budget Committees of the House and the Senate (2 USC §601). While these committees are supposed to select the candidate solely on the basis of the candidate’s qualifications (2 USC §601), nothing prevents other considerations from tacitly factoring in their decisions. Moreover, both the Senate and the House can remove the Director (2 USC §601), so, while the institution might be non-partisan in theory, the Director of the CBO is still not fully insulated from political pressure in practice.
The bias of the intermediary sources does not need to be intentional. For example, social media users are typically more likely to share news stories that fit with the views and preferences of their political side, thereby, effectively filtering out news stories that they perceive to be unfavorable to their political side.
Greenspan’s considered views were likely better reflected in an opinion piece that he had published in the Financial Times a few months before his widely reported admission at the hearing. That opinion piece concluded with the following words: ‘Thus it is important, indeed crucial, that any reforms in, and adjustments to, the structure of markets and regulation not inhibit our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure: market flexibility and open competition’ (Greenspan, 2008). These do not seem to be the words of a man who has substantially changed his mind about the merits of laissez-faire economics.
Regina Rini, for one, has argued along these general lines with regards to the transmission of political testimony on social media (Rini, 2017).
Just to be clear, Rini (2017) does not discuss this application of partisan epistemology (let alone endorse it).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rachel Herdy, Sushruth Ravish, Tony Ward, Jamie Watson, and two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Contessa, G. Shopping for experts. Synthese 200, 217 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03590-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03590-5