Experts? What Do They Know?

The soundtrack of Sunday afternoons when I was a child was provided by neighbours tinkering with their cars, although I was never sure how much good they were doing to their vehicles as most of the tinkering seemed to comprise of opening the bonnet and whacking bits of the engine with a hammer.

In those long-ago days of the 1960s, it was possible for most car owners to perform running repairs and maintenance. It was both possible and necessary because cars were far less reliable then. The motorist of the 1960s didn’t need to be an expert at car maintenance, but a little basic knowledge was invaluable.

Modern cars are so complex that anything over and above the most basic maintenance is beyond ordinary people. A few years ago, I managed to replace a headlamp bulb in a Vauxhall Astra, but I couldn’t do the same with my current car, a Nissan Note. When a brake light bulb needed replacing a couple of years back, a mechanic at Halfords needed half an hour and some tools that I don’t own to do so.

As well as not being competent enough to indulge in most aspects of vehicle maintenance, or plumbing, or a whole plethora of other manual tasks, I also have what I suspect is a peculiarly British trait of being embarrassed and awkward when dealing with car mechanics and plumbers.

Research has shown that two in five British people (probably all men) change the way they speak when engaging with tradesmen. Generally, men become more ‘blokey’ and start using colloquialisms and jargon they don’t normally use. Despite the handicap of not knowing one end of a carburettor from another, nor knowing the purpose of the manifold or pressure relief valve in our central heating system, we nod knowingly as the mechanic or plumber describes the problem with one or all of these things, and take as gospel his assurance that we need a new one, and while we’re at it we might as well replace at least one pump (both cars and central heating systems seem to have an inordinate number of pumps).

We do this because although we rely on these men and women to do the things we cannot, we like to maintain the fiction that we could probably do the job ourselves if we chose to. We prefer not to admit our ignorance of motor car engines or central heating boilers, although in recent years I have become increasingly less bothered and now willingly confess that I have no idea what my car mechanic or plumber is talking about. I’m neither revelling in my ignorance, nor ashamed of it, after all, I doubt that my plumber could explain to me how a Nostro account works, nor the difference between a SWIFT MT199 and an MT999.

But the funny thing about experts is that while there are some who are held in high esteem, there are some who are not.

When it comes to practical things, like plumbing or car maintenance, most of us are happy to accept that there are people who will know much, much more than we do, and we trust them (up to a point, there’s always that nagging thought that our ignorance is getting us ripped off), but strangely, when we get to more complex matters such as climate change, or Brexit, or coronavirus, many people will listen to experts and then completely reject what they say, not from a position of greater knowledge, but actually from ignorance.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people are unable to recognize their lack of ability, comes into play here, as what often happens is that because we do not understand something, we refute it. Our common sense tells us that what we are being told must be wrong because we cannot comprehend it.

As we have found in the last year, despite having numerous relevant qualifications, despite having worked in the field for many years, and despite still practicing medicine, the opinion of our Chief Medical Office, Chris Whitty, is often derided by radio talk show hosts, celebrities, or random people on social media, because they get it into their head that he is wrong, largely because what he is saying is beyond their understanding.

The derision thrown in the direction of experts stems either from the fact that, for many people - politicians for example - their opinions are inconvenient, and oppose their favoured direction of travel, or because, not being infallible, experts still get things wrong. An expert can get one hundred things right and that will never be mentioned, but get one thing wrong, and they are immediately deemed useless, and that mistake is wheeled out for ever and a day afterwards as justification for not trusting what they say.

It is easy to criticise the experts when one doesn’t have to take any responsibility. Pooh-poohing the ideas of social distancing, of wearing masks, and declaring that lockdowns don’t work is easy, after all you or I can say these things in the certain knowledge that we won’t be held accountable for those opinions if they turn out to be wrong.

Apart from coronavirus, Brexit, and climate change, there’s one area where most men think they are experts, where they believe that their opinion is worth as much as the people who make a living from it, and that is football.

Jose Mourinho (who was manager of Spurs when I started writing this blog, but had been sacked by the time I finished it), recently said of his critics, "I don't think anybody is going to discuss rocket science with the guys from NASA, but everyone around the world thinks they can discuss football with one of the most important managers in the game."

And it’s true, almost everyone who has watched football, regardless of the fact that the local park is the highest level they reached when playing the game, feels that their opinion is valid, and carries as much weight as that of people who have played the game, or been managers, at the highest level. As with those who disagree with the experts on subjects like coronavirus, these armchair experts are never going to have to put their money where their mouth is. Which means they can brag about the times when their view turned out to be right, but can conveniently forget about the more frequent occasions when they were wrong.

People will defer to a plumber or car mechanic and say, “You’re the expert,” but with epidemiologists, virologists, and football managers it’s more likely to be, “Experts? What do they know?”

How tolerant would those who question and criticise experts like Professor Chris Whitty be if they were mocked, challenged, or criticised by a complete stranger with no background in their field of endeavour? Not very, is my guess.

Weird, isn’t it, the arbitrary way we regard experts?