Why are the "Experts™️" regularly wrong?

[Meat Target]

• "New York will be underwater by 2020, due to global warming"
• "Iraq has WMDs"
• The Great Recession caused by subprime mortgages
• "Hope and Change"
• "Hillary has a 90% chance of winning"
• "Two weeks to flatten the curve"
• "Inflation is transitory

...And on and on.

It's no wonder lolcow-tier misinformation is so prevalent. With Experts like these, who needs quacks?

 

[mate]

Because journalists and politicians just go looking for experts who tell them what they want to hear.

 

[Slappy McGherkin]

 

[Book Thief]

Because they aren't "experts" at anything other than attempting to mislead the masses into believing what they want them to believe. If you can scare the sheep into thinking The End of The World is around the corner, you can convince them to vote for you in the next election cycle by saying that you have "The Solution." This is how Donald Trump became Mega-Hitler who was going to throw gays and trannies into a wood-chipper and deport anyone darker than a paper bag, when in reality he was just your average milquetoast Conservative candidate.

 

[Sperghetti]

I think a lot of "experts", especially in topics like climate and immunology, tend to overestimate the drama factor of their chosen field of study.

For example, when you’ve spent decades thinking about the concept of a Black Death-tier plague wiping out most of humanity, you’re probably primed to look at any new sniffle that shows up and think “OH GOD, THIS COULD BE IT, THIS COULD BE THE BIG ONE” rather than “eh, it's just another cold, big deal”. Which is why some immunologists saw no problem predicting absurd amounts of deaths from SARS… and bird flu… and swine flu…

Hell, I’m sure anybody in these fields who is level-headed enough to realize that 95% of everything is a nothingburger is probably outright dismissed by their coworkers.

 

[FFinfo]

A lot of people extrapolate their expertise in one thing as applying for things beyond their station.
A few more are just particularly self-serving and will use their expertise at the expense of others (people knew 2008 was an inevitable result of their practices just as much as they knew banks would get bailed out and there was no risk for them personally in obliterating the middle class).
The ones that know better as experts and don't feel like meddling never get in public-facing positions in the first place.

 

[SneedEyeMitch]

Lack of humility and a lack of receiving humiliation for being wrong.

I know of a young doctor that tried to win up a friend of mine when it came to caring for his wife, no one knows my friend's wife needs and treatment better than my friend, and the older doctor who was the original MD agreed and chewed out the young one for being arrogant and not listening to a man who knows his patients better than he does.

 

[B2_Spirit]

Because typically they're not experts - the real experts are in some lab somewhere actually working. These guys are just there to tell you things to make you scared enough to give up your rights.

Since when did the public actually seek out and digest expert information? That's not why the field of PR was created. That's what this stuff is.

Since they (coughMaxwellcough) started to monetize science and scientific findings you're gonna find increasing numbers of "experts" trotting out whatever gets them the next paycheck, too.

 

[Retink]

An expert is only an expert when defined by those with approved opinions, usually not experts themselves. The real pool of experts will have varying opinions based on data interpretation, so there's no shortage to pick from of experts that hold the stance that you agree with and as such it's more about narrative than reality.

A great example is something like the '08 crisis, there were plenty of people who made a lot of money using their expert opinion, which they shared openly, but few wanted to believe them. It was considered to be the end of volatility and those claiming there was a crisis coming were just quacks, but there were many of those quacks and today they're seen as experts because history proved them right. Now let's say I pick one of those prophets, such as Peter Schiff, and listen to him today, I'll probably be listening to one of those experts who will be proven wrong as he has been with his anti-Bitcoin stance and the like, but hey, he's an expert that doesn't like Bitcoin and is a gold maximalist, so if that's your cup of tea you can present him as one of the experts that agree that Bitcoin is rubbish along with Warren Buffet and others. You'll be wrong of course, but you can find enough big names out there to make the claim that experts agree while discounting contrary opinion as denialism or having conflict of interest to push a narrative.