Rejecting the experts

How do you reason?

One of our consultants recently reread an essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes, an author much respected though perhaps not on the tips of people’s tongues nowadays.  In it he deprecates the use of logic and bald facts in conversation, asserting that anything can be proved by logic, including (for instance) that Napoleon never existed.  Of course Holmes was being purposely provocative, as essayists sometimes are.  His actual point was that conversation should not be structured like a mathematical proof. Also, that one should take advantage of the considered opinions of those who have shown themselves to be reliable (in our paraphrase); though he does not go into detail about how one shows this.  In other situations Holmes is happy to employ logic; he cannot be considered an inveterate foe of the practice.

In the same essay a relatively uneducated character asserts that he is happy to employ his own common sense, rather than any fine reasoning.  Certainly nowadays a similar suspicion of logic and experts in general is widespread.  Indeed, it might be considered a hallmark of recent years.  Leaving aside the large-scale implications and effects of this, we considered how it might come about.

“Proving that Napoleon never existed” indicates one source: the fallacious argument.  The trappings of logic can be, and often are, misused.  Finding the flaw(s) in an apparently persuasive line of reasoning can be fiendishly difficult.  Our astronomer can quote two arguments in favor of extremely long lifetimes for stars that were accepted for decades, before further work demolished them.  This happened in a consciously rational science.

But careful and tiny flaws are not at all necessary, as long as the argument leads where the proponent wants it to go.  This is an extremely human thing.  Wanting something, we work out reasons why it should come to be.  A common argument among paradoxers goes something like, “The establishment rejected Galileo; Galileo was proved correct.  The establishment rejects me, so I shall be proved correct.”  This is simple and easy to state.  The counter, that the establishment has also rejected an enormous number of people who turned out to be incorrect, is harder to express as a slogan.

Well, if someone does not have the education or training to follow an expert’s argument well enough to detect possible flaws, what can he or she do?  Our astronomer once wrote a book attempting to answer this question.  It was well-received, but probably didn’t fulfill its aim.  We have also addressed the topic in this blog.  In practice, as Holmes’ character did, people fall back on “common sense.”  And as Montaigne (another essayist) observed, this quality must be the most fairly distributed in the world, since everyone knows they have exactly as much as they need.

Not to put too fine a point on it, common sense is simply a number of years of accumulated prejudice.  At best, it is what we remember worked in the past (and memory is a chancy thing).  Often it leads to nonsense.  People go to great lengths to avoid a chemical that someone has suggested might lead to a higher rate of cancer over a lifetime.  As the same time, they concentrate on their smartphone while driving and so greatly increase the chance of dying in a car crash.  As a rule, people are terrible at estimating risks.

People are not logical.  This is not the fault of logic.