Chapter 13 - TRUSTING EXPERTS—AND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
We all need experts. Scientists will be happy to tell you that journalists, consumers, and policy makers don’t understand science and need expert advice. But they themselves struggle to see that they also need input from experts. We scientists need to learn how to increase the diversity of our field, consider the ethics of what we are doing, and reach out to nonscientists and explain our work.
The knowledge gap between experts (be they scientists, medical doctors, or economists) and nonexperts is increasing, and perversely our reliance on these experts is decreasing. This is due in part to the fact that we often have a misguided overconfidence in our knowledge, something Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, psychologists at Yale University, termed the illusion of explanatory depth. According to them, “most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and ...
