I took the title for this article from the July 2012 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, which featured an opinion piece by Philip Tetrock, who wrote the book Everything Is Obvious Once You Know The answer.
Tetrock conducted a study in which he had 284 political experts make about 100 predictions. For each of these predictions, Tetlock insisted that the experts specify which of two outcomes they expected and also assign a probability to their prediction. He did so in a way that confident predictions scored more points when correct, but also lost more points when mistaken. With those predictions in hand, he then sat back and waited for the events themselves to play out. Twenty years later, he published his results.
What he discovered was surprising. Although the experts performed slightly better than random guessing, they did not perform as well as even a minimally sophisticated statistical model. Even more amazing, the experts did slightly better when operating outside their area of expertise than within it.
Tetrock also found that when they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.
We’ll go a little further than Tetrock. We have no study to back us up, but we think that the more educated some of these experts are, the more likely they seem to be to dismiss the opinions of others. It can even become a kind of arrogance where the experts are willing to be wrong for what they think are the right reasons.
A perfect example of this is the case of Douglas Wise, a former Defense Intelligence Agency deputy director and former senior CIA operations officer. He was one of more than 50 former intelligence officials who signed a letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election as likely “Russian disinformation.” In an interview with The Australian, Wise admits that he and others always knew that the emails on the Hunter Biden laptop were likely genuine. Yet Wise doesn’t admit he did anything wrong; and he still maintains that, while the laptop story was factual, he and the other officials were right to call it out as likely “disinformation.”
Then there is the case of Doctor Deborah Birx, former President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. She certainly qualifies as an expert; her three-decade-long career focused on HIV/AIDS immunology and vaccine research. She too decided to do the wrong thing for what she thought was the “right reason,” by telling the President and the American people something different than what she really knew and believed.
In her new book, "Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late, Birx admits the following.
Remember 15 days to stop the spread? Although she pushed a short lock-down strategy, she actually wanted to isolate every single person in the United States. Writing about how many people would be allowed to gather she said: If I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a lockdown – the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”
She also said: “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection.” In contrast, she told ABC in late 2020: “this is one of the most highly effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic!
In our opinion, Dr. Birx and Mr. Wise are just two examples of powerful and influential people who used their important positions to shape public opinion; unfortunately, they hid what they truly believed in an effort to push the American people toward the direction they favored. Deep down, they did not trust the American people to make their own fully informed decisions.
It is too easy to criticize these experts by just saying, in retrospect, that their expert opinions were absolutely wrong. It is now obvious to everyone that the Hunter Biden laptop story was accurate and not Russian disinformation; in fact, the only disinformation here came from the experts! As for Dr. Birx’s preference of a lockdown for everybody, the recent and brutal lockdown imposed by the dictatorial Chinese government was an unmitigated disaster, for covid infections surged in its immediate aftermath. She could not have been more wrong, so thank God the Chinese experience was not imposed on the American people.
What is worse, however, is when these experts - these unelected bureaucrats - insist on creating policies that negatively affect the American people, even though they know their policies will not work. From early on in the pandemic, they all knew that the lockdowns, the vaccines and the boosters would not stop transmission of the virus; yet President Biden himself called it the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” He announced a vaccine mandate for all federal workers and contractors, and a requirement that large companies must mandate vaccines or regular testing for employees. Those employees who refused would be fired.
Ask yourself: do you really want one person – the President of the United States – to have the absolute power to fire millions of people? If you are really worried about “the threat to democracy,” you should be very alarmed by this Presidential claim of authority.
There is only one good thing we can say about the “misinformation” coming from these experts, is that, in the future, the American people will not be so quick to trust them. Hopefully, US citizens will not tolerate the experts, who are so sure they are doing the right thing, that they are willing to misinform us, so they can get what they think is the “right” result.
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