Noreena Hertz: How to use experts -- and when not to

It's Monday morning.

In Washington,

the president of the United States

is sitting in the Oval Office,

assessing whether or not

to strike Al Qaeda

in Yemen.

At Number 10 Downing Street,

David Cameron is trying to work out

whether to cut more public sector jobs

in order to stave off a double-dip recession.

In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez

is standing at the door,

listening to her baby crying and crying,

trying to work out whether she should let it cry

until it falls asleep

or pick it up and hold it.

And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital,

trying to work out

whether I should let him drink

the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water

that his doctors just came in and said,

"You must make him drink today," --

my father's been nil by mouth for a week --

or whether, by giving him this bottle,

I might actually kill him.

We face momentous decisions

with important consequences

throughout our lives,

and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions.

We talk things over with our friends,

we scour the Internet,

we search through books.

But still,

even in this age

of Google and TripAdvisor

and Amazon Recommends,

it's still experts

that we rely upon most --

especially when the stakes are high

and the decision really matters.

Because in a world of data deluge

and extreme complexity,

we believe that experts

are more able to process information than we can --

that they are able to come to better conclusions

than we could come to on our own.

And in an age

that is sometimes nowadays frightening

or confusing,

we feel reassured

by the almost parental-like authority

of experts

who tell us so clearly what it is

we can and cannot do.

But I believe

that this is a big problem,

a problem with potentially dangerous consequences

for us as a society,

as a culture

and as individuals.

It's not that experts

have not massively contributed to the world --

of course they have.

The problem lies with us:

we've become addicted to experts.

We've become addicted to their certainty,

their assuredness,

their definitiveness,

and in the process,

we have ceded our responsibility,

substituting our intellect

and our intelligence

for their supposed words of wisdom.

We've surrendered our power,

trading off our discomfort

with uncertainty

for the illusion of certainty

that they provide.

This is no exaggeration.

In a recent experiment,

a group of adults

had their brains scanned in an MRI machine

as they were listening to experts speak.

The results were quite extraordinary.

As they listened to the experts' voices,

the independent decision-making parts of their brains

switched off.

It literally flat-lined.

And they listened to whatever the experts said

and took their advice, however right or wrong.

But experts do get things wrong.

Did you know that studies show

that doctors misdiagnose

four times out of 10?

Did you know

that if you file your tax returns yourself,

you're statistically more likely

to be filing them correctly

than if you get a tax adviser

to do it for you?

And then there's, of course, the example

that we're all too aware of:

financial experts

getting it so wrong

that we're living through the worst recession

since the 1930s.

For the sake of our health,

our wealth

and our collective security,

it's imperative that we keep

the independent decision-making parts of our brains

switched on.

And I'm saying this as an economist

who, over the past few years,

has focused my research

on what it is we think

and who it is we trust and why,

but also --

and I'm aware of the irony here --

as an expert myself,

as a professor,

as somebody who advises prime ministers,

heads of big companies,

international organizations,

but an expert who believes

that the role of experts needs to change,

that we need to become more open-minded,

more democratic

and be more open

to people rebelling against

our points of view.

So in order to help you understand

where I'm coming from,

let me bring you into my world,

the world of experts.

Now there are, of course, exceptions,

wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions.

But what my research has shown me

is that experts tend on the whole

to form very rigid camps,

that within these camps,

a dominant perspective emerges

that often silences opposition,

that experts move with the prevailing winds,

often hero-worshipping

their own gurus.

Alan Greenspan's proclamations

that the years of economic growth

would go on and on,

not challenged by his peers,

until after the crisis, of course.

You see,

we also learn

that experts are located,

are governed,

by the social and cultural norms

of their times --

whether it be the doctors

in Victorian England, say,

who sent women to asylums

for expressing sexual desire,

or the psychiatrists in the United States

who, up until 1973,

were still categorizing homosexuality

as a mental illness.

And what all this means

is that paradigms

take far too long to shift,

that complexity and nuance are ignored

and also that money talks --

because we've all seen the evidence

of pharmaceutical companies

funding studies of drugs

that conveniently leave out

their worst side effects,

or studies funded by food companies

of their new products,

massively exaggerating the health benefits

of the products they're about to bring by market.

The study showed that food companies exaggerated

typically seven times more

than an independent study.

And we've also got to be aware

that experts, of course,

also make mistakes.

They make mistakes every single day --

mistakes born out of carelessness.

A recent study in the Archives of Surgery

reported surgeons

removing healthy ovaries,

operating on the wrong side of the brain,

carrying out procedures on the wrong hand,

elbow, eye, foot,

and also mistakes born out of thinking errors.

A common thinking error

of radiologists, for example --

when they look at CT scans --

is that they're overly influenced

by whatever it is

that the referring physician has said

that he suspects

the patient's problem to be.

So if a radiologist

is looking at the scan

of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say,

what happens is that,

if they see evidence

of pneumonia on the scan,

they literally stop looking at it --

thereby missing the tumor

sitting three inches below

on the patient's lungs.

I've shared with you so far

some insights into the world of experts.

These are, of course,

not the only insights I could share,

but I hope they give you a clear sense at least

of why we need to stop kowtowing to them,

why we need to rebel

and why we need to switch

our independent decision-making capabilities on.

But how can we do this?

Well for the sake of time,

I want to focus on just three strategies.

First, we've got to be ready and willing

to take experts on

and dispense with this notion of them

as modern-day apostles.

This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D.

in every single subject,

you'll be relieved to hear.

But it does mean persisting

in the face of their inevitable annoyance

when, for example,

we want them to explain things to us

in language that we can actually understand.

Why was it that, when I had an operation,

my doctor said to me,

"Beware, Ms. Hertz,

of hyperpyrexia,"

when he could have just as easily said,

"Watch out for a high fever."

You see, being ready to take experts on

is about also being willing

to dig behind their graphs,

their equations, their forecasts,

their prophecies,

and being armed with the questions to do that --

questions like:

What are the assumptions that underpin this?

What is the evidence upon which this is based?

What has your investigation focused on?

And what has it ignored?

It recently came out

that experts trialing drugs

before they come to market

typically trial drugs

first, primarily on male animals

and then, primarily on men.

It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact

that over half the world's population are women.

And women have drawn the short medical straw

because it now turns out that many of these drugs

don't work nearly as well on women

as they do on men --

and the drugs that do work well work so well

that they're actively harmful for women to take.

Being a rebel is about recognizing

that experts' assumptions

and their methodologies

can easily be flawed.

Second,

we need to create the space

for what I call "managed dissent."

If we are to shift paradigms,

if we are to make breakthroughs,

if we are to destroy myths,

we need to create an environment

in which expert ideas are battling it out,

in which we're bringing in

new, diverse, discordant, heretical views

into the discussion,

fearlessly,

in the knowledge that progress comes about,

not only from the creation of ideas,

but also from their destruction --

and also from the knowledge

that, by surrounding ourselves

by divergent, discordant,

heretical views.

All the research now shows us

that this actually makes us smarter.

Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion

because it goes against our very instincts,

which are to surround ourselves

with opinions and advice

that we already believe

or want to be true.

And that's why I talk about the need

to actively manage dissent.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

is a practical practitioner

of this philosophy.

In meetings, he looks out for the person in the room --

arms crossed, looking a bit bemused --

and draws them into the discussion,

trying to see if they indeed are

the person with a different opinion,

so that they have dissent within the room.

Managing dissent

is about recognizing the value

of disagreement, discord

and difference.

But we need to go even further.

We need to fundamentally redefine

who it is that experts are.

The conventional notion

is that experts are people

with advanced degrees,

fancy titles, diplomas,

best-selling books --

high-status individuals.

But just imagine

if we were to junk

this notion of expertise

as some sort of elite cadre

and instead embrace the notion

of democratized expertise --

whereby expertise was not just the preserve

of surgeons and CEO's,

but also shop-girls -- yeah.

Best Buy,

the consumer electronics company,

gets all its employees --

the cleaners, the shop assistants,

the people in the back office,

not just its forecasting team --

to place bets, yes bets,

on things like whether or not

a product is going to sell well before Christmas,

on whether customers' new ideas

are going to be or should be taken on by the company,

on whether a project

will come in on time.

By leveraging

and by embracing

the expertise within the company,

Best Buy was able to discover, for example,

that the store that it was going to open in China --

its big, grand store --

was not going to open on time.

Because when it asked its staff,

all its staff, to place their bets

on whether they thought the store would open on time or not,

a group from the finance department

placed all their chips

on that not happening.

It turned out that they were aware,

as no one else within the company was,

of a technological blip

that neither the forecasting experts,

nor the experts on the ground in China,

were even aware of.

The strategies

that I have discussed this evening --

embracing dissent,

taking experts on,

democratizing expertise,

rebellious strategies --

are strategies that I think

would serve us all well to embrace

as we try to deal with the challenges

of these very confusing, complex,

difficult times.

For if we keep

our independent decision-making part

of our brains switched on,

if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical,

if we devolve authority,

if we are rebellious,

but also

if we become much more comfortable

with nuance,

uncertainty and doubt,

and if we allow our experts

to express themselves

using those terms too,

we will set ourselves up

much better

for the challenges of the 21st century.

For now, more than ever,

is not the time

to be blindly following,

blindly accepting,

blindly trusting.

Now is the time to face the world

with eyes wide open --

yes, using experts

to help us figure things out, for sure --

I don't want to completely do myself out of a job here --

but being aware

of their limitations

and, of course, also our own.

Thank you.

(Applause)