Comment on The Statistician's Fallacy

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 07:05:57 GMT

Experts have perverse incentives to overstate the value of their expertise. An academic paper concluding "the tools of our profession are more powerful than we thought because...." is much more likely to get published than one concluding the reverse. The flaws you see in expert opinions might mostly be pushing the conclusions in the direction that makes the experts' advice seem more important.

Examples? There may be a weak effect of this sort, but my best attempts to survey available examples in my Trusting Expert Consensus post suggest it's actually pretty hard for an entire discipline to convery on stupid conclusions.

Because of political correctness in academia, you can't much generalize from how academics treat IQ to how we handle most other topics.

I dunno, academic subjects seem pretty full of ideological landmines. My two other examples in this post, for example, had to do with environmentalism, which is pretty politically charged.

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