Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—and How to Know When Not to Trust Them David H. Freedman (Little, Brown)
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Of course, the tech guy and other modern experts are more effective than some rustic auto-da-fé—right? David H. Freedman‘s Wrong may make you wonder. Experts, Freedman argues quite convincingly, don’t know what they’re talking about most of the time. The rest of the time, they really don’t know what they’re talking about. Should you bother with the breathing part of CPR, or should you just do chest pumps? Is it better to get nine hours of sleep a night or five? Does Vitamin D fend off cancer? The experts’ guesses are only marginally better than yours or mine.
But that’s not exactly news. More surprising is Freedman’s frontal assault on practices in the hard sciences. He notes, for example, that scientific studies often involve tests on mice, which may provide all kinds of insights into rodents but tend to yield very little useful information about humans. Experts, he says, also make shit up: Freedman points to numerous surveys of scientists showing that 10 to 20 percent of them have been involved in or observed research fraud. In just one example he cites, “a 2005 survey of the authors of clinical drug trials reported that 17 percent of the respondents personally knew of fabrication in a research study within the past ten years, with 5 percent having been directly involved in a study in which there had been fabrication.”
Still, it’s not hard to hear the specter of crankery wailing and thrashing just below the measured murmur of reasoned discourse. Freedman keeps his questioning within careful bounds: individual scientists and experts may make errors, but the scientific method itself is at least theoretically sound. And yet once you start looking closely at the farrago of confusion and nonsense Freedman uncovers, well, you don’t have to push very hard before you find yourself wondering how far wrong the experts went on the Kennedy assassination or 9/11—or, for that matter, evolution. Once you’ve walked off the cliff, you just keep falling.
