Experts and Funding Research
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 05, 1999
Two Sorts of Problems
There are two sorts of problem—those to which we know the solution and real problems.
The first sort of problem is simply a task that needs to be done. Similar tasks have been done before and there are people around who have done them. Assuming their solutions to the problem have been successful—and sometimes even if they haven’t—these people are experts at that particular task. They know what to do to go about accomplishing the task and can generally be relied upon to complete it. Such a problem might be how we can get a lot of traffic from Humberside to Lincolnshire. The answer is to build a large bridge and the experts know how to do it. You might wish to have your poetry translated into Ugarit. The expert would know English and Ugarit and have a good sense of the poetic in both languages and be able to complete the task. They are judged as expert or otherwise by their results.
Real problems however are those which have not yet been solved. Political questions. How can we run the economy fairly so that everyone benefits and no one suffers? How can we make our leaders accountable? Scientific or medical problems like how to cure cancer or provide a plentiful safe source of energy. Or religious or spiritual problems like the existence of God or the forgiveness of sin. Or both. What is consciousness? What makes people criminals? There can be no experts on matter like these because no one knows the answers.
Isn’t it strange then that the most influential experts in our lives are exactly those people who claim expertise in these questions: politicians, scientists and evangelisers. We want to improve community relations or get better social services so we set up a pressure group. Who do we choose to lead it? A politician—one of that group of experts who have consistently failed to solve or even address the problem. And politicians always set up a circus of other experts—sociologists, policemen, probation officers—to obfuscate and delay for as long as possible under the guise of looking into it. We want to get justice and better conditions in our inner cities. Who do we turn to? The local priest or bishop. Forget it! Experts in matters spiritual they might be but the clergy have never consistently chosen God above the secular powers that be.
Scientific Experts
What of the scientists? Surely they are just honest men doing a job. Yes, many are. But take care when the news media announce that an expert has declared beef fit to eat or cigarettes safe to smoke, or nuclear power safer than crossing the road. Ask yourself; who is paying this person when they pronounce thus? The opinion is not independent of its owner—not the expert but a large corporation, or a government trying to remain popular with its own paymasters—the large corporations! And if we are public spirited and have raised money to finance medical research, to whom do we give it to decide how it should be spent? All of those medical experts who have failed to solve the problem hitherto. They will vote the money to themselves to continue their unsuccessful methods and comfortable lifestyles.
The paradox of these experts is that, on the definition of the expert as someone who knows how to solve a problem, they are, not only not experts, but they are failures! They have been trying for long periods, millennia in the case of religious experts, and they still do not know the answers to the problems lay people think they had solved.
What then are the criteria that these experts claim give them expertise and which impress the gullible?—the rest of us! Let us call them True Experts because that is what they believe they are. A real expert is, to them, merely a mechanic, a technician, a clerk or an infidel.
True Experts
True Experts must establish a reputation as having thought a great deal about some deep issue. As long as it is prestigious, it does not have to be the problem of immediate concern as long as it can be linked with it by some connexion however tenuous. It is by this means that committees set up to investigate almost anything of public concern contrive to have one or more priests or prelates as members. Their unfamiliarity with the matter under discussion is perceived as a benefit which allows them—under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—to be quite objective. To be fair to the clergy the same arguments can be used for anyone from the local MP to a Nobel Laureate since committees always want to seem particularly important and therefore seek important experts on anything to boost their credentials.
True Experts must be highly regarded by others in the same field—their peers. The purpose of this is self-enhancement and safety in numbers. Since there is not a single professional Christian that can prove they have saved someone’s soul as they claim to do, it is important that they should all stand as one and make their claims in unison. It is hard for the confused onlooker to believe that so many clever people are charlatans or deluded.
True Experts must show no signs of becoming actually expert in their field. To solve a problem is inconsiderate to all of one’s friends who have set up schools to investigate it. This is intolerable to true experts who get all their status in life from the admiration of their peers, get their research funds approved and their papers accepted by peer review and ultimately reach the Nirvana of the editorial board and the XYZ Research Approval Committee. A major break-through renders all this old-hat. Those that announce a breakthrough are instantly denounced by their peers as immature, mavericks or publicity seekers. Their erstwhile colleagues unite to disprove whatever discovery has been claimed. If you don’t believe it, think about it. If I proved that particle accelerators simply made exotic particles from the input energy and none of it had anything to do with atomic structure, a lot of expensive equipment and comfortable lifestyles would have to be abandoned. Do you think petroleum company employees, garage owners and motor manufacturers would allow the internal combustion engine to be superseded? In academia the easiest way to make sure nobody rocks the boat is to make sure any revolutionary proposals are not funded. Peer group research committees constantly baulk at innovative research proposals and academic institutions usually ensure that solitary mavericks are sacked, promoted into non-jobs or gagged with threats. Did you ever wonder why genius is considered akin to madness? It is so that research committees can say that clever maverick scientists are insane and refuse them funding.
For this reason True Experts are never in a hurry to become experts anyway. If a True Expert finds a wonder drug that without exception shrivels up every sarcoma it meets, the True Expert will keep their discovery secret while they carry out decades of trials enabling them to write lots of abstracts, papers, summaries, reviews and plenary lectures, get tons of research money from corporations who also have time to learn how to make the drug on a commercial scale, engage hundreds of research students, and build themselves an empire and a reputation. He says that to do otherwise would engender "false hopes". Real hopes require endless tests and trials, research committees and appeals for fresh funds. That keeps the incomprehending masses happy raising or giving money, both of which are good for their souls. Too bad if their beloved mothers or sons die meantime.
So True Experts are always cautious, not wanting to risk sullying a carefully moulded reputation by making false claims, claiming breakthroughs or miracle cures lest they should prove to be false hopes—a convincing attitude admittedly. The exception to this is, as we saw, when their paymasters want them to help get them out of some publicity hole. Then they have to allay public concern by making ex cathedra statements (even our language comes from the original experts!) to save their masters’ bacon. Odds on the truth is the opposite!
The Anti-Expert
Worthy people raise money for favourite medical charities by street fairs, village fetes and jumble sales but the money is then turned over to committees of doctors who have failed for fifty years to find cures for the major diseases. The committees are made up of True Experts who siphon the funds into extant projects that have gone nowhere and are unlikely to get anywhere. They are great for building reputations but lousy for curing AIDS, heart disease or cancer.
A new discipline needs to be created—the anti-expert! An anti-expert committee would consist of satirists who are quick to spot cant, sports statisticians who can work out relative batting averages, sufferers from the problem and potential beneficiaries, inventors to decide whether there are better ways of doing it than that proposed, two or three children aged about 12 to whom the proposal has to be explained, a couple of real experts who have succeeded in turning ideas into practical propositions and a separate committee of about 100 average taxpayers who will hear the recommendations and vote on whether it is worth it to the public purse.
The application would be judged on;
- innovation—dull continuing research which has not got anywhere should only have spare funds,
- the recent success of the applicants—if it’s fine today there is a good chance it will be fine tomorrow but last week’s weather is irrelevant,
- immediacy—results which will lead to immediate benefits should not be ditched for "fundamental" research,
- flexibility—the consideration of possible outcomes that might change the direction of the research into more productive channels,
- unpredictability—if the outcome is predictable then it is not research and should be left for commercial developers who want profits without risk,
- size of grants—should be modest because breakthroughs are usually inspired rather than obtained through grind. The big funds and the grind can come after the breakthrough when commercial interests can take over.
The consequence of this would be that peer group judgement—which is actually valueless because it is really peer group chuminess—would be abandoned. Innovative lower budget projects would be preferred over low-risk plodding research. Research offering immediate real benefits would be preferred over expensive long term projects—research into robot limbs might be fashionable but vastly cheaper research into wheel chairs might be far more useful to sufferers. Long term projects would not be disallowed but would have lower priority and would have to meet the other criteria. Dr David Horrobin who has directed research rightly insists that basic research is not basic because it is poor quality but because it is fundamental. Yet much of the funded research is really poor quality. To be valuable, basic research too has to be inspired.
Dr Horrobin proposed much of this twenty years ago. Does anybody know whether anything has changed?
From Sydney Ross Singer: I enjoyed your article very much. I am a medical anthropologist who researches the lifestyle/cultural causes of disease. Our most known work is the link between breast cancer and bras, discussed in our book Dressed To Kill. I constantly struggle against the medical “experts.” You would like our website www.SelfStudyCenter.org. We believe everyone should be their own health expert. Check out our Note To Doctors.
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