Reading the Room: Quick Assessment of a Range of Expert Views

Reading the Room: Quick Assessment of a Range of Expert Views

For a lot of things in life, you can trust a single person. A good doctor or trusted mechanic will give you a lot of advice that just might be worth taking.

For issues where you do not have a trusted expert at hand, your best bet on getting a good treatment is usually not to put your faith in a single expert or professional. And even where you do have an expert handy, if the decision is particularly important (for example, around surgery), you might want a second opinion. For things that matter, you’re going to want to understand what a range of experts think.

Let’s start with some definitions of types of agreement and disagreement you find in expert communities.

• Competing theories: There are multiple explanations, and most experts buy into one or another of them, but no one idea is dominant.
• Majority/minority: There is one widely accepted theory, but a nontrivial number of respected experts support one or more alternative theories that the majority concedes are worth consideration.
• Consensus: A rare condition where the majority of experts consider the evidence so compelling that the question is effectively closed. At the margins, a few folks may continue to pursue alternative theories, but most of the discipline has moved on to other questions.
• Uncertainty: This situation might initially look like majority/minority or competing theories, but when you look deeper, you find that most experts are so uncertain they have not invested deeply in any one hypothesis. (This is the sort of situation where the expert in a news article says pointedly, “We just don’t know.”)
• Fringe: For certain issues, in addition to a majority or minority expert viewpoint, you will find fringe viewpoints. Fringe viewpoints are not minority viewpoints—experts may disagree with minority viewpoints, but they consider them, nonetheless. Those espousing minority viewpoints argue their case with those espousing majority viewpoints, and vice versa. Fringe viewpoints, on the other hand, are viewpoints that have no support among the vast majority of respected scholars in the field. As such, these views are not even in dialogue with scholars in related disciplines or most individuals in a profession.

So how do you go about “reading the expert room” on various issues? This doesn’t mean you have to agree with the smartest expert or the most people. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. You may look at a majority/minority divide on the benefits of taking a given medication and go with the minority. You might have to wade in and make your best guess in choosing between competing theories. Or, sensing the level of uncertainty on an issue, even among experts, you might wisely decide to take no position at all—at least for now.

But we do want you to avoid what we call trust compression.[1]