Transcription
Hello! Welcome to the Research and Disinformation series. These videos were made possible by a partnership between the Library and the Rhetoric department at the University of Iowa. My name is Chris Wei, and all my work on the series has been in collaboration with Tim Arnold and Katie Hassman.
Today, we're going to talk about expertise. What we mean by "expertise" is that a source of information will be more or less reliable depending on how consistent its argument, analysis, and reported facts are with the findings of experts in the field. A simpler way to put this is: sources from a position of greater expertise are going to be relatively more trustworthy and well-informed.
Bear with me, but we're going to start by talking about plumbing. (Full disclosure: I don't know anything about plumbing! And that's, oddly enough, exactly why we're going to talk about it.) Imagine, hypothetically, that I were to run into a plumbing issue at my house—maybe my kitchen sink starts overflowing, or my pipes start breaking. Obviously, it would be important, as I research and solve the problem, that I know who to trust and who not to trust, right? In other words, that I know how to recognize expertise.
But just as important as recognizing other people's expertise is my attitude about my own knowledge (or rather, my gaps in knowledge). I need to recognize my lack of expertise in the subject to effectively interact with new information about it. So if I were to call my brother-in-law (a mechanical engineer who happens to know a great deal about plumbing) but then ignore, amend, or abridge his advice, or treat his expertise dismissively, that would be pretty unwise! I might mess up my sink or my pipes even worse than they were before.
Let's do a very quick exercise. I want you to get a piece of paper and write down a list of biases, assumptions, blind spots, or knowledge gaps that you personally might have. Just write a list of things that you know you don't know. [Bill: "Socrates [says] 'the only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing.'"] [Ted: "that's us, dude!"] You can pause the video and take a few minutes for this activity. Come back when you're finished.
At this point you may be wondering: "Chris, are you telling me to ignore my own intuitions, to discount my own perspective? Are you telling me that I can't claim my own authority?" And my answer to this is, well, yes and no: it's complicated. Of course it's important to have confidence in your own ability to perceive patterns in the world and make sense of your experiences, but it's also important to recognize the limits—the boundaries—of your own knowledge. Especially when we do research of any kind, we've got to cultivate a humble attitude and a curious, open frame of mind, and we need to trust those whose expertise surpasses our own. We need to be ready to challenge our own preconceptions. So if you're like me and you don't know anything about plumbing, for example, part of what this means is that you should call and rely on someone who knows what they're doing.
But an important question remains: who exactly are you going to call? What makes some sources of information more valuable than others? And if you and I have knowledge gaps and biases (those things you wrote down on your piece of paper), then what about the experts? They're just human beings, which means they're fallible: they have their own knowledge gaps and biases, too, right? To respond to this, we need to start thinking systemically. So let's consider some best practices: some methods and processes by which institutions try to vet their own information and check themselves to maintain reliability. Once you understand how these practices work on a systemic level, hopefully you'll be able to recognize when a source is being careful rather than reckless.
One big one that you'll see specifically in scholarly or academic work is called "peer review." You've probably heard this term before, but might not know exactly what it means. Essentially, peer review works like this: If I'm hoping to publish a scholarly article, reputable academic journals will only publish my piece once other experts in the field have rigorously double-checked what I've written—to make sure that my claims are logical, my use of data is responsible and precise, my engagement with previous literature is appropriate and accurate, and my contribution to my field of research is in line with the existing body of knowledge. In other words, other experts check my blind spots. And it's important to emphasize here that these are experts: people who have studied my topic for many years. If I want to publish something in a peer-reviewed journal, it won't be double-checked by just anybody. [Ryan George: "So what's your source on that? 'Based on this scientific paper I read!' "That's just a paper with the word 'science' misspelled on it." 'Well, I don't know what to tell you, sir—it's peer-reviewed!' "Multiple scientists looked over that and approved of it?" 'No, some drunk guy on the pier checked it out: he loved it!' "That is technically peer-reviewed; I think we're good!"]
Furthermore, when these experts look at my manuscript, it's anonymized, which means they don't know I'm the one who wrote it. This is important: it helps eliminate bias that might have crept in if they, for example, like or dislike me. So we can be sure that their individual feelings about me as a scholar or a person are irrelevant to the assessment of my work. This double-blindness also attempts to remove other kinds of bias beyond personal relationships. For example, if my readers don't see my name, which may carry various cultural signifiers, then they can't use cultural biases (things like race, class, ethnicity, or gender) to discriminate unfairly against my scholarship.
You might think that a system like this, in which peers double-check each other, would just create an echo chamber, but it's not like scholars never disagree with each other—actually they often do! However, those disagreements should ideally be rooted in a shared understanding of the facts and concepts. So when someone who's not an expert in a given field reads some scholarly information on the topic, the peer-review system helps ensure that the information is reliable.
Another institution to keep in mind is journalism. Usually when we talk about journalistic rigor, we talk about "fact-checking," and that's an important part of it, but beyond mere accuracy there's a broad general code of ethics that journalists try to follow. I want to emphasize that these core values are aspirational; they're not hard and fast rules. Some publications are stricter than others about maintaining them. In the best situations, an editor or ombudsman or news counsel will carefully vet an article before publishing it, but even when an editor isn't careful enough, the main thing to remember about journalism is that it is accountable. A newspaper, magazine, or broadcast news station can be sued for libel if they misrepresent a story... [Peter: "Spider-Man wasn't attacking the city; he was trying to save it. That's slander!"] [Jameson: "It is not! I resent that. 'Slander' is spoken; in print, it's 'libel.'"] ...whereas social media platforms, for example, are legally immune from libel laws.
So, to be clear, it's not that newspapers are perfect or even that academic journals are perfect. Peer-review systems and fact-checking systems are run by human beings, who might make mistakes. But something that's gone through a vetting process will be more reliable than something that hasn't. It's coming from a position of greater expertise. So when you do research, you want to pay attention not just to where information is coming from, but also to that institution's standards. On average, you can trust a peer-reviewed article more than some anonymous blog; you can trust a thorough piece of investigative journalism more than some random social media post; etc.
All of this is to say that expertise exists, and that it matters. It's more of a spectrum than a binary, but some types of sources are more trustworthy than others. The goal is to 1) understand the limits of your own expertise and knowledge; and 2) to seek out the best, most thoroughly vetted information possible from those whose expertise exceeds your own.
Our next two episodes will offer some practical application of these concepts, and we'll walk you through a critical reading technique called "lateral reading," so be sure to check that out. In the meantime, stay safe, stay informed, and we'll see you next time!