This means that, when making decisions that require expert perspective, it might be a mark of a true expert to admit that he or she doesn’t know, at least not yet. And, if we aren’t sure what questions are answerable, we are vulnerable to uninformed experts convincing us they have the answers. Even worse, good experts, when posed an unanswerable question, might do the same. From the expert perspective, they know that admitting uncertainty can harm their reputation, because bad experts are more likely to be uninformed than good ones. More concretely, saying ‘I don’t know’ makes for bad punditry, and unenviable terrain for ambitious analysts or consultants hoping to justify their hourly rate. [...]
Bad policy can also come about when the research frontier doesn’t offer definitive answers, or gives the wrong answers. The history of medicine is littered with examples of treatments that we now know did more harm than good, such as bloodletting, tobacco and opium. All of these techniques had ‘evidence’ that they were in fact healthy, from vague theories about ‘humours’ (bloodletting) to real evidence that they reduced pain, but without sufficient consideration of side effects (opium). Many lives would have been saved if doctors realised that they didn’t know whether these treatments worked well enough to outweigh the side-effects, and were able to admit this. [...]
What can we do about this problem? A seemingly obvious solution would be to check whether expert claims are correct. If experts who make strong claims that are then refuted are chastised and not hired in the future, this might deter them from overclaiming. Alas, the punishment for guessing wrong never seems to be that high: the architects of the Iraq War and those responsible for decisions that led to the 2008 financial crises are generally doing quite well, professionally. And our model gives a theoretical justification for why. Just as some experts who don’t have a good answer to questions really are competent but face an unanswerable question, those who guess and end up being incorrect might be competent too. In fact, if all uninformed experts guess at the truth, then guessing and being wrong is no worse than just admitting uncertainty outright. So the uninformed might as well roll the dice and guess: if they are right, they look competent; if not, they look no worse than if they had been honest about their uncertainty.
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