SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT EXPERT POLITICAL JUDGMENT: REPLY TO THE SYMPOSIUM

Imagine devoting years of arduous study to master the intricacies of a subject*and years more of hard labor applying and refining your knowledge in your chosen profession. You secure a steady income and the respect of your peers and the broader society. And then along comes the Information Revolution which starts to nibble away, ever more aggressively as the decades pass, at your professional prerogatives. Computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, and evidence-based management consultants demonstrate that increasing percentages of your work could be done better by ever more sophisticated sets of algorithms (Dawes, Meehl, and Faust 1989)*and the remainder of your job could be done better if you were held tightly accountable for following a public checklist of do’s and don’ts (Gawande 2010). Statisticians show that your judgment is no more accurate than, and often less accurate than, the wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki 2004). In a nutshell, your status as an expert is under siege. The mystique of professionalism surrounding you and your pronouncements has begun to fade*and so does demand for your services. Sociologists who specialize in the study of professions see a familiar pattern. Professions are doomed to fall from grace when they lose their ability to convince powerful outsiders that they possess special judgmental skills that cannot be easily reproduced elsewhere (Wilensky