A few years ago, I imagine many scientists would have wished that science stories more often made front page news. Besides colorful photos of the surface of Mars or attention-grabbing reports of cancer again cured in mice, most scientific progress is shared in ways inaccessible to the public: at poster sessions, behind paywalls, and via the esoterica of academic social media. Even the splashiest of the passions to which scientists have dedicated themselves are usually relegated to one of a dozen tabs under the header of the Times, available to those not already burned out by everything above the fold.
Then it was 2020, the monkey’s paw curled, and a particular science story came to define an era. SARS-CoV-2 and all its deadly unknowns indeed made front page news, and they have largely remained there ever since. Everyone discussing science all the time, however, might not be the enlightenment we had anticipated. Lab scientists are now experiencing what economists, political scientists, and other intellectuals have always thanklessly endured: people with platforms approaching their fields and being loudly, confidently wrong.
At the risk of overgeneralizing, science is not well designed to be fully interpretable by those not studying it. While an artist may create with a viewer in mind, or a historian can provide an accessible perspective on a notable event, research sciences tend to enter laypeople’s lives only after years of jargon-dense publications have yielded new therapeutics for use or new technologies for purchase. If such items do their jobs, our field has done its own, often with no explanation needed. But the COVID-19 pandemic has forced a pivot in this regard, tossing researchers typically cooped up in conference halls into a flood of limelight, asked by a desperate public for simple answers to questions that did not exist only months prior. In an environment of such ambiguous, complex, and critically consequential information, it’s no wonder that society has taken to consulting those who should know best: the experts.
To their immense credit, many academics and health professionals have shouldered this mantle in the past year, and the vast majority of such experts have saved countless lives by doing so. Epidemiologists have taken to print, television, and the internet to explain the origin of the virus, its myriad symptoms, and what steps we can take to limit infection. Since our earliest lockdowns, teams of qualified researchers have assembled plan after plan for flattening the curve and stopping the spread prior to any hope of vaccines [1, 2]. And with several news sites still offering their coronavirus coverage for free, perhaps never has well-sourced information been so readily and encouragingly available.
Yet, time and again, government officials and crowds of Americans have seemed loath to act on said well-sourced advice. An evidence-based plan for reopening was not adopted at the federal level for almost a year; meanwhile, scores of views racked up on misleading videos such as a now-deleted press conference by two urgent care doctors arguing that COVID-19 is no deadlier than the flu [3]. As prominent a figure as Elon Musk fell for their provocative and irresponsible claims, which were “emphatically” denounced by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine [4, 5]. The opinions of renowned antivaxxers and pseudoscience practitioners were also shared widely online, raising a perplexing question: If experts are our key to the smartest strategies and best available facts, why do some of us not listen to them [6, 7]? Though numerous cognitive biases and overt political motivations may drive a large portion of this behavior, I think an underappreciated element lies in how the public views the role of expertise in the world. By assigning experts inappropriately broad domains and stripping them of reasonable human fallibility, we set up our most valuable resources for failure—and have done so over and over during this crisis.
Firstly, non-academics may be unaware of how specific expertise truly is. As science writer Emily Willingham points out, a nutritional epidemiologist is a different kind of authority than an infectious disease epidemiologist, both of whom are not interchangeable with their viral geneticist colleague [8]. A robust response to the current pandemic requires input from all of these disciplines, but three such researchers are not equivalent simply because their names are trailed by Ph.D. or M.D. Expertise is not transitive; two forms of epidemiology being similar enough does not mean training in one counts as training in another.
This fallacy is not exclusive to science. Think of recent ads for MasterClass online courses, where one can learn the art of acting from legends like Samuel L. Jackson and Helen Mirren. The professions of acting and teaching acting may feel similar, but as best I can find, these accomplished actors have no credentials as educators beyond playing them onscreen. Acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts a class as well, and among the subjects he covers are cognitive and cultural biases, which, to my knowledge, he has never studied [9]. Regardless of how well these lessons are instructed, the implication that physicists can be consulted on psychological topics sets a dangerous precedent.
Perhaps part of our reason for irresponsibly extrapolating expertise is the halo effect, letting our respect for these authorities in one field cast too warm a glow on our judgment of their mastery of others [10]. While distinct disciplines can certainly overlap, and expertise in multiple is surely possible, we’re soon enough trusting urgent care physicians as if they were immunologists. Indeed, when the experts themselves fall for this illusion, we have a case of what philosopher Nathan Ballantyne calls epistemic trespassing: someone perfectly competent in one area begins making claims in another, without the knowledge to support them, and with a much greater chance of error [11].
Modeled predictions of total American deaths due to COVID-19 vary widely, both a year ago and today. Forecasts are provided by the Centers for Disease Control and are in the public domain.
Inappropriately inflating experts’ domains is damaging as is, but in so doing, we undermine expertise in a second way by exposing our experts to more situations where they may be wrong. An easily falsifiable tweet about evolutionary biology from the aforementioned astrophysicist serves as an obvious example [12]. But even when an expert makes a mistake within their appropriate field, a fallacy kicks in that prematurely discredits them for being incorrect. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once estimated that the U.S. would suffer just 60,000 COVID-19-related deaths, down from a prior estimate of 100,000 [13]. This number has since needed updating by almost an order of magnitude, but to distrust Fauci’s advice as a result of such an error—as many have done—is misguided. In a situation rife with unknowns, new information is continually generated, and models are perpetually updated [14]. While some models may be more correct than others, a flawed choice does not retroactively rescind Fauci’s qualification to have made that choice. Much discussion has also taken place around the reversal of masking advice by the Centers for Disease Control, in opposite directions both this spring and last, but the same concept applies: experts can disagree, but they have all spent the bulk of their lives earning the standing to do so.
To be sure, a pattern of blatantly inaccurate advice or interpretation of data should call into question one’s status as an expert, but a small fraction of predictions that do not bear out is no such pattern. As with any human or institution, errors are inevitable when uncertainty abounds. That an expert is far less fallible than a layperson in their topic of study does not mean they have transcended fallibility entirely, and to expect otherwise is to misunderstand the power and possibility of expertise. But this reality is only compounded when experts speak outside their topics of study, accruing otherwise avoidable mistakes that further provoke cynicism toward sound science.
Given all of these misconceptions, how then are we to engage with experts both during the pandemic and beyond it? To start, science communication must better acknowledge the way that science itself is constructed—as a collection of specialized subfields, each with unique and vast nuances. The public often needs scientific authorities to make sense of opaque data, but for these abilities to be meaningful, they can’t be cast over broad categories like “biology” or “physics.” The scholarship that falls under either classification is simply too extensive for any one individual to master. Specificity is crucial for expertise to retain its strength, and this is a lesson worth learning by the public and the press.
Furthermore, scientists need to present a united front by knowing their appropriate domains and trespassing only with the greatest humility. Collaboration and critique across disciplines are critical to the progress of science, and they have been fundamental to recent success in vaccine development, but they should be undertaken in a way that does not blur lines from the perspective of newly interested and sometimes desperate onlookers. This restriction of the arena in which a scientist operates can seem like a stifling game of optics, but it is of utmost importance as a foundation of trust in science at large. As far as some are concerned, when anyone can be an expert, evidently no one is.
Edited by Daniel Roybal
References
“Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience.” Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University, 20 Apr. 2020, ethics.harvard.edu/covid-roadmap.
Dearen, Jason, and Mike Stobbe. “Trump Administration Buries Detailed CDC Advice on Reopening.” AP News, The Associated Press, 7 May 2020, apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-health-us-news-ap-top-news-politics-7a00d5fba3249e573d2ead4bd323a4d4.
Stolberg, Sheryl Gay. “Biden Unveils National Strategy That Trump Resisted.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Jan. 2021, nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/politics/biden-coronavirus-response.html.
@elonmusk (Elon Musk). “Docs make good points.” Twitter, 26 Apr. 2020, 3:38 p.m., twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1254495050228260865.
“ACEP-AAEM Joint Statement on Physician Misinformation.” ACEP, American College of Emergency Physicians, 27 Apr. 2020, acep.org/corona/covid-19-alert/covid-19-articles/acep-aaem-joint-statement-on-physician-misinformation.
Neuman, Scott. “Seen ‘Plandemic’? We Take A Close Look At The Viral Conspiracy Video’s Claims.” NPR, National Public Radio, 8 May 2020, npr.org/2020/05/08/852451652/seen-plandemic-we-take-a-close-look-at-the-viral-conspiracy-video-s-claims.
Ahmed, Imran. “The Disinformation Dozen.” CCDH, Center for Countering Digital Hate, 2020, counterhate.com/disinformationdozen.
Willingham, Emily. “Today’s PSA: when you want to make sure someone is speaking from expertise, training, and experience, the -ologist you’re looking for varies with the subject.” Facebook, 7 May 2020, 3:25 p.m., facebook.com/ejwillingham/posts/10222572120476240. Accessed 17 May 2021.
“Neil DeGrasse Tyson Teaches Scientific Thinking and Communication.” MasterClass, MasterClass, 2020, masterclass.com/classes/neil-degrasse-tyson-teaches-scientific-thinking-and-communication.
Guha, Martin. “Elsevier’s Dictionary of Psychological Theories.” Reference Reviews, no. 8, Emerald, Dec. 2006, pp. 10–11. Crossref, doi:10.1108/09504120610709402.
Ballantyne, Nathan. “Epistemic Trespassing.” Mind, no. 510, Oxford University Press (OUP), Feb. 2018, pp. 367–95. Crossref, doi:10.1093/mind/fzx042.
@neiltyson (Neil deGrasse Tyson). “If there were ever a species for whom sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago.” Twitter, 11 Mar. 2016, 5:59 p.m., twitter.com/neiltyson/status/708427052433678336.
Keemahill, Dan, Erin Mansfield, Dinah Voyles Pulver, Nicholas Wu, and Dian Zhang. “Fauci lowers U.S. coronavirus death forecast to 60,000, says social distancing is working.” USA Today, USA Today, 9 Apr. 2020, usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2020/04/09/coronavirus-deaths-u-s-could-closer-60-k-new-model-shows/5122467002.
Richards, Sabrina. “There’s No Crystal Ball for Modeling the Pandemic.” Fred Hutch News Service, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 22 Feb. 2021, fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/02/modeling-pandemic.html.
