Expert

There’s an easy way to tell if you’re talking to an expert or a faker.

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Albert Einstein

The difference between experts and fakers is that experts don’t know that much. Fakers, on the other hand, know everything – or at least they think they do.When your job is to write about science, you end up talking to a lot of experts and a (hopefully smaller) number of people who are making things up as they go along.

Experts are frustrating. They stand on top of mountains of knowledge, only to point at the horizon and say There’s so much we have yet to discover!

It makes them skittish, consumed with their own ignorance. They speak in precise, limited language.

One scientist (whose name I will not use due to an ongoing legal case) was asked to identify for police a man who had attacked him in his own home. He pointed to the man and said “To the best of my knowledge, that’s him.”

Later, the police questioned why he wasn’t 100% sure that the man with the face of their attacker was his attacker. He said, “I’m not 100% sure of anything.”

This is not how normal people talk. And it’s certainly not how fakers talk.

I get emails several times a week from people who think they’ve “proven” climate change is a hoax. I ignore all of them – not only because over the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change but because of the absolutely confident tone with which they’re almost always written.

Real climate scientists never talk that way, though in a field with suchoverwhelming consensus you couldn’t blame them if they did. Instead, they’ll point to the enormous degree of peer review and replication success in their field, then carefully explain all the questions they have yet to answer.

I’ll give you another example.

Ancient Ruins with a Great Arch and a Column

Recently, I interviewed Sean Downey for an article about why societies collapse. Downey’s an archaeologist. He uses statistical methods to examine Neolithic European civilization, and he’s developed a robust set of mathematical tools for differentiating “resilient” and not resilient populations.

My problem in getting ready to write about his work is that the civilizations Downey studies all died out eons before recorded history. So I asked Downey to offer some modern examples of resilient and non-resilient populations.

He paused. My recording of our conversation shows he was silent for sixteen seconds before he said that 20th Century England might-maybe-possibly-I guess be a resilient society. He explained why, then qualified the analogy with several caveats.

To be clear, Downey is more qualified than almost anyone else on the planet to comment on whether a society is or isn’t resilient. He’s studied and cultivated theories of societal collapse for years. But he wasn’t willing to offer even a hint of an opinion he wasn’t sure he could back up with empirical data.

Fakers have opinions on everything. Ask them a question, no matter how nuanced, and they’ll have a sure, ready answer – sometimes about topics you didn’t ask about in the first place.

Climate change is a hoax. So-and-so will win exactly 56% of the vote in tomorrow’s election. No one will listen to rap music in twenty years. Invest in this company and you’ll get rich.

This, I suspect, is the essential difference between the sorts of thought that lead to major discoveries and the sorts that don’t.

Experts – and people with the tools to become experts – assume their own ignorance and look for ways to poke holes in common ideas. And so they ask better questions.

I wonder whether dogs really understand human speech? How much will fighting climate change cost? Has weed really gotten stronger?

But if you approach a topic with a fully-developed theory of the case, it’s harder to ask any questions beyond those that would validate your preconceptions.

A caveat: Plenty of people are experts in one subject and fakers in others. It’s common, in my experience, for scientists to talk with much more confidence about subjects outside their fields than the subjects they’ve spent years actually studying.

And, finally, another caveat: I’m clearly not an expert in expertise – just look at the hubris and overconfidence dripping from this article! But this is a rubric I find useful. Take it or leave it.

Pesticide risks need more research and regulation.

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Developing countries need stronger pesticide regulation and a better understanding of how pesticides behave in tropical climates, according to experts behind a series of articles published in Science today.

They also need an international body to carry out regular pesticide safety assessments — ensuring they are used properly by farmers who are given thorough training in their use — and to monitor the safety of chemical levels in food, the experts say.

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In the face of projections that the global population will reach nine billion by 2050, scientists must develop new technologies to make pesticides safer, and continue research into crops that will not require pesticides at all, according to the special section in Science.
 
Millions of tonnes of pesticides are used each year in agriculture, sometimes with poor oversight and knowledge regarding theirenvironmental impact, particularly in developing countries.
 
A review article by a team led by Kathrin Fenner, a senior scientist at the Eawag aquatic research institute in Switzerland, looks at pesticide degradation. It also identifies knowledge gaps in what happens to pesticides once they are applied in the field.
 
According to Fenner, the biggest challenge is relating what is measured in laboratory studies to what is observed long-term in the environment. One example is what happens to pesticides that have been in the soil for a long time and what products they leave behind as they degrade.
 
“There are situations that are not covered, or not fully covered, by laboratory studies, especially situations in low concentrations in groundwater,” Fenner says.
 
Furthermore, laboratory studies carried out for pesticide regulation in the United States or Europe look at factors specific to those regions, such asclimate and soil type, and not at the warmer climate zones where many developing countries lie.
 
“How relevant that really is to more tropical settings, where you have more organic, carbon-rich soils and higher temperatures, is also somewhat of a knowledge gap,” says Fenner.
 

“If you reduce plant diseases, you could feed 20 to 30 per cent more calories to people.”

Jeffery Dangl

Efforts to lower dependency on pesticides altogether is one option addressed in the Science articles.
 
A review article by Jeffery Dangl, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina, United States, and his colleagues, reveals developments in the understanding of plant immune systems and DNA sequencing that allow scientists to engineer crops that are less susceptible to pests and disease, and thus require less pesticides.
 
The technology could help tackle environmental concerns, such asgroundwater contamination. It could also help reduce plant diseases and recover crop losses.
 
“We lose 20 to 30 per cent of our global food supply to pests and pathogens every year,” Dangl tells SciDev.Net. “If you reduce plant diseases and recover that, you could feed 20 to 30 per cent more calories to people.”
 
The research would have a significant impact on developing countries, where, Dangl says, there are health issues and poor regulation of pesticide use.
 
“One often sees farmers throwing chemicals on their plants, using their hands, and without proper clothing, and they often use fungicides and pesticides that are no longer allowed in the developed world,” he says. “There’s poor regulation and poor administration of the regulation.”
 
One solution could be to strengthen the international body that works to maintain regular safety assessments of pesticides.
 
According to an article by Philippe Verger, from WHO and Alan Boobis, from Imperial College London, this would be done through improved cooperation with the Joint FAO/WHO Meeting on Pesticide Residues, an expert body that aims to harmonise the requirements and risk assessments on pesticide residues.
 
“We know developing countries don’t have the resources to adequately assess the risk of these various chemicals,” says Verger. “So the WHO, together with FAO, is providing this regulation to give a framework for evaluating these compounds.”

The importance of improving such a body would not be limited to the developing world. It would ensure internationally that pesticides are licensed and used properly, and that farmers have instructions and training for their use. Most importantly, it would monitor the safety of the levels of chemicals in the food we eat.

“If we want to continue to feed the world population, we have to increase productivity. To do that, pesticides will increase globally, so the sector needs to integrate the protection of public health,” says Verger

Source:Scivx