10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 3)

World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise

“I’m being objective!” Surely, you’ve had someone you’ve been arguing with scream that at you. Perhaps you have even yelled those words yourself on occasion.

I remember – always with a smile on my face a self-styled “left brain” account shouting at me in disagreement on a point, “God damn it! I’m being objective. You are being emotional,” as he pounded a clenched fist on the conference room table.

Objectivity ain’t what it used to be. In fact, its popularity is dwindling. Farhad Manjoo titles the penultimate chapter in his True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society “The Twilight of Objectivity.”

Tradition holds that truth is accessible only through objective inquiry and accurately transmittable only through dispassionately executed argument. However, a proposition that is broadly held to reflect objective reality, even if held so for centuries, ultimately has no defensible eternal claim of veracity. It is but a consensus about a purported slice of reality.

A steady decline of confidence in objective thought is lowering the value  people place in the idea of expertise because we tend to associate expertise not only with experience, but with the ability to think objectively about matters, leaving emotions or subjective perceptions on the sidelines. We want this ability in our judges, personal lawyers, doctors, financial analysts and other we've elected or hired to protect and serve our interests.

Social philosopher Pierre Levy observed in Collective Intelligence (1994):

“Only by incorporating cultural and moral objectives, aesthetic experience, can business engage the subjectivity of its employees, as well its customers…

… Because it conditions all other activities, the continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be considered the major economic activity throughout (this) century.”

Levy is talking about what Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore call the Experience Economy in their book by that name. He is talking about Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind . Pink, like True Enough’s Manjoo, is a celebrant in the last rites for objectivity – or more properly perhaps, Cartesian objectivity.

For several centuries, science has unfolded in accordance with Rene Descartes’ tenet that nothing can be deemed true until proven to be so through objective analysis that yields predictable hence replicable results. Over time, virtually every field of mainstream human thought became subordinate to the idea that truth was verifiable only through objectively guided investigation. However, the same level of certainty that physicists work with cannot be achieved in a wide spectrum of other human endeavors, such as human behavior.

James Shanteau is an expert on experts. He has spent his entire professional life studying experts. He has found that in fields characterized by absolutely predictable events such as physics, chemistry and engineering, experts far outperform nonexperts. However, in fields that resist absolutely predictable events, such as stock picking, horse picking and human behavior, nonexperts often outperform the experts.

James Surowiecki popularized the term “the wisdom of crowds” in his book by that name. The subtitle of the book is Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, societies and Nations. Chalk one up for “common sense.”

Throughout all my growing up years, through the early and middle years of my life intuition was denigrated as having no value in truth-seeking. In my childhood, comic strips, movies and radio comedy shows like Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly talked about intuition as a woman’s way of figuring things out.

However of late, intuition has been gaining respectability in spite of its being a nonobjective approach to discovering truth. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink quickly became a best seller in 2005 because the zeitgeist was already experiencing erosion of a several centuries-old objective foundation. Tolerance for subjectively rooted expressions about what is truth and what is not was on a rapid rise. Other books, such as Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions – which preceded Blink, and actually a more informative book – have helped give intuition legitimacy in respectable thinking society.

Then comes Wikipedia – a living organic testimony to the veracity that is abundantly present in “the wisdom of the crowds” that often strays wide of objective thinking. Having been the subject of an abundance of criticism for the certain veins of error streaking through its corpus, Wikipedia was subjected to an exhaustive investigation sponsored by the British magazine Nature in 2007. The analysis consisted of in depth comparisons with the Encyclopedia Britannica on the same topics. To the astonishment of many, Wikipedia and Britannica scored about the same for accuracy.

Next: How the Ebbing Value of Expertise Is Changing the Rules of Marketing