{"id":500,"date":"2016-07-02T17:06:22","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T00:06:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/?p=500"},"modified":"2016-07-04T14:34:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-04T21:34:35","slug":"unbelievable-experts-and-common-sense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/2016\/07\/02\/unbelievable-experts-and-common-sense\/","title":{"rendered":"#Unbelievable: experts and common sense"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Coincidence is not correlation. About the same time that the UK was moving towards\u00a0yes to a referendum to exit the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iarc.fr\/en\/media-centre\/iarcnews\/2016\/DebunkMyth.php\">European Union, the WHO&#8217;s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was downgrading coffee and upgrading &#8220;hot beverages&#8221; as a causal agent in cancer<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As the story goes, expert opinion debunked\u00a0400,000 years of the human experience of drinking hot beverages while the\u00a0Remain\u00a0camp boasted\u00a0that expert opinion was\u00a0on their side.<\/p>\n<p>Thank you experts.<\/p>\n<p>Leading up to the Brexit, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2016\/06\/06\/eu-referendum-who-needs-experts-when-weve-got-michael-gove\/\">Conservative Party&#8217;s\u00a0Michael Gove remarked<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cI think people in this country have had enough of experts.\u201d\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2016\/06\/10\/michael-goves-guide-to-britains-greatest-enemy-the-experts\/\">Anti-expert sentiment gained momentum and perhaps an upper hand<\/a>. At the brink of the British exit from the EU\u00a0and in the aftermath, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/business\/2016\/06\/21\/in-defence-of-experts-whether-they-support-leave-or-remain\/\">experts scrambled for legitimacy<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Expertise can breed arrogance and false certainty; specialisms fall prey to group-think. Experts must be challenged and their work robustly interrogated.\u00a0<span class=\"m_first-letter\">B<\/span>ut that is very different from attacking evidence merely because it undermines your arguments (something that both Remainers and Leavers have done) and instantly impugning the motives of those who have produced it (ditto).<\/p>\n<p>How could experts have got it so wrong? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2016-06-24\/brexit-results-are-yet-another-blow-to-experts\">Immediately post-referendum, one\u00a0pundit asked straight away: &#8220;do the experts know anything?&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0Another queries <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thebookdesigner.com\/2016\/06\/brexit-twilight-experts\/\">if we are now witnessing &#8216;the twilight of the experts.&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Were data saying one thing while experts were hearing another? Intentionally?<\/p>\n<p>Welcome to the summer section of EDUC 500: Research Methodologies!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Coincidence is not correlation. About the same time that the UK was moving towards\u00a0yes to a referendum to exit the European Union, the WHO&#8217;s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was downgrading coffee and upgrading &#8220;hot beverages&#8221; as a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/2016\/07\/02\/unbelievable-experts-and-common-sense\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[537494,4957,6196,1010486,1010470,1010480],"tags":[1153049,352412,1153050,1010479],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-common-sense","category-data","category-expertise","category-opinion-pools","category-research-2-0","category-science-2-0","tag-data-2","tag-experts","tag-research-2-0","tag-research-mt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":527,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/educ500\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}