Quotes About Experts

In any economic or political crisis, one thing is certain. Many learned experts will prescribe many different remedies

All that is very relevant to Afghanistan. To a startling degree, the Politburo's 1979 deliberations about how to deal with it mirror the Bush administration's close-minded and secretive decision-making that led to its invasion. The Bush White House might have modeled itself on the Soviet gerontocracy under Brezhnev that brushed aside warnings from military and regional experts who knew the situation in Afghanistan to be far more complicated than the Politburo stated.

Security concerns are especially high with regard to the e-filing of Income Tax returns that is rapidly being extended from commercial entities to individuals. Leading IT security experts and tax consultants are unhappy at the lack of security in e-filing of Income Tax returns.

The A.M.T. is much reviled by tax experts across the political spectrum for its unintended consequences and fiendish complexity.

We believe that the real child-care experts are mom and dad. That's why we brought in the universal child care benefit way back in 2006.

There is no 'ultimate goal of therapy.' Thinking there is some ultimate or universal goal of therapy is one of the most fundamental errors of our field. To me, that concept is rather arrogant, as if therapists were some kind of spiritual experts who knew what human beings are supposed to be like.

There are three ways to spoil a public man: women, gambling, and listening to experts. The first is the pleasantest, the second is the fastest, but the third is the most certain.

None of us are claiming that the statistical analysts understand the game of football as well as the football coaches do, or that our analysis should take precedence over the informed opinions of experts. I'm not saying that at all.

No, the bigger problem is that we're proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything.

At the root of all this is an inability among laypeople to understand that experts being wrong on occasion about certain issues is not the same thing as experts being wrong consistently on everything. The fact of the matter is that experts are more often right than wrong, especially on essential matters of fact. And yet the public constantly searches for the loopholes in expert knowledge that will allow them to disregard all expert advice they don't like. In

The relationship between experts and citizens is not "democratic." All people are not, and can never be, equally talented or intelligent. Democratic societies, however, are always tempted to this resentful insistence on equality, which becomes oppressive ignorance if given its head.

the only way to resolve these debates in terms of policy choices is to move them from the realm of research to the arena of politics and democratic choice. If democracy is to mean anything at all, then experts and laypeople have to solve complicated problems together.

These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument.

To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they're wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones

And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy. Experts, too, have an important responsibility in a democracy, and it is one they've shirked in recent decades.

In a passage often cited by Western conservatives and especially loved by American libertarians, the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1960: "The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.

Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted. Faced with a public that has no idea how most things work, experts likewise disengage, choosing to speak mostly to each other rather than to laypeople.

I brought together experts from health care, business, academic institutions, and the community to develop a comprehensive blueprint for eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care in the City of Boston.

In an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do.

There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.

What I understand now is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right.

The playbook is well known. As Czech president (and economist) Vaclav Klaus once explained, environmentalism is the successor to failed socialism as justification for all-pervasive rule by a politburo of experts. Only now it acts in the name of not the proletariat but the planet.

Modern liberalism's perfectionist ambitions - reflected in its progenitor (and current euphemism), progressivism - seeks to harness the power of government, the mystique of science and the rule of experts to shape both society and citizen and bring them both, willing or not, to a higher state of being.

Some experts even say the idea of India is wrong; it is not more than a leftover patchwork of disparate kingdoms created by the British.