Fair Experts Are Satisfying, Overconfident Ones Are Painful To Hear

The other day I was watching TV without any particular purpose, and a story about a certain entrepreneur and a story about a certain researcher happened to air back to back, across two different programs. Over that hour or so I felt satisfied on one hand, and on the other felt a sort of itch that wasn’t quite indignation, wasn’t quite rejection. I thought, “this is rough.”

One was a story about a cloud researcher. It’s outside my field, but I know a fair amount about climate mechanisms and environmental technology, if I may say so myself. I read specialist books out of interest and keep an eye on the latest news. When I was in the US I started a business related to climate, and the interest itself has stayed with me ever since (I’m quite fond of sites like EnviroTech https://www.envirotech-online.com/). What that researcher said was very fair. They clearly laid out what can be done, what is known, what is not known, and what the challenges are. For instance, in the program they found the cumulonimbus clouds that give rise to linear precipitation bands, integrated that with various other real-time data, and predicted where and when localized thunderstorms would occur. In the aired footage, they hit the prediction quite accurately. As a piece of TV, it was a perfect score. But when you boil down what that researcher actually said, the reality is that they hit “a fairly easy-to-read case” using “a great deal of manual labor” and “rules of thumb,” and moving this as-is into general operational use makes no sense at all. They closed by saying a more efficient and accurate model needs to be built. To begin with, the mechanisms of cloud formation and development are a field that can hardly be said to be fully understood, and most experts think they ought to be represented at a finer resolution than the mesh size used in most climate models. In other words, most climate models substitute cloud mechanics with formulas that are considerably abstracted to match the mesh size — “reasonably accurate but not very precise.” Non-specialists rarely state this plainly, but frankly it’s a troubling state of affairs. People who state this sort of thing plainly strike me as very fair, and it’s satisfying to listen to them. What someone says is, in most cases, worth believing when they don’t engage in chest-thumping like “my field is amazing” or “my field can do anything.”

The other program was about a company developing flying cars. As you can probably already tell from the context, listening to this one left me with a rather rough feeling. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the content itself, so I’ll avoid going into detail (I’d welcome a conversation with anyone involved). But first there’s the overly optimistic goal-setting typical of entrepreneurs. That might be forgivable before founding or right after founding, but the company is already three years old. Where they stand in year three, the path that got them there (I heard some talk that touched on this), and the vision for three years from now built on all that were all conspicuously vague. I found myself itching for someone around them to push back with “it’s fine to say big things, but what’s the plan for the milestones?” The founder also doesn’t seem to have a technical career background, and in response to technical questions (especially about precision) gave answers that sounded like they were lifted from a Nikkei article from ten years ago. That was enough to make me talk back at the TV — a sign of aging. I once looked into the backgrounds of that company’s members for various reasons. There were a lot of young people who seemed to lack experience, but there were also engineers with solid credentials among them. I don’t know whether any of them sit on the management team, but they should at least be in a position to offer advice. I became convinced that this company clearly has a founder running wild without fully understanding the details, and that the people around him can neither stop him nor advise him.

Someone who talks about a vision has to bring a “proper dream” to the table. Someone who talks about unachievable goals as if they were a settled future, with no real plan, is a fraud. It’s a problem when a company raising huge sums of money is like that. Not that it’s my problem, personally. So I wasn’t so involved as to feel indignant, and the show seemed too flashy to just dismiss outright. But thinking of the people involved left me with nothing but an itch I couldn’t shake.

As you age and learn many things, your sense for distinguishing genuine from fake gets remarkably sharper. Generally speaking, this does more harm than good. That’s because it very easily leads to the habit of only seeing and hearing what falls within the range you can understand, and discarding everything else. That’s what’s known as being an out-of-touch old man.

The world is, by nature, full of uncertainty. In the 18th century, when Newtonian mechanics reigned, how many people believed in the existence of a world that couldn’t be explained by that “theory of everything”? The famous Boltzmann was completely misunderstood by the academic community and hanged himself. We’re taught that addition and multiplication are mappings in perfect one-to-one correspondence, and we take that for granted. But IUT theory, which has drawn attention in recent years, attempts to prove the ABC conjecture by tearing that down and rethinking it from scratch. Honestly, I have no intuitive sense of whether it’s actually correct, and personally I imagine it will be a long time before that’s settled. But if it does turn out to be correct, humanity’s general understanding will be turned completely upside down.

There are any number of such “seeds” in the world capable of overturning the whole game board.

That said, it’s far too naive to think that everything is uncertain. If anything, that’s an act of trampling on everything humanity has built up so far (if that’s actually the intent, go ahead, I suppose). In engineering especially, unlike basic research, what can and can’t be done is much clearer. Because of that, the conclusions you can reach from the current state of things are also much easier to anticipate. Naturally, when it comes to “content-driven” things that involve mass psychology or shifts in social conditions, the range of uncertainty widens. But at the pure engineering level, AI isn’t suddenly going to acquire a human heart, and micromachines entering the body to surgically treat disease are still a bit further off.

Speaking fairly has grown more important in recent years. I think COVID-19 served as one trigger for this. Many social media platforms lost value through COVID-19. It became clear that a whirlwind of information, genuine and fake all mixed together, only confuses people and pushes them further from fair thinking. However fast the speed of infection, it’s almost never the case, barring special circumstances, that one person today becomes a thousand infections tomorrow. So there should have been ample time for both verification and communication. And yet even now, a great deal of fair information remains buried under the statements — sometimes ravings — of countless self-proclaimed “experts.” Given this situation, I’m not going to say a system that trusts centralized information is wonderful. A great many vested interests exist at that “center,” and information ends up needing correction because of them.

So then what can be trusted? I think it’s people who consistently keep putting out fair statements. People who make throwaway remarks on social media and, if they get flamed, simply delete or reverse them, are out of the question. It’s also hard to trust people who present information as if it were conclusive while knowing there’s room for counterargument or debate, without disclosing that, and who then abandon it the moment they see the tide turning against them. I’d even go so far as to say that people who, without explicitly reviewing the hypotheses or predictions they themselves put forward once the results are in, shamelessly go on to boldly put forward their next hypothesis or prediction, bring significant confusion and misleading to the world, and disqualify themselves as scientists. You can tell someone’s authority just by looking at their title. But whether they’re fair or not isn’t something you can tell at a glance. What matters is not a burst of energy but staying power — facing each day, each individual issue, carefully and fairly, continuing to critique fairly, and making the effort to become that kind of person. I think this isn’t something only commentators should be conscious of. It’s something everyone who puts out any kind of message — which in this day and age might mean pretty much everyone on Earth — should keep in mind.

A world where entrepreneurs spin flashy fantasies and raise huge sums of money on nothing but a slide deck is, at most, entertainment that occasionally occurs at the margins of society as a whole. We should have known that decades ago.

Incidentally, the reason I hold back on social media and place weight instead on putting together proper pieces of writing like this blog is that I want to write down things of universal value. But it’s also so that I can always look back and check whether I’ve been fair, and whether I can continue to be.

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Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/667/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.