Should experts decide everything for us?
“Ask the expert” is the dictum which all of us are told to obey for successfully negotiating an increasingly complex world. There used to be a time when there were fewer experts around to ‘help’ us make decisions which we did without any fuss. The knowledge explosion of the past several decades has broken down domains into cocoons of specialisation. It is true that skill and scholarship in any area are acquired only through dedicated study and research. But punditry has acquired an esoteric dimension which is debatable. ...
...Japan’s famed nuclear safety experts could not anticipate that an earthquake and a tsunami would occur simultaneously. The experts had an alibi for not anticipating the Fukushima nuclear disaster — the accident was a Black Swan — a highly improbable event with enormous consequences. But the fact that a few precautions like a water-proof backup generator could have mitigated the fallout was lost on the pundits. Such precautions do not need expertise, only an application of the mind which has become an endangered activity in the age of the Internet.
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