The Errors of the Products of Elite Universities

The various postmortems on the handling of the Pandemic are reinforcing my Personal Rule that very smart highly credentialed people from elite universities (who encourage this behavior and fail to really educate) often use their smarts not to open mindedly explore their fields, or search their own work for error, or to find data that overturns their hypotheses. But use their smarts to defend their existing mindsets, to resist looking for counter data and deny any errors in their work.

Elite institutions like CDC and WHO compound this individual failing, by institutionalizing the defense of orthodoxy and the denial of error. And when the institutions do change they try to pretend that the change didn’t happen, that they were not previously in error.

I have had many arguments with so called experts in many fields in recent years and they follow this pattern. They literally are incapable of thinking they may be mistaken. They don’t have a “I may be wrong” protocol in their brains, because their credentials have convinced them (and the world) in a way, that doesn’t convince me, given that I make mistakes all the time as my wife points out.

No credential, no knighthood, no Nobel Prize, no Fields Medal, nothing proofs you against error, but it may proof you against recognizing it or admitting it.

And doctors: well my childhood health was nearly wrecked by medical error until a good doctor turned up and saw the error of his colleagues ways. So I talk from deep experience. Medical error in the US kills 100,000 people a year. But I never hear the elite medical professionals talk about this or take action to reduce this slaughter.

Kathryn Shulz’s fine book “Being Wrong” should be mandatory reading in elite universities and institutions with tests to see if the message got home and follow up to see it is being applied.https://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong?