Expert Fallibility Quotes

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Economists are about as useful as astrologers in predicting the future (and, like astrologers, they never let failure on one occasion diminish certitude on the next).

There is no such thing as an expert on Russia. There are only people with varying degrees of ignorance.

The best information from the leading medical and health scientists and experts in the country was dead wrong.

Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.

We turn to experts to tell us the future, even though they have not the foggiest idea themselves. It is a practice that goes back thousands of years.

Experts kill me. Economic experts, that is. Corporations, foundations, publications and governments pay them by the bucketful, and they fill buckets with forecasts that change more frequently than white-collar, workers do shirts. What Lies Ahead is the usual title. What Lies would often be more appropriate. If women's hemlines changed as rapidly as an economist's forecasts, the fashion people and the textile industry would be more profitable than any other. In fact, if all the country's economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.

Sometimes economists are right, and sometimes economists are wrong.

Experts always know everything but the fine points. When I took my citizenship exams, no one there knew how the White House came to be called the White House.

Scientists, especially when they leave the particular field in which they are specialized, are just as ordinary, pig-headed, and unreasonable as everybody else, and their unusually high intelligence only makes their prejudices all the more dangerous.

You want to challenge experts, because experts get a lot wrong. Doctors misdiagnose one time in five. In the U.S. and Canada, 50,000 people die every year who would not have had to.

The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.

Never play tips from "insiders." They can't see the forest for the trees.

What do you call an economist with a prediction? Wrong.

No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals - what a mess.

A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen.

Economists have much to be humble about.

If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Everything they told me as a kid has already been disproved by the same type of “experts” who made them up in the first place.

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess.

It's because finance is so baffling that makes being an economist such a safe option. It nestles down comfortably with psychiatry and astrology as a profession where getting it patently wrong is just not a problem - and also, rather wonderfully, seems to have no adverse affect on their professional standing whatsoever.

Most of what we know we don't really know first hand. I've never seen a cancer cell. But I trust this community of experts who have, so I believe that cancer exists. But we trust these experts, and we trust that the experts have a system of checks and balances and self-correction. And we have to insist that experts have certain certifications. They're not perfect. Every once in awhile there's an engine falls off the wing of a plane, or a tax audit happens and you find out your expert made a mistake. But it's a pretty good system. It's the best system we've got.

A sports expert is the guy who writes the best alibis for being wrong