Posts about expertise

Time for Experts

March 24, 2020 by Jeff Jarvis
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In this novel crisis, we in media and online need to shift much of our attention away from trying to eradicate disinformation (and how’s that going?) to spend more of our time and resources once again finding and amplifying good information — authoritative information from experts.

That is why I am maintaining and immersing myself in my COVID Twitter list of 500 epidemiologists, virologists, physicians, researchers, NGOs, and selected specialist journalists. I have been taking in their conversations with each other and the public, learning every hour, privileged to be able to ask questions, witnessing science in action; it’s that and only that that gives me hope. Through those experts I get a better view of our new reality versus any bro’s contrarian thumbsucking in blog posts or New York Times columns or in mindless TV location shots in front of poke bars that — guess what? — have no business. More on all that in a minute.

Of course, I’m not suggesting an end to fact-checking and fighting disinformation. First Draft, Storyful, fact-checkers worldwide, and news organizations aplenty have that well in hand, or as well as anyone can these days. But the flavor of disinformation has changed; the target has shifted; the enemy is different. As First Draft’s founder and my leader in all such things, Dr. Claire Wardle, said in a video conference with journalists the other day, much disinformation these days comes not from malicious actors but from the well-meaning ignorant. Ignorance is our foe.

That is why we need the experts. That is why we need to put our effort behind finding them, listening to them, learning from them, and amplifying what they have to say. That is media’s job № 1.

Cable TV news is doing a decent job, I think, of getting experts on air to answer questions — authorities such as Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security; Dr. Peter Hotez, professor at Baylor; Dr. Ashish Jha of Harvard; Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of Penn; Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness; Andy Slavitt, former Obama ACA head. My primary complaint is that, TV being TV, they fill too much time with meaningless, repetitive location shots, coming back to an empty deli or Times Square a dozen times in a day or standing in front of the soon-to-be mass hospital at Javits Center where there’s no reporting to be done. Stop.

I want to see that time filled instead with more voices of science. I want to see TV do what it does best: make stars, stars of experts, scientists, doctors — the people we should trust and listen to, not pontificators or certain politicians at podiums. I can recommend many more scientists from my list. Here are some examples:

Devi Sridhar, chair of global health at the University of Edinburgh, has been a brilliant and outspoken critic of UK policy who can explain anything in the crisis with crystal clarity. Watch her from two years ago predicting precisely predict what we are now enduring:

Here is Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a lead researcher on the NIH effort to create a vaccine and an excellent explainer on Twitter.

Also from the UK (which I recommend because we need international perspectives) here is scientist Mike Galsworthy explaining with concise clarity and a simple notebook why Boris Johnson’s herd immunity strategy was dead wrong.

And more experts with amazing credentials and a talent for explanation:

They are all sharing directly with us on Twitter; what a privilege to be able to read them. That is but a small sample of the 500 experts I follow. You could follow each of them or better yet subscribe to my list (I get nothing out of it but the knowledge that you’ll help spread good information). Twitter, to its credit, decided they wanted to expedite verification (that is, the anointing of checkmarks) of these experts and so they came to me for help and I’ve been trying to guide some of them through the process, still ongoing.

One caution: What passes in tweet-length conversation in the midst of a constantly changing situation is science in progress. That is to say, there are no answers and conclusions, but there is information and data, and there are important questions. And that would be OK for most people. But Trump. I retweeted a report of very incomplete information about one doctor’s experience giving a few patients a malaria drug and antibiotic — worth looking at, the doctors in my feed said; no more. Then Trump trumpeted this as practically a cure, causing doctors to scream and a run on the medicine. I was properly castigated by someone on Twitter for tweeting such a small study and he was right to the extent that I should have added the context that it was small and nowhere near conclusive. You might wish for the days of gatekeepers — reporters — to add that context, but we’re leaving that era. I welcome hearing so much information directly from so many experts and practitioners. In this age of more open information, the public will have to learn to deal with incomplete data. You might call what’s needed media literacy, except media often do an idiotic job of reporting the progress of science (“Wine will kill us!” “Wine will save us!”). I call the solution simply education.

Now let us compare and contrast how certain media have dealt with — that is, spread or ignored — expertise. Some media have been wonderful. The Atlantic immediately put its excellent COVID coverage — for example this well-documented policy proposal from two renowned doctors and an ongoing project tracking how many Americans have the disease — outside its paywall. Some followed the example, making COVID coverage free; some haven’t. For God’s sake, if there were ever a moment when journalists should see reporting as a public good, if there were ever a moment when we should do everything we can to eradicate ignorance so we help eradicate this threat, this is it! Before you start poor-mouthing about tough times — which we all now share — know that it was The Atlantic’s decision to go outside its paywall that motivated me to subscribe. Sometimes doing good is its own reward; sometimes, there’s a bonus.

I also want to single out Medium for praise. As a platform, it does not choose what is posted there. Among the God-knows-how-many posts that went up recently was an absolutely awful festival in willful ignorance and hubris from a so-called growth hacker who thought he could do better with epidemiological data than untold experts around the world. To quote:

I’m quite experienced at understanding virality, how things grow, and data. In my vocation, I’m most known for popularizing the “growth hacking movement” in Silicon Valley that specializes in driving rapid and viral adoption of technology products. Data is data. Our focus here isn’t treatments but numbers. You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say. Numbers are universal.

Scores of experts in my Twitter list went properly berserk over his conclusions, — a biology professor at the University of Washington, Dr. Carl Bergstrom, decrying every paragraph. It spread for a time via Fox News fools and others. (I could insert a rant here about Fox News and Rupert Murdoch killing people and democracy, but let’s just stipulate that for the time being.)

But then Medium took the piece down.

UPDATE: Medium released this statement about the takedown:

“We’re giving careful scrutiny to coronavirus-related content on Medium to help stem misinformation that could be detrimental to public safety. The post was removed based on its violation of our Rules, specifically the risk analysis framework we use for ‘Controversial, Suspect, and Extreme Content.’ We’ve clarified these rules to address more specific concerns around the evolving public health crisis. We’ve also taken steps to point readers to credible, fact-checked pieces on Medium and elsewhere on the web, and to remind readers that Medium is an open platform where anyone can write. We’re assessing the situation daily and making adjustments as necessary.”

Bravo for Medium. Yes, I wish Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al would do likewise. The differences are clear: Medium is a platform for content while social media provide platforms for conversation; social media carries exponentially more items to monitor. Facebook says, and I agree, that it would make a bad arbiter of truth. Fine. But I do want to see especially Facebook grow a spine and decide what does and does not fit in the community it has built. Denying informed science and endangering lives belongs in no community. Besides tamping down the bad, I also want to see Facebook, like Twitter, do everything possible to amplify science and sense.

Yes, there are idiots out there and idiots who believe idiots and who don’t want to believe science. But we will go mad trying to save them all from their ignorance; we are too busy to focus on them. I say we must concentrate now on those willing, wishing, and needing to learn, which I firmly believe is most of us. We do that by helping them pay attention to science and facts and helping them ignore the idiots.

You’d think that concentrating on the evidence produced by experts would be easy at a publication still controlled by editors, as opposed to a technology platform. But I cannot understand why The New York Times is publishing some of what it has published lately, fully in its control.

Take, for example, this op-ed by David Katz, which like the post Medium took down takes a contrarian position that this pandemic really isn’t as bad as it seems, implying we are overreacting. Once again, countless experts in my Twitter list went nuts over this. They were particularly amazed that The Times chose to give over its precious space and its invaluable distribution and imprimatur not to an epidemiologist or a virologist but to someone who is well-known for defending sugar and acting as a California walnut ambassador and creating a discredited nutrition rating system (all of which The Times could have found, as I did, in a simple Google search). Could The Times have found no one more knowledgeable about the disease? I could suggest 500 people. Here Yale’s Dr. Gregg Gonsalves takes it apart:

So right. In choosing that author and that op-ed and passing on others who know so much more, The Times is — I’ll repeat Gonsalves’ words —exercising “denigration of expertise, when we need it most, prizing generalist knowledge when specifics matter.”

And it gets worse with — surprise, surprise — Bret Stephens, who took the same contrarian path, questioning the experts and their “models” — yes, he put “models” in scare quotes. He based his arguments in great measure on a piece by John P.A. Ioannidis — which I had already seen the expert doctors in my Twitter list excoriate. Here is a very polite takedown of Ioannidis’ theories by Harvard’s Dr. Marc Lipsitch, who concludes: “Waiting and hoping for a miracle as health systems are overrun by Covid-19 is not an option. For the short term there is no choice but to use the time we are buying with social distancing to mobilize a massive political, economic, and societal effort to find new ways to cope with this virus.”

And then there is Tom Friedman’s latest column, in which he echoes the challenges of the contrarians: “Is this cure — even for a short while — worse than the disease?’’ He all but gives the back of his hand to the epidemiologists who are informing policy, calling what they offer — with scare quotes — “group think.” Good Lord. Theirs is not the opinion of a goddamned coffee klatch. It’s science, based on data and experience — which is more than any columnist has. Friedman hides behind the classic excuse of the journalist: “I am not a medical expert. I’m just a reporter.” Translated: We’re supposed to ask dumb questions — just questions — on behalf of the dumb public. No! Our job is to go to the experts to help make the public smarter. Amazingly, Friedman goes on to favorably quote both Katz and Ioannidis from The New York Times. Talk about an echo chamber! Talk about “group think”!

Gonsalves tweeted again, about this Times hat trick, and I must quote it all:

Expertise. We will live or die by expertise: by science, by evidence, by experience, by knowledge, by data. Hot takes will kill us, whether they are Donald Trump’s (‘I have a good feeling about the drug’) or a tech bro’s (‘I know data’) or New York Times’ columnists’ with their scare quotes (‘are “group think” and “models” good? we’re just asking’).

In journalism, we are never experts. It is our job to find experts and give them voice for the public, adding questions and context where helpful. But thank goodness, I don’t need the journalists to stand in the way. I can go straight to 500 amazing, brave, brilliant, experienced, knowledgeable, dedicated, and caring experts thanks to the internet.

Thank you, doctors.

The next net: expertise

January 21, 2020 by Jeff Jarvis
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The net is yet young and needs to learn from its present failures to build a better infrastructure not just for speaking but also for listening and finding that which is worth listening to, from experts and people with authority, intelligence, education, experience, erudition, good taste, and good sense.

Here is a preview of one nascent example of such a system built on expertise from Samir Arora, the former CEO of Glam. Samir and I bonded a dozen years ago over the power of networks, when he came to my office to show me one history’s ugliest Powerpoint slides, illustrating how open networks of independent blogs at Glam bested closed systems of owned content in a media company. I had been beating the same drum. Glam later imploded for many reasons, among them the change in the ad market with programmatic networks and investor politics.

Next Arora quietly set to work on Sage, a network of experts. It’s not public yet — he and his team plan to open it up in the first or second quarter — and it’s a complex undertaking whose full implications I won’t fully understand until we see how people use it. But as before, I think Arora is onto an important insight.

He started with a manageable arena: travel and food — that is, expertise about places. That topic made it easier to connect what someone says with a specific destination, hotel, or restaurant; to compare what others said about these entities; and to judge whether someone was actually there and spoke from experience as a test of credibility and accuracy.

I’ve begged Arora to also tackle news but watching him grapple with expertise — at the same time I’ve watched the platforms struggle with quality in news — it becomes apparent that every sector of knowledge will need its own methodology. Sports can probably operate similarly to travel. Health and science will depend on accredited institutions (i.e., people with degrees). Culture will be sensitive to, well, cultural perspective. International affairs will require linguistic abilities. Politics and expertise is probably oxymoronic.

Sage began with 100 manually curated experts in travel. Asking the experts to in turn recommend experts and analyzing their connections yielded a network of 1,000 experts with opinions about 10,000 places. Then AI took that learning-set to scale the system and find 250k experts and influencers with their judgments about 5 million places. 250k is a lot of sources, but it’s not 1.74 billion, which is how many web sites there are. It’s a manageable set from which to judge and rank quality.

I probably would have stopped there and released this service to the public as a new travel and restaurant search engine built on a next generation Google’s page rank that could identify expertise and control for quality and gaming. Or I’d license the technology to social platforms, as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey has been talking about finding ways to present expertise in topics and Facebook is in constant search for ways to improve its ranking.

But Arora did not. His reflex is to create tools for creators, going back to his cofounding of NetObjects in 1995, which built tools to build web sites. At Glam, he bought Ning, a tool that let any organization build its own social network.

So, at Sage, Arora is creating a suite of tools that enable an expert who has been vetted in the system to interact with users in a number of ways. The system starts by finding the content one has already shared on the web — on media sites, on Instagram or Pinterest, on YouTube, on blogs, in books, wherever — allowing that person to claim a profile and organize and present the content they’ve made. It enables them to create your own channels — e.g., best sushi — and their own lists within it — best sushi in L.A. — and their own reviews there. They can create content on Sage or link to content off Sage. They can interact with their users in Q&As and chats on Sage.

Because Arora is also reflexively social, he has built tools for each expert to invite in others in a highly moderated system. The creator can ask in contributors who may create content and curators who may make lists. Sage is also going to offer closed networks among the experts themselves so they will have a quality environment for private discussions, a Slack for experts. So creators can interact with the people they invite in, with a larger circle of experts, with the public in a closed system for members and subscribers, or with the public at large.

And because the real challenge here is to support creativity and expertise, Sage is building a number of monetization models. You can link to your content elsewhere on the web with whatever business models are in force there. You can offer content for free. You can set up a subscription model with previews (the meter) and one-time purchase (an article or a book). You can sell access to an event: an online Q&A, an individual consulting session, an in-person appearance, and so on. And you can sell physical products — a cookbook, a box of hot sauces — directly or via affiliate arrangements. Plus you can accept donations at various tiers as a kind of purchase. Note that Sage will begin without advertising.

I hope this platform could place where newly independent journalists covering certain topics could build an online presence and make money from it.

All this is mobile-first. Experts can build content within Sage, on the open web, and — if they have sufficient followers — in their own apps. The current iteration is built for iOS with Android and web sites in development. (Since I live la vida Google in Android, I haven’t been able to dig into it as much as I’d like.)

Users will discover content on Sage via search on topics or by links to experts’ channels there.

After starting with restaurants and travel, Sage is expanding into culture — reviews of books and movies. Next comes lifestyle, which can include health. News, I fear, will be harder.

So what is expertise? The answer in old media and legacy institutions was whatever they decided and whomever they hired. In a more open, networked world, there will be many answers, yours and mine: I will rely on one person’s taste in restaurants, you another. The problem with this — as, indeed, we see in news and political views today — is that this extreme relativity leads to epistemological warfare, especially when institutions old (journalism) and new (platforms) are so allergic to making judgments and everyone’s opinions are considered equal. I am not looking for gatekeepers to return to decide once for all. Neither do I want a world in which we are all our own experts in everything and thus nothing. Someone will have to draw lines somewhere separating the knowledgeable from the ignorant, evidence from fiction, experience and education from imagination and uninformed opinion.

Will Sage be any good at this task? We can’t know until it starts and we judge its judgments. But Arora gave me one anecdote as a preview: About 18 months ago, he said, Sage’s systems sent up an alert about a sudden decline in the quality and consistency of reviews from a well-known travel brand. Staff investigated and, sure enough, they found that the brand had fired all its critics and relied on user-driven reviews from an online supplier.

This is not to say that users cannot be experts. As Dan Gillmor famously said in the halcyon early days of blogs and online interaction: “My readers know more than I do.” In aggregate and in specific cases, he’s right. I will take that attitude over that of an anonymous journalist quoted in a paper I just read about foundations requiring the newsrooms they now help support to engage with the public:

The people are not as knowing about a story as I am. They haven’t researched the topic. They haven’t talked to a lot of people outside of social circles. I read legal briefs or other places’ journalism. I don’t think people do that. It can become infuriating when my bosses or Columbia Journalism Review or Jeff Jarvis tells me I’m missing an opportunity by not letting people tell me what to do. I get the idea, you know, but most people are ignorant or can’t be expected to know as much as I do. It’s not their job to look into something. They aren’t journalists.

No. Expertise will be collaborative and additive. That is the lesson we in journalism never learned from the academe and science. Reporters are too much in the habit of anointing the one expert they find to issue the final word on whatever subject they’re covering: “Wine will kill us!” says the expert. “Wine will save us!” says the expert. As opposed to: “Here’s what we know and don’t know about wine and health and here is the evidence these experts use to test their hypotheses.”

What we will need in the next phase of the net is the means to help us find people with the qualifications, experience, education, and means to make judgments and answer questions, giving us the evidence they use to reach their conclusions so we can judge them. Artificial intelligence will not do this; neither will it replace expertise. The question is whether it can help us sift through the magnificent abundance of voice and view to which we now have access to help us decide who knows what the fuck they’re talking about.

(You can apply to join Sage for Experts here.)