Wrong Why experts* keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them *Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, high-powered consultants, health officials and more

by Freedman, David H.

• ISBN13: 9780316023788
• ISBN10: 0316023787
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-10
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Summary

Our investments are devastated, obesity is epidemic, test scores are in decline, blue-chip companies circle the drain, and popular medications turn out to be ineffective and even dangerous. What happened? Didn't we listen to the scientists, economists and other experts who promised us that if we followed their advice all would be well? Actually, those experts are a big reason we're in this mess. And, according to acclaimed business and science writer David H. Freedman, such expert counsel usuallyturns out to be wrong--often wildly so. Wrong reveals the dangerously distorted ways experts come up with their advice, and why the most heavily flawed conclusions end up getting the most attention-all the more so in the online era. But there's hope: Wrong spells out the means by which every individual and organization can do a better job of unearthing the crucial bits of right within a vast avalanche of misleading pronouncements.

Author Biography

David H. Freedman is a science and business journalist. He is a contributing editor at Inc. magazine and has written for The Atlantic, Newsweek, the New York Times, Science, the Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Wired, Self, and many other publications. He is the coauthor of A Perfect Mess, about the useful role of disorder in daily life, business, and science, and the author of books about the U.S. Marines, computer crime, and artificial intelligence. He lives near Boston.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
Some Expert Observations	p. 14
The Trouble with Scientists, Part 1	p. 37
The Certainty Principle	p. 68
The Idiocy of Crowds	p. 87
The Trouble with Scientists, Part 2	p. 104
Experts and Organizations	p. 125
Experts and the Media	p. 146
The Internet and the Technology of Expertise	p. 168
Eleven Simple Never-Fail Rules for Not Being Misled by Experts	p. 203
A Tiny Sampling of Expert Wrongness, Conflict, and Confusion	p. 231
The Evolution of Expertise	p. 239
A Brief Sampling of Contemporary, High-Powered, Apparent Scientific Fraud	p. 255
Is This Book Wrong?	p. 258
Acknowledgments	p. 269
Source Notes	p. 271
Index	p. 285
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