How “Gibson’s law” makes it hard to trust experts

March 03, 2023

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

It’s one of the most famous lines in poetry, and with it, Alexander Pope hits the nail on the head. We all know that one person who sees themselves as some world authority based on a single article they’ve read. They’re the keyboard preachers and cocksure dilettantes who have spent an afternoon researching a topic, and they’ll tell you exactly how it is. They’re drunk, indeed, on a little learning, and will shout at everyone to let them know.

The fact is that disagreeing with someone is easy. No matter how much of your life you’ve devoted to a subject or how many letters after your name you have earned, it takes only one fool, who’s read one Facebook post, to disagree with you. It’s this which presents the illusion of depth and complexity — as if debate means that there will be no right answer. There are two sides to everything only because saying, “You’re wrong,” doesn’t require any qualifications whatsoever. And yet, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, muddying the water will not make it deep.

“Gibson’s law” is the observation that, “For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.” It’s mostly seen in adversarial courts of law, when two competing lawyers each will produce some heavyweight authority to prove their side of the argument. But, it need not be limited to the courtroom. It can also be a form of petulant confirmation bias.

Let’s say you meet an expert in some area, and they present a fact or argument that you simply cannot tolerate. Fuming, but unable to articulate your counterargument, you go home to Google the expert’s position. To your great annoyance, the entire first page of search results validate the expert. You still hunt, determined to be right. Nestled in the forgotten abyss of Google’s page 4, you find Dr. Clutching Straws. You drag out Dr. Straws whenever you can.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/gibsons-law-hard-trust-experts/