Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero.original_ [19]
EVEN EXPERTS CAN BE WRONG
History records numerous occasions when the expert opinion has been the wrong opinion. In ancient times the standard medical opinion was that headaches were caused by demons inside the skull. The accepted treatment ranged opening the skull to let the demons out to giving medicines derived from cow's brain and goat dung. (The American Indians preferred beaver testicles.)3
When the idea of inoculating people against such diseases as smallpox first arrived in the colonies in the early 1900s, most authorities regarded it as nonsense. Among them were Benjamin Franklin and a number of the men who later founded Harvard Medical School. Against the authorities stood a relatively unknown man who didn't even have a medical degree, Zabdiel Boylston, whose opinion was proved right? Not the experts' but Zabdiel Boylston's.4
In 1890 a Nobel prize-winning bacteriologist, Dr. Robert Koch, reported that he had found a substance that would cure tuberculosis. When it was injected into patients, though, it was found to cause further illness and even death.
In 1904 psychologist G. Stanley Hall expressed his professional opinion that when women engage in strenuous mental activity, particularly with men, they experience a loss of mammary function and interest in motherhood, as well as decreased fertility. If they subsequently have children, the children will tend to be sickly.5
Between 1919 and 1922 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City bought seventeen gold vessels that experts determined were authentic treasures from a 3,500-year-old Egyptian tomb. In 1982 they were discovered to be twentieth-century fakes.6
In 1928 a drug called thorotrast was developed and used to outline certain organs of the body so that clearer X rays could be taken. Nineteen years later, doctors learned that even small doses of the drug caused cancer.
In 1959 a sedative called thalidomide was placed on the market. Many physicians prescribed it for pregnant women. Then, when a large number of babies were born deformed, medical authorities realized that thalidomide was to blame.
Psychiatrists often agree on the symptoms of particular mental disorders and have little difficulty reaching very similar professional opinions about particular cases. In some cases, however, those opinions may not be completely trustworthy. One man, Garrett Trapnell, has committed numerous crimes without ever spending a day in prison. His secret? He learned how to fool psychiatrists by playing the role of a paranoid schizophrenic, getting judged incompetent and assigned to mental institution, and then escaping. When he revealed his trickery, of course, some psychiatrist claimed he really was insane and his story merely sounded believable. But soon afterward the possibility that he was correct was underlined when three men and five women conducted an experiment to determine whether the sane could be distinguished form the insane in psychiatric hospitals. They succeeded in faking symptoms of mental disorders and were admitted to a number of mental hospitals in five eastern and western states.7
KINDS OF ERROR
There are four general kinds of error that can corrupt anyone's opinions. Francis Bacon classified them as follows: (1) errors or tendencies to error common among all people by virtue of their being human, (2) errors that come from human communication and the limitations of language, (3) errors in the general fashion or attitude of an age, (4) errors posed to an individual by a particular situation.8
Some people, of course, are more prone to errors than others. John Locke observed that these people fall into three groups. He described them as follows:
Those who seldom reason at all, but think and act as those around them do – parents, neighbors, the clergy, or anyone else they admire and respect. Such people want to avoid the difficulty that accompanies thinking of themselves.
Those who are determined to let passion rather than reason