Welcome to Science with Shrike! Today we’re going to discuss “science experts” and some red flags suggesting which ones are imposters. While the public is focused on “who can we trust”, this is part of the larger challenge of credentialing. How do we decide which strangers are reliable when we lack the expertise to evaluate their track record?
Become an Expert With These 4 Easy Ways
There are four routes to becoming an expert today. The first two are to earn an MD and/or a PhD. The third is to become a bureaucrat at an institution deemed to be an expert (e.g. the CDC, a university/hospital, or leading scientific journal). The final option is to become an influencer on social media who talks about a specific area. Some people combine routes.
To get an MD, you need admission to medical school (decided by a woke admissions committee at the med school in question), and then not failing out. For ‘expert’ status, it doesn’t matter if you got Cs in med school, couldn’t find a residency, or were top of your class. All the credential says is you survived 4 years of medical school.
To get a PhD, you need admission to a PhD program (sometimes an admissions committee, sometimes one crazy professor with a rubber stamp from the admissions committee), and then you need to spend 4-8 years to complete a dissertation. Completion of that dissertation is judged by ~5 PhDs of faculty rank or equivalent that you choose to serve on your committee. All this credential says is you convinced 5 other PhDs to give you a degree. While the average biomedical science PhD is smarter than the average MD, the standard deviation on the PhDs is much larger.
If you are doing a dual MD/PhD or are in the British system, your PhD will be 3 years (hence the MD/MsC joke that MD/PhDs are getting a master’s degree instead of a PhD). The theory is that MD/PhDs are the top students admitted to the medical school, so they can complete the work faster. This is what Shrike would call one of the Physician Fallacies, specifically that the physicians think they’re smarter. In practice, PhD mentors find “shorter” projects for MD/PhDs and are more inclined to push them through so they don’t slow down the progression too much. Most would benefit from another year or two of research.
If spending 4+ years of additional schooling sounds like too much effort to become an expert, no worries! You can work as a bureaucrat at an institution that has the reputation of being an expert. While it is harder to claim expert status as the CDC’s janitor, there are many jobs that require some science knowledge, and have appropriate titles. The top positions will require a PhD or MD, but there are others for which a BS in a science is sufficient. Congrats, you can now claim expert status!
The last route of becoming a science influencer sounds easier, but this depends on your personality and ability to market. It may also take years to build your audience. Some get their start doing affiliate marketing with a science frame (think drinks that claim to improve your gut health), but others are extroverts who have mastered social media. While this does not require any science knowledge per se, succeeding as an influencer requires being at the top of your game, and most will have some degree of knowledge.
If Shrike were to rank the average person by ‘most accurate science knowledge/ability to think’, it would go PhD > (MD/PhD) > MD > influencer > bureaucrat. Note that there is lots of variability, so this is a rough rule of thumb with plenty of exceptions. There are moron PhDs and competent bureaucrats.
If Shrike were to rank the average person by ‘best able to communicate science ideas to the public’, it would go influencer > bureaucrat > MD/PhD or MD > PhD. Still lots of variability, and this ignores overlap between categories.
These differences illustrate part of the challenge (transmit accurate science knowledge), but even without the different skill sets needed between categories, there is enormous variation within each of these categories. Almost as if we need to judge each person on their individual merits, and not on their credentials.
Problems with that are:
If you lack the expertise yourself, how do you judge?
Judging a person on individual merits takes too much time and effort.
Which expert should I trust?
tl;dr trust no one.
But since you’re a human wired to trust and get sold to, that won’t work so well. However, there are some red flags that you can check first to help you decide if this person is full of garbage, repeating what Google and Wikipedia say, or has real expertise.
Over-reliance on credentials
Credentials can rapidly communicate useful information. But a “Prof X, MD, PhD”? Huge red flag when someone strings that many together. It screams ‘obey me, peon!’
Even “Dr.” and “Prof” alone are empty authority appeals. If the person had a real degree, all they need to do is state it. In some professional cases, a degree in the title (or alternatively in the bio) can be ok. Same with university affiliations—in some cases, it is ok in a bio, but Harvard has a lot of midwits… and some of them even get PhDs.
Time is another empty authority appeal. Remember that some newly minted PhDs have been in science for 8 years because they did undergrad research for 3 years and spent 5 years on their PhD. MDs often count their med school as “science”, so you will see residents with “10 years’ experience’.
Lack of expertise
Students are not experts. Mathematicians and economists are not biomedical scientists. While these people may have insight into their experiences with biomedical science, and more training than the average person, the Dunning-Kruger effect is strong in them. Being an extrovert or effective marketer does not make one an expert.
Policy-makers
The bio may tell you what they do. If it suggests any kind of administrative role higher than a chair (eg dean, provost, president, chancellor, vice-president, vice-provost, vice-chancellor, director, founder, CEO), they go in the ‘policy-maker’ bin. Assume everything a policy-maker says is focused on advancing their agenda, and/or convincing you to comply with their agenda. Could be true, could be false. The higher up they are, the smoother they lie to you.
Also note that policy-makers love conflating themselves with scientists and/or researchers. Please do not enable this type of lying. Policy-makers could have a science background, but you should no longer trust them as “scientists” once they cross that chasm into policy-making. This becomes 100x worse when they are government officials. Note that scientists running research labs at the NIH are not “government officials”, even though they are government employees. They don’t set policy. Directors and Program Officers at NIH are the policy-makers there.
This also goes for activists, brands and companies. Everyone reflexively distrusts “Big Pharma”, but every brand and company is focused on driving value to themselves. Some can do it by providing helpful information and solving a problem you have. Some create the problem by fear-mongering to drive sales.
If your interests align with the policy-maker’s, you can trust them to the extent your interests align.
Fear-mongering
Lots of fear-mongering is a sales tool to make you emotional and easy to sell to. Any scientific FUD should instantly raise your defenses—you’re about to be sold to. Maybe this is a legit problem, more likely not. These accounts rely on your distrust of the policy-makers to gain your trust. As with some of these other heuristics, it’s not all-or-none, but when an account consistently pushes a specific narrative, that’s not science. At best, it’s a brand. Not all marketing is bad, but it is marketing. Recognize it for what it is. And if the account is constantly trying to scare you about some secret evil the policy-makers are doing, they go in the ‘scam’ category if they cannot give concrete examples. Specific criticism isn’t fear-mongering—for example, ‘mask mandates are unethical because they are ineffective. Here’s why cloth masks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses’… this is criticism, not fear-mongering. If the account is devoted to proving the government wrong about everything, or convincing you that mask mandates are sterilizing you, then you’re getting into fear-mongering territory.
Autist note: The proper way to fear-monger as a scientist is to put it in a section called “Significance”, “Impact”, “Problem”, or “Introduction”. These words are clues that you are in the scientific sales funnel aimed at convincing you, the reader, that the scientist is studying a critical problem that must be solved, and framing the solution that the scientist will present as the best possible one. There is useful information in these sections, and the facts are often technically correct. Even when facts are technically correct, the narrative could be total garbage, though. Note that contrary facts are often omitted or subjected to straw-man arguments in these sections. Read the contrary papers to get the other viewpoint.
Location
If they’re in Iran, India, China, Turkey, South Korea, or some third world nation, the science is most likely garbage. Note this is geographic location, NOT race—there are excellent Indian, Chinese, Turkish, Korean, etc scientists in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. There are some good scientists in the countries to avoid, but if you can’t tell if the person is an expert or not, stick to US/Canada/UK/Western Europe/Australia/Japan. You have a better chance of finding real information.
Pronouns in name or bio
The downside to sticking to “the West” is you get a lot more people with pronouns in the bio. This is a general red flag. These people might be right in some areas, but they will be soy, and they will follow the government line. Useful for figuring out what the officially acceptable range of ideas are, and what might become officially acceptable thought. Avoid trusting for the controversial subjects, but they may have local subject-matter expertise on issues that are non-controversial.
Track record
For non-controversial issues, check some of their claims against Google and Wikipedia. This will tell you what level they are talking at, and how close to easily findable information they are. If they’re repeating Google and Wikipedia verbatim, you know they’re a hack. If you get more detail out of Google/Wikipedia and it’s not a high level tweet/post, you know they’re a hack.
The other thing to check is what references and/or links they provide. If they continually link to garbage journals or non-science websites, you know they’re not an expert. Easy rule of thumb for ‘garbage journals’ is anything with an impact factor < 4 (google <journal name> impact factor to get that number). If the publisher is Frontiers or MDPI, it is also suspect, though these can be good sometimes.
biorXiv and medrXiv links are ok if they’re discussing that specific pre-print, or if the knowledge is so new it has not yet been published. But for established things? Nope.
If you have access to Scopus, you can look up their publication track record and their h-index. The h-index should be at least 10. For full professors/boomers, it should be closer to 30+.
If there’s never any references provided because the government, Big Pharma, or other powers censor all “true” information on this topic, they’re a scammer. There’s enough competition that someone has tried everything semi-questionable that is widely known, and the findings have been published. Those studies could be absolute garbage, but someone has tried them. Also common sense helps. If using soy lipids to make “liposomal” formulations could reliably deliver compounds to the blood for “sustained release” after eating it, all your off-patent drugs would be packaged this way because that’s way cheaper than current liposomal formulations.
Controversial Topics
This one is the hardest to figure out, due to your biases. Shrike’s rule of thumb here is to trust experts you already trust for non-controversial things. If you trust your physician, listen to them, even for the controversial things. The other two things to do is 1) get a second opinion and 2) see what narrative the other side is pushing. If it’s some rando on CNN speaking authoritatively about the latest viral variant, only trust them if you trust CNN (hint: never trust media).
If two accounts you otherwise trust square off on a controversial topic, it’s also ok not to have an opinion on it, or to keep an open mind.
Wrapping Up
These heuristics are not perfect, and each have exceptions to them. But. They should help you with identifying higher quality sources of information, especially when you cannot trust official accounts.
If you think Shrike missed any easy science red flags, drop them in the comments below
This was great - a lot of good quotes dropped. 😂