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Questions for Assessing Credentials
When reading a book or a study or listening to a talk, it’s important to consider two aspects of the authors. The first is their credentials. So often books and talks will be claiming to be based on research, but what is that person’s expertise in research? If I was to start writing papers on artificial intelligence, you should dismiss the papers that I’m writing even though I might have a professor title and a PhD after my name. Why? Because my expertise is in economics. It is not in artificial intelligence.
Another type of expertise might not be in producing research, but in synthesizing research, and that is the skill of a journalist. So they are able to look at lots of different types of research, and they have a lot of skill into distilling this into actionable, practical takeaways. But again, we want to look at what is that journalist expertise in the topic. Has he or she written about that topic many times in the past? Or are they jumping on this particular topic because it’s popular, it’s hot, and so they think they will write about it because it will sell? But notice that expertise need not just come from scientific research. I’m not trying to play my own book and say academics are better than everybody else. That is simply not true. It could well be that you have expertise as the CEO of an organization. There is nobody better to tell war stories about what he or she did to make her company successful. But be careful to recognize that their expertise might be limited to the types of organizations they’ve run. It might not be true in general.
Questions for Assessing Bias
The second aspect of an author to look at is their bias. So sometimes they’re authors who might be biased to finding one particular result. So if you’re somebody who has a history of, say, anti-capitalist writings, it may well be that you will write a book saying everything about the capitalist system is wrong. And therefore, you should be concerned because he or she is likely to only gather the evidence that supports his or her position even if there’s lots of evidence supporting capitalism. I notice this is equally true of an author who is pro-capitalist. He or she might write a one-sided book about everything that is great about capitalism and be blind to the possibility that this can cause inequality and some negative outcomes.
So one thing that you might want to ask yourself is, if the same author had produced the same study which had given the opposite result, would he or she be willing to publish this? Sometimes there were academic scientists who have come up with some studies with unpopular results. Maybe diversity, equity, inclusion does not always improve company performance. Maybe sustainable companies do not always perform better, but they release those papers because that’s what the evidence says. And as a researcher, they’re committed to scientific objectivity. But there are other authors who will very rarely release anything that goes against their particular ideology. Why? Because they want to show a particular view, and they will blind themselves to the possibility of an opposing view.