An expert is somebody who has a broad and deep understanding and competence in terms of knowledge, skill and experience through practice and education in a particular field or area of study. Informally, an expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain. An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study. Experts are called in for advice on their respective subject, but they do not always agree on the particulars of a field of study. An expert can be believed, by virtue of credentials, training, education, profession, publication or experience, to have special knowledge of a subject beyond that of the average person, sufficient that others may officially rely upon the individual's opinion on that topic. Historically, an expert was referred to as a sage. The individual was usually a profound thinker distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. ... [It] means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." The aim of EBM is to integrate the experience of the clinician, the values of the patient, and the best available scientific information to guide decision-making about clinical management. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients.
Junk science is spurious or fraudulent scientific data, research, or analysis. The concept is often invoked in political and legal contexts where facts and scientific results have a great amount of weight in making a determination. It usually conveys a pejorative connotation that the research has been untowardly driven by political, ideological, financial, or otherwise unscientific motives.
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited. It is not the same as junk science.
Cultural bias is the interpretation and judgment of phenomena by the standards of one's own culture. It is sometimes considered a problem central to social and human sciences, such as economics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Some practitioners of these fields have attempted to develop methods and theories to compensate for or eliminate cultural bias.
A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
An ideology is a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons, especially those held for reasons that are not purely about belief in certain knowledge, in which "practical elements are as prominent as theoretical ones". Formerly applied primarily to economic, political, or religious theories and policies, in a tradition going back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory.
John Kenneth Galbraith, also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian-American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
Scientism is the belief that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.
Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of the contracts are considered as the aggregated belief.
Legal psychology is a field focused on the application of psychological principles within the legal system and its interactions with individuals. Professionals in this area are involved in understanding, assessing, evaluating potential jurors, investigating crimes and crime scenes, conducting forensic investigations The term "legal psychology" distinguishes this practical branch of psychology from the more theory-oriented field of clinical psychology.
An opinion is a judgement, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive, as opposed to facts, which are true statements.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post–World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. The book sparked much public discussion at the time. It is also credited with popularizing the term "conventional wisdom". Many of the ideas presented were later expanded and refined in Galbraith's 1967 book, The New Industrial State.
The Great Crash, 1929 is a book written by John Kenneth Galbraith and published in 1955. It is an economic history of the lead-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book argues that the 1929 stock market crash was precipitated by rampant speculation in the stock market, that the common denominator of all speculative episodes is the belief of participants that they can become rich without work and that the tendency towards recurrent speculative orgy serves no useful purpose, but rather is deeply damaging to an economy. It was Galbraith's belief that a good knowledge of what happened in 1929 was the best safeguard against its recurrence.
Cognitive inertia is the tendency for a particular orientation in how an individual thinks about an issue, belief, or strategy to resist change. Clinical and neuroscientific literature often defines it as a lack of motivation to generate distinct cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem or issue. The physics term inertia emphasizes the rigidity and resistance to change in the method of cognitive processing that has been used for a significant amount of time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is the perseverance of how one interprets information, not the perseverance of the belief itself.
The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time was Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith's final book, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004. It is a 62-page essay that recapitulates themes—such as the dominance of corporate power in the public sector and the role of advertising in shaping consumer demand—found in earlier works.
Mathematical models of social learning aim to model opinion dynamics in social networks. Consider a social network in which people (agents) hold a belief or opinion about the state of something in the world, such as the quality of a particular product, the effectiveness of a public policy, or the reliability of a news agency. In all these settings, people learn about the state of the world via observation or communication with others. Models of social learning try to formalize these interactions to describe how agents process the information received from their friends in the social network. Some of the main questions asked in the literature include:
- whether agents reach a consensus;
- whether social learning effectively aggregates scattered information, or put differently, whether the consensus belief matches the true state of the world or not;
- how effective media sources, politicians, and prominent agents can be in belief formation of the entire network. In other words, how much room is there for belief manipulation and misinformation?
Alternative medicine is a term often used to describe medical practices where are untested or untestable. Complementary medicine (CM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), integrated medicine or integrative medicine (IM), functional medicine, and holistic medicine are among many rebrandings of the same phenomenon.
