My favorite quote on experts is from author John Le Carre in his novel Russia House:
“I do not like experts,” he said. “They are our jailers…. Experts are addicts. They solve nothing. They are servants of whatever system hires them. They perpetuate it. When we are tortured, we shall be tortured by experts. When we are hanged, experts will hang us…. When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats.”
But an even better quote is from James Surowiecki, author of The Widsom of Crowds:
Why are we not better off finding an expert to make all the hard decisions?Experts, no matter how smart, only have limited amounts of information. They also, like all of us, have biases. It’s very rare that one person can know more than a large group of people, and almost never does that same person know more about a whole series of questions. The other problem in finding an expert is that it’s actually hard to identify true experts. In fact, if a group is smart enough to find a real expert, it’s more than smart enough not to need one.
Anyone who’s spent time on my site knows by now “this isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.” Tara talks about her Point last week (oh yeah, she’s the girl with balls – go read her blog and see if you don’t arrive at the same conclusion).
My point and why this site is here – I am advocating something in the Philippine energy sector that is … well … something that is no less than an architecture of participation.
John Nery, an editor at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, got really close to this concept yesterday in his blog when he quotes from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:
When the right of every citizen to co-operate in the government of society is acknowledged, every citizen must be presumed to possess the power of discriminating between the different opinions of his contemporaries, and of appreciating the different facts from which inferences may be drawn.
I get up every morning with anticipation of finding out more how this is going to be made manifest in the Philippine energy sector.