Expert's intuition: worse than flipping a coin?

There have been quite a number of efforts to elaborate on the essential differences between liberals and conservatives. Some have been relatively objective, and employed the collection of data; others have been liberal hatchet jobs.

Complicating the efforts is not just that conservatives differ greatly among themselves and but that every opinion that does not support a “progressive” Marxist worldview gets dumped into the conservative category. Thus we have conservatives of a libertarian bent and Christian conservatives, which reflect the social versus economic conservative dichotomy. And there is a small fringe of conservatives who truly are the right wing authoritarians all conservatives are portrayed to be. I would argue that American exceptionalism, all that made America great, has been the curious hybrid of the first two categories of conservatives, combining belief in individualism, in the superiority of the individual to the collective, of radical notions of freedom, with aspects of a conservative morality. This was the "American way" which liberals have largely succeeded in eliminating from the media, universities and government. The two perspectives seem contradictory yet somehow the combination worked to produce the freest, most prosperous, best society humanity has ever seen. But in general conservatives value empowering the individual and liberals believe that the collective, that the beehive, should be controlled by a centralized authority of experts who determine all policy and can construct efficient "five year plans" to solve all problems. (Global warming and capitalist exploitation and thought crimes apparently being our main problems). Ideally to be done through the UN, for the entire planet.

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One interesting line of research to determine the basic differences between conservatives and liberals is the work of Jonathan Haidt. It is based on what he calls "the Social Intuitionist Model". The idea is that moral judgment are made using automatic processes, not reasoning. He elaborated on this in his aptly titled article “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail.” However the theory that decisions are made on a non-conscious, non-rational basis and that our conscious mind merely finds rationalizations for them, is at least 130 years old, and based on what we know through the field of evolutionary psychology, firmly established. We see it Freud's idea that conscious part of the ego is the "clown in the circus" (this refers to a traditional circus act in which a clown pretends to be the ringmaster), and even echoed earlier in Nietzsche's statement that consciousness is a surface. Perhaps the most interesting of Haidt's findings is in his words (Reason, May 2012): “we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a ‘typical liberal’ would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a ‘typical conservative’ would respond." And what Haidt found "The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal'.” In other words conservatives accurately perceive liberals, and liberals rather than displaying greater empathy and imagination as they portray themselves as having, saw conservatives as caricatured villains. We all made our predictions before the game. And a lot of us placed bets based on those predictions. No one can really predict football games against the spread. That is the whole point of the spread. Objectively predicting the results of football games is so complex a process that no formulas have been created, nor perhaps can be, where one merely plugs values of variables in. Never the less should not experts be no worse than .500, if not above? You can trust what a physicist says about matter or what a paleontologist says about evolution (to the distress of some conservatives) not because they are "experts" but because they can generate data through the scientific method, and interpret such data. But in areas where this is not possible, be it predicting football games or social policy, how do experts make decisions? Intuition, let us call it "experts intuition". Decisions about which football team to pick are not made utilizing the scientific method, and are not science but are made as most of our attitudes are formed, as all political decisions are made, namely subjective feelings then being rationalized. I had long noticed that when newspapers carried picks for football games and gave the record of those doing the picks, the winning percentages were usually below .500. In the January 31 issue of the New York Daily News, there was a bettors guide on the superbowl called "our experts call the shots". Nine experts, professional NFL writers and reporters, gave their pick. Their records until now where given. One was at .500 and 8 were below .500. Combined they were 1082 wins and 1222 losses. Somebody predicting based on coin flips would have an expected probability of winning 50% of the time. The chances of going 1082-1222 or worse while flipping a coin would be .002 or 2 in a thousand!! Why did these experts do far worse than somebody flipping a coin could possibly have done? They were using "expert's intuition". You can see that decisions made using "expert's intuition", a must in areas like public policy where an objective data driven algorithm is not possible, can be worse than those made flipping a coin!! Its not hard to see why all states which value collectivism above individualism, which do not believe in the invisible hand of free individuals allowed to pursue their own interest, in which a centralized body makes decisions, wind up as genocidal totalitarian hells.