Dunja Šešelja gave a talk at the Higher Seminar in Philosophy at Stockholm University.
Expert Disagreement: From Individual Judgment to Collective Decision-Making
When experts make judgments that inform public policy, what kinds of reasons should they consider to provide informed and responsible recommendations? In the first part of this talk, I argue that responsible expert judgment requires sensitivity to certain social-epistemic reasons that are often overlooked in discussions on expertise. Using the COVID-19 aerosol transmission debate as an illustrative case, I show how experts must account for “higher-order evidence” arising from peer disagreement, and “inquisitive reasons” regarding the pursuit-worthiness and distribution of labor across various research programs. However, acknowledging that disagreement should inform individual expert judgment raises a challenge for collective decision-making: how should advisory boards aggregate those divided opinions into a policy recommendation? To address this challenge, in the second part of the talk I presents an agent-based model comparing different decision-making strategies in the context of expert disagreement, and their impact on successful policy-making and on public trust in science. Our results show that no decision-making strategy is optimal across different scenarios. Moreover, there is a trade-off between strategies that maximize successful policy-making and those that maximize public trust in science. (The first part of the talk is based on joint work with Will Fleisher and Daniel C. Friedman; the second part is based on joint work with Leah Henderson and Christian Straßer).