Highlights - MARK BURGMAN - Author of “Trusting Judgments: How to Get the Best Out of Experts”

“And we are all wondering the same thing about our threatened species, and so we did some experiments and that's when we found that asking the best-regarded person is a mistake. You don't ask them. They're usually overconfident, and they know more than a random person from the street. But if you are interested and you understand the data and the jargon, then your judgment will be as good as anyone else's. And then I've got a much wider pool of people. I can go to people who are interested than people who profess knowledge and insights. Get them together, talk to them, facilitate the discussion in a structured way, and generate an answer. And that's, we did that because we were interested in conservation problems, but it has implications for expert judgment in epidemiology, medicine, dentistry, social security, national security, and geopolitics. These same questions and these same constraints arise. And so the results of that work are much more generally useful than just conservation.”