Expert Accountability

The recent CrowdStrike disaster highlights what I believe is a significant problem with our modern society: as our world has become more complicated and interconnected, we have come to rely more on experts to oversee various aspects of our lives and keep us informed. We give these experts and their institutions great power and trust, but when they make mistakes there is often little accountability.

I am of course not just referring to issues with Information Technology - public trust in a number of institutions is at an all time low, and for good reasons. The last few years has seen a replication crisis in science and the retraction of a number of important studies due to fraud. There have been multiple confessions from journalists explaining how various publications have "lost their way." There have been warnings by social scientists about the censorship now prevalent in their fields.?In all these cases, the public has been or will be harmed by the errors or bias of these institutions, and with usually no recompense. In most cases, not a single person is held responsible.

I have personally started to question if many of the social and political problems were are currently facing were actually caused by bad information and advice given by experts.?Perhaps one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are becoming so prevalent is that the average person finds it hard to believe that the experts could be so incompetent - and so they instead assign malice to their actions.

Hopefully this issue becomes public knowledge and part of the wider discussion that includes possible solutions. I can only offer a basic outline for a possible solution - create a balance of power. New institutions might be created for the sole purpose of uncovering and explaining the mistakes of other institutions.?These institutions could generate after action reports when there have been large failures that affect the public. It might not completely solve the problem, but exposing information on the failure would hopefully allow improvements in the future.