My expert is better than your expert

There’s a lot of noise – understandable noise – in the UK’s political classes about the upcoming EU Referendum.

While my view on what the right answer is has not changed a bit during the campaign (if anything, I’ve become even more convinced), I’m fascinated by the nature of the conversations and what they reveal about how we make these kinds of decisions.

On the one hand, there are lots of big “facts” being produced (the highly erroneous £55m a day one is one example adding up to the approximately – note only approximately – £350m that the Brexit bus)

People moan about wanting the facts but the politicians struggle to land “facts”. Nobody wants to hear the facts if they disagree with the point of view they are being used to support. Equally, the politicians bring a source-bias into play by merely opening their mouths – whatever Gove, IDS, Boris, Farage and co say, many disbelieve simply because of who is saying it. Politicians’  credibility is often – rightly – questioned because the way their “facts” seem to be plainly untrue (banana-gate is one egregious example of plain wrong “facts”).

It doesn’t help that statistical “facts” are actively manipulated by both sides – the UK’s statistical watchdog was highly critical of the £350m number quote by the Brexit team and the plague-of-frogs-like (pro-EU) Treasury report on the likely economic outcome is unlikely to be any more precisely accurate than those it has made in recent years, whatever the Chancellor says.

And behind each set of “facts” – each economic model or letter from scientists, celebrities, business leaders – lies an “expert” (in the sense I’ve described in Copy Copy Copy). Someone whose views or behaviour we outsource our decision-making to. This – you might think – is a more reliable way to make your decision on a matter as complex and as important to the future of the country.

Or, is it? All to often, when confronted with an otherwise reliable source – with whatever view – most of us will play the man not the ball (as the male politicos have it): to evaluate the message according to its source. More than once this week, I’ve seen polling data dismissed because it’s from a “Tory Stooge” or secretly EU-funded. Or economic analysis dismissed because all economics-based predictions have always been wrong. As one wit put it on twitter last week, probably the best way to decide which way to vote is not to do any research but just ask a bloke down the pub. Or several, until you get the answer you wanted all along.

All of which makes this kind of decision really hard to make. Or make well.

But perhaps more interestingly, really hard to shape.

In the circumstances I’m not in the least surprised by the fantastical emotional appeals by both sides – using experts and authorities to evoking loss-aversion (how much Brexit will cost us) or fear-of-foreigners. Even though I’d much prefer the debate to be a little more rational and sensible (and in line with my own opinions), I suspect it’ll come down to a combination of who we think we are (NE on the map) and how much we (and the people we trust) fear we might lose (NE/SW).

What do you think?