专家如何重获大众的信任？

I wrote recently that with Brexit, the UK is experimenting on itself. The Trump administration is doing something similar: it’s testing the theory that the US can be run without experts. Trump’s point-man for China, Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian question is Jared Kushner, a real estate heir. Scott Pruitt, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency, has no scientific training. The administration seems to be handling North Korea almost without reference to diplomats or Korea experts. And senator Lindsey Graham, who ran the latest Republican push to dismantle Obamacare, admitted afterwards that he’d started from ignorance: “Well, I’ve been doing it for about a month. I thought everybody else knew what the hell they were talking about, but apparently not.”

我最近写过，英国正在通过脱欧(Brexit)拿自己做实验。特朗普政府也在干类似的事：他们正在验证一个理论，离了专家美国也照样玩得转。特朗普在中国、伊拉克及巴以问题上的侦察兵贾里德•库什纳(Jared Kushner)，是个地产集团继承人。美国国家环境保护局(EPA)局长斯科特•普鲁伊特(Scott Pruitt)，没有受过科学训练。特朗普政府在处理朝鲜问题时看上去几乎不征询外交官或朝鲜问题专家们的意见。而最近一次代表共和党为废除奥巴马医改计划(Obamacare)做出努力的参议员林赛•格雷厄姆(Lindsey Graham)后来承认,他开始做这件事时对情况一无所知：“好吧，我干了差不多一个月。我以为别人都知道他们到底在说啥，但显然不是这么回事。”

Experts are out of fashion. Populists dismiss them as doofus elitists without common sense. But Steven Sloman, cognitive scientist at Brown University, says we’ll always need experts. That’s because most of us are ignorant about almost everything. It couldn’t be otherwise, argues Sloman: the workings of a fridge are complex, let alone the economy or the climate. Common sense usually isn’t enough because complex systems are rarely intuitive. Nor can everyone acquire all-purpose expertise: the brain has only about one-16th the memory storage space of a low-end thumb drive. So a “cognitive division of labour” is essential, says Sloman. We’ll simply have to put our faith in experts. They aren’t wiser than ordinary people — they just have more expertise. Here are some ways that they can restore trust:

专家们过时了。民粹主义者们认为他们是没有常识的愚蠢精英。但布朗大学(Brown University)的认知科学家史蒂文•斯洛曼(Steven Sloman)则说，我们永远需要专家。那是因为我们大多数人几乎什么都不懂。斯洛曼认为这是必然的：冰箱的工作原理尚且很复杂，更别说经济或气候问题了。常识往往是不够的，因为复杂的系统很少是一目了然的。人们也无法获得万能的专业知识：大脑只有一枚低端U盘十六分之一的存储空间。因此必须要有一种“认知的劳动分工”，斯洛曼说。我们必须相信专家们。他们并不比普通人智慧——他们只是拥有更多的专业知识。下面几种方法能让专家们重新赢得人们的信任：

• Experts should shift the conversation from identity to solutions. When people argue from their identity — “I’m a rural Republican, ergo I oppose Obamacare” — they tend to ignore expertise. But if you make the subject “How to get people healthcare when sick”, they listen.

专家们应将谈话的重点从身份转移到解决办法。当人们从他们的身份出发提出自己的主张时——“我是个乡下的共和党人，所以我反对奥巴马医改”——他们往往会忽视专业知识。但如果将发言的主题变成“患病时如何让人们获得医疗服务”，他们就会倾听。

• Don’t argue with people who reject expert knowledge. Ignore them. Climate rejectionists (often cogs in the fossil-fuel lobby’s anti-expert infrastructure) will never accept scientific opinion, no matter how many facts are given. Debating them in the media only advertises their beliefs, says Stephan Lewandowsky, psychologist at Bristol University. (He and others cited here spoke at a recent conference organised by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.)

别和拒绝专业知识的人争论。不要理他们。气候反对派们(这些人通常是化石燃料游说团反专家组织的成员)永远都不会接受科学的观点，不论给出多少事实。跟他们在媒体上辩论只会为他们的信条增加知名度，布里斯托大学(Bristol University)心理学教授斯蒂芬•莱万多夫斯基(Stephan Lewandowsky)说。(这里提到的莱万多夫斯基和其他人在欧盟委员会联合研究中心(European Commission Joint Research Centre)最近组织的一次会议上发了言。)

• Don’t dismiss ordinary people as irrelevant, or suggest that their group will be erased. If you sketch people a future without them in it, they will do everything to stop that future happening. Recall Hillary Clinton saying during her presidential campaign, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Similarly, voters won’t buy an expert-run technocracy in which their own opinions are sidelined.

不要说普通人无关紧要，或暗示他们所在的群体将会不复存在。如果你向人们勾画出一个他们不在其中的未来，他们将会尽一切努力阻止这一未来变成现实。回想一下希拉里•克林顿(Hillary Clinton)在竞选总统时说过的话，“我们要淘汰众多煤矿及煤炭企业。”同样，选民们也不会为一个不重视他们意见、由专家掌控的技术官僚体系买账。

• In a democracy, ordinary people, rather than experts, set society’s goals. They should also help set the scientific agenda on issues such as robotisation, says former European trade commissioner Pascal Lamy. Experts can only advise on how to achieve those goals.

在一个民主国家，设定社会目标的是普通人，而不是专家。在机器人化这样的问题上，普通人也应该参与科学议程的制定，曾任欧盟贸易专员的帕斯卡尔•拉米(Pascal Lamy)说。专家们只能建议如何实现这些目标。

• Experts should be humble. If they pretend they’re omniscient, they will be punished whenever they make mistakes — as happened after the financial crisis. They should admit that the scientific process is messy. “We deal with uncertainty, with risk, with failure,” says Johannes Vogel, head of Berlin’s Naturkunde Museum.

专家们要谦虚。如果他们假装自己无所不知，那他们只要一出错就会受到惩罚——就像金融危机后的情况一样。他们应当承认科学的过程是复杂的。“我们应对的是不确定性、风险和失败，”柏林自然博物馆(Naturkunde Museum)的负责人约翰内斯•福格尔(Johannes Vogel)说。

• Despite uncertainty, experts should give clear advice. Lewandowsky advises stating and then repeating findings before qualifying them with uncertainty. His model message is: “We know we are warming the climate. We know we are warming the climate. We are uncertain about how much warmer your backyard will be in 39 years.”

尽管存在不确定性，专家们也应该给出明确的建议。莱万多夫斯基建议，先提出结论，然后重复一遍，最后再补充说明不确定因素，以便让结论更禁得起推敲。他对此作了示范：“我们知道我们正在令气候变暖。我们知道我们正在令气候变暖。我们不确定是，未来39年大家的后院将会变暖多少。”

• Purge the failed and corrupt experts. Every expert gets things wrong, because what humankind doesn’t know about any subject always vastly exceeds what we know. However, forecasters who are consistently wrong should be downgraded, says Jonathan Kimmelman, biomedical ethicist at McGill University. Anyone who spent years cheerleading the pre-2008 housing bubble should not now be spouting about the economy. And experts should have to declare their interests whenever they open their mouths.

清除那些失败和腐败的专家。每位专家都会出错，因为在任何学科中，人类未知的部分总是远远大于我们已知的部分。然而，那些总是出错的预测者应该被降级，麦吉尔大学(McGill University)生物医学伦理学家乔纳森•基默曼(Jonathan Kimmelman)说。任何人如果在2008年以前的数年里一直为房地产泡沫助阵，那如今就不该再大谈经济问题。专家们在开口发表主张前，应该先申明是否利益相关。

• Experts should respect the practical experience of ordinary people. Fishermen usually know where the fish are, notes Lewandowsky.

专家们应该尊重普通人的实践经验。渔夫往往知道鱼在哪里，莱万多夫斯基指出。

• Experts should speak clearly to ordinary people. “Be open, speak human,” advises Tracey Brown, director of the charity Sense about Science. Vogel thinks 10 to 15 per cent of science funding should be spent on communicating with the public. That still wouldn’t equip everyone with the expertise to make their own judgments. But better communication should reduce distance, and so increase trust. Experts need to learn from Trump, who communicates in stories and images instead of numbers and jargon. In any communication, style matters much more than substance.

专家们应当对普通人把话说得清晰易懂。“要开诚布公，用通俗的语言表达。”英国非盈利科普组织Sense about Science的总监特蕾西•布朗(Tracey Brown)建议。沃格尔认为，应拿出科研经费的10%到15%，用于与公众沟通。但这仍不能使每位民众都具备专业知识做出自己的判断。但更有效的沟通应当缩短距离，由此增加信任。专家们要学学特朗普，用故事和形象沟通，而不是数字和专业术语。在任何交流中，风格都要比实质内容重要得多。

• Experts should advertise their practical uses. US Republicans believed in science as long as science brought technological advances, such as putting men on the moon, says Lewandowsky. As the science-technology link weakened from the 1970s, many Republicans went off science.

专家们应当为他们理论的实用性做宣传。只要科学带来了技术进步，如让人类登上了月球，美国的共和党人就会信奉科学，莱万多夫斯基说。20世纪70年代以来，随着科学与技术的联系减弱，许多共和党人就对科学失去了兴趣。

• Teach schoolchildren sourcing rather than facts. Knowing stuff is overvalued. You can find the facts on Google. The trick is knowing which source to trust: big studies by accredited academics, or some random Facebook post.

让学生们学会追本溯源而不是仅仅告诉他们事实。我们过于看重是否知道某些事实了。事实用谷歌(Google)就能找到。关键是要知道应该相信哪种信息来源：权威学者们的大型研究，还是Facebook上一些随机显示的帖子。