When the public rallies to an idea that distinguished experts reject, the experts are usually right.
Asimov offered it in a 1977 essay as a deliberately sceptical counterweight to Clarke's first law, which he thought encouraged credulity, and especially against popular pseudoscientific enthusiasms. It is an aphorism rather than an empirical estimate of how often experts or crowds are right.
In practice
- A viral claim that a common additive causes harm is rejected by every toxicologist who has looked at it, and the toxicologists are right.
- A widely shared theory about an aircraft crash is dismissed by accident investigators, and the final report vindicates them.
- Standing
- The counterweight to Clarke's first law, which Asimov wrote it against.
- Subject
- Science & Epistemology
- Essay
- Paradoxes in the data, and sayings about knowing