The fragmentation of academic disciplines forces individuals to specialise. In doing so, they become experts over their narrow area of research. However, ambitious scientific projects, such as the search for gravitational waves, require them to come together and collaborate across disciplinary borders. How should scientists with expertise in different disciplines treat each others’ expert claims? An intuitive answer is that the collaboration should defer to the opinions of experts. In this paper we show that under certain seemingly innocuous assumptions, this intuitive answer gives rise to an impossibility result when it comes to aggregating the beliefs of experts to deliver the beliefs of a collaboration as a whole. We then argue that when experts’ beliefs come into conflict, they should waive their expert status.

学科的碎片化迫使个人专业化。这样一来，他们就成为了他们狭窄研究领域的专家。然而，雄心勃勃的科学项目，例如寻找引力波，需要他们走到一起，跨学科合作。具有不同学科专业知识的科学家应该如何对待彼此的专家主张？一个直观的答案是，合作应该听从专家的意见。在本文中，我们表明，在某些看似无害的假设下，当涉及聚合专家的信念以提供整体协作的信念时，这种直观的答案会导致不可能的结果。然后我们认为，当专家的信念发生冲突时，他们应该放弃他们的专家地位。