Experts: Everything and Nothing

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As Rush Limbaugh points out often on his show, the experts are always surprised. Just this morning, I discovered by typing in “experts always surprised” into a Yahoo search, I discovered how experts didn’t expect the frequency of shark attacks, the frequency of earthquakes in the Yucca valley, Arabian response to Israel, and even to scores in Bridge games. For a more exhaustive list, see Intellectual Conservative’s post on the subject. His post focuses on who gets to be an expert, and once I touch on that I’ll focus on what makes a person an expert and what that means for everything else he says.

Media expert selection follows no set bounds. When you hear stories about how “experts predict” or how their predictions didn’t come true, remember that the media does not select the people who know the most about things to be experts. Some of it, like sadly some ballots being cast now, is all about name recognition. Media experts come with two caveats: location and baggage. Like IC points out, it’s logistically more difficult and expensive to talk to someone at the Kennedy Space Center when Challenger exploded when they have someone down the hall at the studio or across the street who once knew someone who worked for NASA, nevermind the contact was a janitor. Everyone in Washington DC, or those proximal when news breaks and they seek opinions, comes with a hidden agenda. Even outside, there’s a desire to have your work and career fostered by your findings. See Robert Spencer’s book Climate Confusion if you have any doubts about that.

Experts know more and more about less and less until they eventually know everything about nothing. You focus in on a certain aspect at the expense of all others, and you usually only study it from one angle. Hans Bonert is a known sodium chloride expert in plants, but he knows very little else about any of the plants in which he studies this particular phenomenon. Out of context, it’s not necessarily useful. Expertise furthermore assumes wrongly that someone knows everything there is to know about a subject, as if mankind were really smart enough for that. We select experts based on perceived accomplishments and good intentions, but we don’t revoke their claims when we find out they don’t have the credentials they claim to have.

While attending college, I had a professor who was sought out by the administration due to his expertise in the plant world. As I came to know this researcher, I realized that he not only did none of the research himself, but that his research was by and large completely useless. He used funding to shotgun a problem and then published all the data he hit, most of which was discontiguous and incongruous without context. Yet, he published gobs and gobs of papers and brought in millions of dollars in research money, so the administration ignored the fact that nothing he produced had any end-user utility.

Earlier this week, my dad took in my guitar for warranty repair/replacement, I having previously dropped by the seller to get help restringing the darn thing. Both in that instance and in this instance, they informed us that the guitar could not be fixed without repair, so they refunded the purchase and let my dad retain the guitar. He came across someone locally online through Craigslist who offered to help people save their guitar for a reasonable price. I am going to plug this guy because he proved himself an expert to me.

If you need guitar help, call DJ at 702-658-0727, and he may be able to diagnose and correct your problem per phone for free.

DJ informed my father that the only thing wrong with our circumstance was that the people at the guitar store were abject morons. Apparently, they’ve gone so far from acoustic guitars in pursuit of noisy rock and roll that they forgot completely how these guitars work. The bridge pins do not actually in and of themselves hold the strings in the guitar. The guitar holds the strings in, which must be kinked and then inserted into slots internal to the guitar, not held down directly by the ends of the bridge pins. I find it highly ironic that people who make their living off of musical instruments don’t know basics like that. I got a free guitar and a refund out of the deal (less the $20 repair guarantee), all because my dad found a REAL expert.

Who decided that just because someone works in a guitar store that he knows everything there is to know? Asinine though this example may be, it clearly illustrates that with a little bit of genuine research, you can solve problems with real solutions and that those identified as experts by some may not be useful to you. Take the advice of experts, scientists, and leaders with a grain of salt. Not everything they say is gospel, and in some cases, none of it’s worth a hill of beans.