We're not always qualified to "do our own research"

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken

In the old days …. That is when we all shopped in town at local merchants and trusted the advice of the man who owned the shoe store who measured our feet and recommended our shoes.   He was an expert on shoes and our friend.  We knew that he would treat our feet as if they were his own.  In other words we let him do the research and didn’t google “shoes.” 

The world of the consumer has changed.  We have become the expert, for almost all products.  Use the internet.  Search for the “ten best shoe bargains.”  Do your own research. 

It is empowering.  Or is it?  The internet, if we stop a moment and think about it, is not your neighborhood pharmacist, or butcher, or jeweler.  It is a commercial network with subtle and sometimes blatant plays for your money.  We know it’s deceptive.  It gives us, however, that false sense of being “in the driver’s seat.” 

I remember when I received my Ph.D. in political science. My father, whose doctorate was in biochemistry, felt obliged to pay greater attention to my views on politics.  I had always trusted his advice on nutrition. 

We lived in a world of trusted expertise.  We did not ”do our own research.”

I am not bewailing our present mistakes in shoe purchases.  I’ll let all of you deal with poor workmanship and bad fits.

When people’s ideas about the world are a bad fit, however, it erodes the very basis of democratic government.

It is not just that we are overwhelmed by the information out there.  We are and we should be.  It is not just that new information rapidly supplants the old. It is not just that political and social information is brand identity on steroids.  It is that expertise does matter and we are “on the clock,” so to speak, to make good choices.

Proud to be your own expert?  My father also worked for several years for the AMA to tackle the problem of fake cures, of miracle elixirs from the high planes of the Himalayans. 

Well the fake doctors on the back platform of buckboard wagons still put on a show only now it’s done online and via cable news. Gullible still we are, as Yoda might say.

But seriously this is one of our more important present challenges. We are not experts on everything and an evening with cable news, google and Facebook do not make us so. What we need to do is think long and hard about the nature of expertise and where to find it. And when the shoe fits, wear it.