Vetting the Experts

I'm tired and impatient at the degree of scientific ignorance you see in the world today. It's not just science, it's also prevalent in politics and historical data today. No one understands the facts and no one takes the time to do the research to figure out what the facts are. What we do instead is lazily let other "experts" do the research and present the results for us.

We're all very busy people, and I can sympathize that most people don't have the time, patience, or inclination to deeply inform themselves, but the problem is that we rely on a select few people to preform this function for us. It brings up the question of who is checking to make sure the so-called "experts" know what the hell they are talking about.

We need something like Snopes.com for experts. Something that goes over the criteria and vouches for someones ability to speak intelligently and authoritatively about a subject. If you get the expert seal of approval, people should trust what you say, if not, shut the hell up.

The problem here is the same as all these wacky emails that get sent around, without a shred of truth to them. Sometimes it's mistaken source material, sometimes it's drawing the wrong conclusion from a set of facts, and sometimes it's just bad information. When I get a stupid sounding email, I check Snopes and reply back to my aunt and tell her that it's not true that Muslims have taken over Britain's education system, or that Captain Kangaroo was a Green Beret. Most people don't bother to check before the forward ridiculous tripe.

The problem is that people already think they are listening to experts, their own experts. Sometimes, the expert is their minister. Their minister is telling them to forget about all this evolution, the bible says the planet is 6,000 years old, so the scientists must be wrong. The problem here is that the bible doesn't say the earth is 6,000 years old, biblical scholars from hundreds of years ago pored over the bible and estimated that the earth had to be that old to get back to Genesis. The bible does not have one answer on page 213 that says "the earth is 6,000 years old". So the "experts" don't even know what they are talking about even if you accept the infallibility of their source material.

I am amazed that people accept the word of their experts, political leaders, over climate scientists. I am amazed that people go on believing against all proof to the contrary.

The earth is 4 billion years old, evolution is a fact, and man is causing global warming. These facts are not subject to debate, they are indisputable.

Just because someone calls themselves an expert, doesn't make it so. We need to check the credentials of the people that are making public pronouncements, and if we find that they are not qualified to give an informed analysis on the subject, we should politely tell them to shut the hell up.

Thomas Pynchon has a great quotation from Gravity's Rainbow: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."

If they can get you listening to the wrong "experts", you won't check the facts to find out what the real story is.