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Experts? We don't need no stinking experts!



I was thinking about writing another letter to the editor (so far they haven’t asked me to stop writing but I expect it any day!) It was in regard to the now famous “Brexit” vote and the confusion swirling around it. It seems that both sides of the argument did a fair amount of fear mongering (read: lying) about what it would mean. My letter was going to be about the fact that it’s really hard for any of us to tell when we are being lied to anymore since truth and beliefs have either come to mean the same thing or, more sadly, perhaps neither means anything.

And apparently it doesn’t even mean anything if you are a so called “expert.” Experts said things would be terrible while other experts said it would be great. It’s too soon to know for sure but it seems to me that only one view can be true but I don’t know.

What I do know is that the internet and social media has allowed ALL of us to become “experts” (despite lacking any actual knowledge of the subject we are expounding upon) because our beliefs are certainly equal to actual facts, right? We email-forwarding, blogging, Facebook-Instagram-Tweeting posting goofs have the ability to inflict our “knowledge” (read, beliefs) on our unsuspecting friends and those strangers unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of our nonsense. So now people that actually ARE experts aren’t to be trusted if their expertise disagrees with OUR “expertise” (read, beliefs.) Then I read this article:

Why Bad Ideas Refuse to die

Apparently even many actual experts aren’t really experts. Well, they ARE experts but . . . you should read it. Here’s the Cliff’s notes:

A lot of things that pass as facts have been disproved over and over but still hang around – “zombie ideas” – because it’s in the financial interest of some group or other to have it hang around.

In the same vein but even scarier, even the OTHER experts who decide if something is a fact (or not) aren’t always driven by the pure desire for truth, justice and the American way. Turns out that the process of determining if a theory is true can be be driven by the same, venal, money grubbing process that gave us our current health care system, financial system, education system and political system; can you guess what it is? Yes, brilliant – money! If you can produce a study that shows an outcome that someone somewhere will pay to support, it has a leg up with all the other eggheads who review these things. Great sigh.

So if you are uncertain about what to believe or not believe perhaps you’re not dumb or uninformed. Maybe you are a victim of our modern times where truth has become a commodity that goes to the highest bidder – facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!


Actually this is perfect; Americans love to be victims and show an amazing ability to be ignorant, now we can be both with a clear conscious!

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