Dan Erwin

"90% of Everything is Crap"

3 keys for telling an expert from an incompetent.

In a recent post I vented my frustration over an incompetent who considered herself an expert on healthcare policy. Although I certainly don't view myself an expert on healthcare policy, I know enough to know she was clueless. Yet there she was, talking like she had the last word on the subject. In an article on expertise, Tom Nichols, an expert in the field, issued a warning about so-called experts and the use of the internet. Referring to the eponymous rule by Theodosius Sturgeon that 90% of everything is crap, he pointed out its application to the web.

With about a billion websites, the good news is that there are probably 100 million pretty good websites.The bad news, however, is that

Gloria Steinem's New Category for Gory, Blood-and-Guts, Terrorism Filled, Male Movies

 

Maybe it's just the fact that we're both the same age--82 years--that causes Steinem and me to get a real bang out of creating new terminology and laughing at ourselves. She really did me one better a short time ago, revealing her ability to create new linguistic categories. I burst out laughing three or four times the same day, just thinking about her obscene category label.

Steinem was on a plane from New York to Seattle when a long delay on the tarmac prompted the airline to offer a free movie. When the flight attendant read the choices out loud, the man across the aisle from her said, "I don't watch chick flicks!" She knew the language as well as I...

Losing Faith in Expertise?

 
  We are moving toward a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based collapse of any division between     professionals and laypeople. Tom Nichols, US Naval War College

Tom Nichols' engrossing study of how America lost faith in expertise--and why that's a giant problem--is long overdue. On numerous occasions I've listened to one of the least informed persons in the room hold court, confidently lecturing me and others with a stream of banalities and misinformation. And it's not just at a cocktail party. A few weeks ago a masseuse was talking with great confidence about national policy regarding healthcare, a subject about which she knew absolutely nothing. Since I was captured on a massage table, I merely grunted, but I wanted to throttle her.