I’ve recently found myself wincing whenever I hear someone in the media refer to their next guest as an “expert” in any field.  Anybody else have that same reaction? Regardless, you know what I’m talking about, right?

So, what am I droning on about now?  Have you ever watched a news show (pick one) where a guest is portrayed as an “expert” in your field?  What invariably happens?  You, over the next few minutes of the interview or expression of opinion, come away with several key takeaways.  One, that buffoon isn’t an expert at all.  Two, why would anyone believe such drivel?  You, knowing your field, having spent years becoming a true expert, are professionally offended by what you’ve just seen and heard.  You go about your day, and likely tell everyone where you work about this idiot and what he/she said in front of millions of viewers . . . and you all get a good laugh.

Yet what happens the following morning?  You know, when another “expert” is trotted out to opine on some other field—one with which you have less familiarity?  Are we not much more willing to accept that person for the “expert” they claim to be?  Even with the previous day’s experience still echoing in our ears, don’t we give this new “expert” the benefit of the doubt, and take what they have to say more seriously?  Heck, it might even lead you to take some following action like a donation to a nonprofit or the casting of a ballot.  And why?  Why are we so willing to accept this second “expert” has the qualifications necessary to convince us our shoe is untied much less to change our opinion about any given topic?

I’m certainly not the first to comment on this phenomenon, but I’ve always found it interesting, nonetheless.  The Dictionary.com definition of “expert” is as follows:

noun

a person who has special skill or knowledge in some particular field; specialist; authority:

And yet in today’s world—and the 24-news cycle I love to malign—nearly anyone can be an “expert”, regardless of whether or not they possess those “special skills or knowledge in some particular field.”  All it really takes is a banner beneath their name on the screen that says “Expert”.  If only it were that easy to gain true expertise.  If only the application of a graphic label really made me an expert . . . I’d label myself a “Financial Expert” and make millions on Wall Street.  And yet, here I sit in Japan—not Wall Street—certainly not making millions . . . unless, of course, I convert my pay into Yen!

I’m going to apologize in advance for those of you who give me crap for the endless movie references . . . but there’s a line in the 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven that I love.  The main character, played by Orlando Bloom, responds to the charge that he makes an unlikely noble by saying, “In France, it only takes a couple rolls of silk to make a noble.”  We laugh at the notion, but isn’t that exactly what’s been done in the media?  The banner graphic—not years spent learning, practicing, and teaching a given subject implied by it—is what has made the “expert” an expert for us.

You know how much work it takes for you to acknowledge someone as an expert in your field, and those standards are probably pretty high.  Yet there seems to be a tendency to lower one’s standards of expertise in other, unfamiliar fields.  After 25 years in my field I feel perfectly capable of judging expertise on military matters, of political-military interaction, and international relations as they exist in Northeast Asia.  Yet how low does my bar go when faced with an agricultural expert, an expert on automotive manufacturing, or an expert on the spread of communicable diseases?  Aren’t I much more willing to accept anybody who appears to have more information than I do in those unfamiliar fields if they claim expertise?  This is doubly true, I think, for those fields that EVERYONE feels comfortable discussing . . . regardless of whether or not they meet the qualifications of an expert indicated above. 

People love to talk matters of military strategy, as if they’d grown up at Clausewitz’s knee, pointing out the “obvious” benefit of this or that proposed course of action.  Certainly, they laugh, it doesn’t take much of a brain—or expertise, really—to be a soldier.  Yet their points could be taken apart, line-by-line, by the youngest Marine Corporal in the field.  Likewise, you occasionally hear people denigrate the work of farmers.  It can’t be that hard, right, farming’s been done for thousands of years by civilizations on every rung of the developmental ladder?  Yet pull just one young farmer in front of the camera and he/she can poke all kinds of holes in yon idiot’s uninformed opinion. Masonry?  Carpentry?  Medicine?  Physics?  Music? Forestry?  Name your field, the years necessary to acquire true expertise are still required no matter the subject.

I guess what I’m actually saying—after much beating of the dead horse—is that we shouldn’t be so quick to accept what is presented to us on a nice, easy-to-digest, platter by the media.  They have expensive airtime to fill, and have increasingly proven over they years they’re not too particular how they do it.  Yet the information conveyed to literally millions of viewers can have unintended (or intended for all you conspiracy theorists out there—you know who you are!) consequences as people leave the comfort of their homes, heading out into the world with heads full of erroneous “facts” taught them by “experts” whose only claim to the title is that they stayed in a Holiday Inn the night prior.

What I really want to say here is that as a society we need to be more demanding of our experts.  We need them to prove their expertise before we take action—or change our opinions—based on their five-minute segments on TV or the internet.  Convince me first that you indeed have some special skill or knowledge, and THEN try to convince me that your view is the right one. 

The graphic banner doesn’t cut it, I just don’t believe it anymore.  Neither should you.

M.G. Haynes