BY JOHN SCHROEDER
Here is Los Angeles County, where masks are still mandated, it is quite common to run into people in various states of deep and abiding fear. That fact stuns me in a place where vaccine rates are very high. Almost 80 % of Angelinos aged 12 and up have at least one jab (71% are fully vaccinated) as compared to only 58% fully vaccinated in the nation as a whole. While you can find someone deeply afraid almost anywhere, my travels say that we seem to see more in the better vaccinated Los Angeles County than anywhere else in the nation I have been. Why? Because the mask mandate speaks very loudly and tells people there is something to be afraid of.
We live in the age of the expert, when it seems like the world is so complicated that we just have to rely on the expert to tell us what to do. There are three comments I want to make about that observation.
The first is that from the observations of the first paragraph the expert has to understand that they have a deep duty to more than simply their expertise. The duty is to make very clear the limits of your expertise to whomever you are addressing, and in so doing make those limits very clear to yourself. Moreover, any expert must realize that the more expert they become in some specific area, the more likely it is that they know less about other things. The singular devotion it takes to develop expertise in some area mandates that one spend less time studying other things. Thus the stereotypical absent-minded professor.
The second comment is for us to understand that experts often aren’t as smart as we would like to think. Anybody that has made a tech support call to a computer or software company should know this explicitly. Those people on the other end of phone, people we often assume to be experts, are anything but. They have a script they work from. They may know more than you, but that is a bar far short of expertise. A position of expertise in no way guarantees actual expertise is present in the chair – particularly in an age of “equity.”
Which leads me to the final comment – you’re not stupid, dumb, or unknowledgeable. An expert is a resource, not a God. Do not be cowed simply because they seem smarter than you. Query them, seek to know what they know, but stop short of letting them tell you what to do. When I see fearful people around Los Angeles I sense a certain insecurity about them that is not born simply of their fear. They don’t really know what to do so out of that uncertainty they act with what someone tells them is optimal security, even if it does not all add up to them. They assume that if it does not add up, it must be due to their ignorance. But often things don’t add up because they don’t add up. (Which is a nice way of saying the experts don’t know either and are heaving cow patties.)
“You’re smarter than you think you are and they are not nearly as smart as they want you to think they are” – a creed to live by in the age of the expert.
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