Experts

This is going to maybe sound a bit odd, so bear with me a second: what is the point in having experts? There exists at least a thousand ‘experts’ in absolutely anything you could possibly mention. Don’t believe me? Name something then. There are experts in everything from growing grass to putting a bloke on the moon.

I’m not decrying experts as a whole because I reckon putting someone on the moon is pretty specialised and a damned sight more complicated than getting grass to grow (side note: it does it by itself! You’re no more an expert in that than I am in making the sun come up each bloody morning!). My beef is where there is no proven correct answer and you end up with a group of spectacle wearing men in white coats arguing at two polar opposites. Surely at this point you cannot regard them as experts anymore than a ‘bunch of people who have an opinion’?

Want some examples? Global warming. On one hand it’s being caused by me every time I turn on a light or start my car. On the other hand, shit happens and the planet naturally cycles through phases of warming before cooling again. There you have two camps of thought which could not possibly be any further apart. One of these camps is very, very wrong. No longer are they ‘experts’ and they might consider re-classifying themselves as ‘idiots’. Which camp? I don’t know, I’m not the one professing to be a bloody expert.

Another example? Food and drink. Not a day goes by without some media-spotlight chasing ‘expert’ proclaiming that his research conclusively proves you’ll die for eating something which was previously considered healthy. That on its own would be fine, and useful information, if it wasn’t for the fact that all these ‘experts’ contradict one another at every turn. Not only do they contradict one another but they’ll also leave out critical details when presenting good news. For example, red wine is good for the heart, but will give you liver failure. I’ve stopped paying attention now because otherwise I’d never eat anything. I expect I’ll open a paper tomorrow and discover that potatoes are good for my digestive system but will make my head fall off. On balance, they’re probably best avoided but then except another ‘expert’ will denounce the theory completely and state that potatoes are wonderful for my joints and my head will stay exactly where it is.

For years ‘experts’ thought the world was flat. At no point during their retarded bickering did anyone think to hop in a boat and go and find out (mainly because they were worried about falling off the edge. Really?!). For centuries the likes of Pythagoras and Aristotle claimed the Earth was spherical, whilst being laughed at. Eventually someone did jump in a boat went, looked and didn’t fall off the edge. The only thing he needed to be an expert in was pointing a ship in one direction. All the boffins left at home had little idea of the outcome, so what value had they added? If I want to know whether there’s a shop around the corner I’ll go and have a look, I don’t need a team of experts to theorise over probabilities and give me an answer which proves nothing either way.

The BP fiasco at the Deepwater Horizon rig made headlines across the world, for months. Why? Because it took them five months from the date of the explosion to completely seal the well and stop the thing pumping oil into the ocean. Let me say that again: five months. And this was major international news; the biggest environmental disaster in years and one of the biggest oil spills ever. It cost billions of dollars in clean-up money and the lives of countless animals. So, how many experts do you think were involved? I’m gonna go long and plump for ‘just about every marine and drilling expert on the planet’. Why did it take five months then? I’m going to guess again: because they were probably all sat in a bloody room disagreeing with each other.

So called ‘experts’ will disagree on many things which could kill us. Mobile phone technology and wireless networking still haven’t been put to bed although the general consensus is they’re okay. What, completely okay or only a small percentage of users will develop brain tumours and die? We need to know, because there’s still a group of ‘experts’ who aren’t convinced, even though they could end up looking really stupid if it’s all fine and dandy.

The ‘experts’ I have the least amount of time for are those in financial markets. These guys don’t even have to back anything up with proof! If a scientist makes a medical breakthrough he would be expected to show the calculations and substance behind his findings. Not so in the financial market. It seems that if you work for an estate agent you are automatically a ‘property market expert’ and what you say regarding the future of the market should be taken as gospel. Just because someone showed a couple round a two bed flat in Clapham he is not qualified to talk about the state of the recession. The same thing applies to bankers, except more so because they’re the very reason we’re in a recession. 

I could probably go on for days on the subject, but I’m sure I’ve made my point by now. Sure, people will disagree with each other but if one side has a well based, water tight and scientific explanation why something happens then anyone who doesn’t agree is moronic. They’re likely to be in the minority once everyone else has sided with the smart bloke anyway, so no-one will listen. The fact that things don’t happen this way leads me to believe that most of it isn’t water tight and isn’t scientific. In fact, I bet they’re all just winging it.