Before I get started, Lindsay was a guest blogger at Alice In Average-Land, a blog written by her sister. I suggest you all check it out as she’s a very talented writer and her posts are always fun to read.
When you read news articles/editorials in the paper (or more and more for me at least Digg), you often hear about Consensus. Maybe its just a consensus of experts (another ambiguous and entirely useless term since an expert could mean anything), or a more specific consensus such as a scientific consensus. Often these mythical beings of untold knowledge and power are used to lend weight to a specific argument, or more likely as a signal for the reader that they can turn off their brain and just soak in the obvious truths that the author has decided to share.
A specific example is also one of my biggest annoyances in the world today. The Scientific Consensus on Man Made (anthropogenic) Global Warming. Sounds pretty impressive I admit, over 2300+ “experts” (there’s that word again) from around the world apparently agree that humans are warming up the planet. Not that all 2300+ of those scientists actually agree on the conclusions, they just contributed to an assessment report that nobody actually got to see. This was then “summarized” (aka heavily edited) to create a second much much shorter document without all that silly science stuff and then released to the public as the IPCC Assessment reports summary for policy makers. Oh yeah, I guess now they’re calling it Climate Change because the global warming thing didn’t happen like predicted…
While I could probably talk and argue for days about this subject specifically (for awhile it was close to an obsession of mine), the point of this post isn’t to debate that theory itself, but to use it as an example of how people stop thinking as soon as someone (or in this case a group of people) with a perceived expertise on a subject divulges a “truth”. This ties in somewhat to my previous post on paint-by-number parenting. Some dude writes a book and calls himself a child/parenting expert and for some reason the readers suspend their inherent skepticism (something I think is very important) and take it all at face value. They may not agree with everything necessarily, but they don’t call BULLSHIT when they should.
My example would be Dr. Richard Ferber (of the famed Ferber method…aka crying it out). If people had read this dudes research (if you could call it that) and treated him as a stupid and potentially dangerous psychopath instead of as an authority on pediatric sleep disorders (if that isn’t an oxymoron I don’t know what is) maybe we wouldn’t have parents across North America teaching their young babies that nobody is going to come no matter how long or hard they cry. I don’t care if he has an MD, that’s nothing special. I’m pretty sure I could have gotten one if I had tried. So what makes this guy an expert? As far as I can tell he gave himself that label and nobody questioned him.
This isn’t an isolated event. If I could jump back to my favorite subject for a minute, we can talk about one of my least favorite people, Al Gore. Best known for being the VP and an almost president of the USA as well as his joke of a movie (I refuse to call it a documentary) “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore portrays himself as an expert on Anthropogenic Global Warming. What are his qualifications for this role? He had a class once in college with a professor that was passionate about the subject. Otherwise everything is self righteousness and conviction (and a little used car salesman thrown in). What earthshaking scientific evidence did his movie show that proved beyond a doubt that humans are the single greatest cause of global warming? A graph that was poorly explained and WASN’T EVEN ACCURATE, as well as a cute graphic of a polar bear sitting on a melting iceberg (incidentally also inaccurate). And what was his reward for all this self sacrificing work for the good of all mankind? A Nobel peace prize (which happens to have a multi-million dollar financial component) and further millions in monetary rewards for his talks around the world, books deals and investment in carbon credit companies and role as an advisor to corporations internationally and in the US. Hmm, sounds pretty selfless doesn’t it (some estimates indicate he’s made over 100 million directly related to Global Warming)? Not only that, but the jerk doesn’t even practice what he preaches. His energy bill is over 20 TIMES that of the average US citizen.
So what was the point of all of this? If we want to move forward as individuals and as a society, people need to stop acting like lemmings and think for themselves. This starts at home with their parenting, but extends to all parts of life. Don’t follow the trends just because someone tells you to. Don’t believe everything you read just because someone labels themselves an expert. And for Gaia’s sake, don’t believe what you read in a newspaper because those guys are full of shit 9 times out of 10.
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If I were religious I’d be saying “Amen”. I hate Al Gore and his hypocritical bullshit spiels. What a joke!
I completely agree that people need to form their own opinions, and not let themselves be swayed by graphs (“conveniently” showing only one small section of data).
Thanks for the bloglove also!!