Claim to Be an Expert
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Working with reputation means attracting socially active and mainly public citizens to projects implementation. They belong to the category of “opinion leaders”, “authorities in moral matters”, celebrities, and “experts”. There often arises confusion as a result of which people who do not have even basic knowledge in the sphere of their “expertise” are known as experts.
That is why it makes sense to clarify the situation:
1. An “opinion leader” – technically speaking, this is a “knot” existing in the real or virtual space of a social network. Due to his/her numerous contacts with other people and his/her personal qualities, this person wins trust of an audience and can influence its opinion of these or those processes or phenomena. If an “opinion leader” is simply extremely popular – he or she is a celebrity. If at the same time his/her way of life and thinking inspires respect and even reverence – he or she is an authority in moral matters.
2. An “expert” is not necessarily a public person but necessarily he/she is competent in a particular area of knowledge and/or skills. He/she may or may not be an opinion leader. But he/she must be a super-pro, must separate the wheat from the tares and the sheep from the goats.
However there are many more quasi-experts than experts in real life. Their most widespread types are:
· “Handmade “talking heads” are artificially created by political actors and business groups to protect their interests. Their popularity is achieved via providing them with good access to the media.
· “Insider information holders” are more often than not privately practicing consultants, due to their clients’ high status they have access to insider information the mass media are interested in. They achieve success themselves or with the support from their patrons (“handmade insider information holders”). Representatives of the “natural species” usually gain popularity as a derivative of the media’s loyalty – as a rule due to regular leaks of the inside. Under conditions of confidential information flow getting poorer the level of “expertise” decreases respectively. They are helpless and uninteresting without the inside.
· “Administrative leverage holders” are heads of various organizations – companies, public agencies, institutions and even mass media. Their common trait is outsized ego that together with ill breeding makes it possible for them to utter platitudes or simply silly judgments. Their popularity is gained via money and/or by sweat of PR-service’s brow.
· “Swindle workaholics” are ignorant ambitious individuals who gain popularity due to their fabulous impudence and unbearably hard work – often starting with an account in social networks. They often join the ranks of “handmade “talking heads” if they manage to sell their specific talent at a profit.
All of these ladies and gentlemen are so popular because “if stars are lit, it is something that somebody needs” and because the society overburdened with information and scared of the current events does not have any skill or wish to unmask chest-thumpers.
Though many of them deserve to be given a rap on their knuckles – for the sake of the ecology of information space and protection of potential victims. Because a quasi-expert does not merely misguide the society but has a great appetite for prizes of life. I can vividly remember a lady editor of a branch magazine reasoning with a serious air that she had been an “opinion leader” and an “expert” since her appointment. So, all the market operators owed her something – not just on the level of human relations but in quite a tangible form. On the following stages of her evolution she was notable for unrestrained jeansing and a habit of trolling the market with methodologically defective ratings. And there is a great deal of such examples in various branches.
Yet as usual we should sink or swim. Not to be cheated, it is necessary to understand a few things:
1. If the media interview a person frequently, it does not prove that he/she is an expert. He/she might simply be a “handmade “talking head”.
2. If a “talking head” makes frequent appearances on the screen and comments on either the design of spacecraft or the world ballet or the ATO operation, he/she is unlikely to be an expert. Encyclopedists are a dying breed.
3. If you agree with every word an “expert” says and you do not get any new information from his/her comment, he/she is most definitely saying commonplace things which are generally known and common-sense. That is he/she is speaking like a middlebrow but not like a person of unique knowledge and skills.
4. If an expert is stubbornly lining up with this or that politician, the fairness of his opinions is equivocal.
5. The accuracy of experts’ forecasts is none the more exact than the accuracy of basic extrapolation. And the “experts” that often “flash” on the screen forecast the future even worse than their low-profile colleagues.
To prove point 5, I’ll tell you a funny story. Phil Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, collected and analyzed over 80,000 judgmental forecasts in various areas from 1980-s till 2003. He made the following conclusions:
· It is impossible to find any field of expertise where people would clearly surpass a basic extrapolation algorithm. An average person possessing a body of data and a calculation methodology can produce a more accurate forecast than an expert.
· Doctors of science make forecasts none the better than people having no academic credentials.
· People with a twenty-year experience are no more perspicacious than newcomers to the field.
· Experts who most frequently appear in the media tend to be the worst (!) forecasters.
So, the most correct logic in the world where “everybody lies” is “you shall not make for yourself an expert”. And use your grey matter.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1374502-pretenziya-na-ekspertnost