The Goodness of True Expertise
By Madison Chastain
A couple of years back, I shelled out money to work with an online OBGYN whose pioneering medical research into “Post-Birth Control Syndrome” has rendered her a big name in the medical industry. Her protocol really did help me better understand what my hormones were and were not doing, and my knowledge of the female body massively expanded. But this course was not cheap, and I found that some components not only didn’t work for me but were dangerous for me––her diets did not account for an inactive gallbladder or IBS. If I had not worked with a personal doctor prior to starting the course, I would not have been able to identify the nutritional risks of strictly following this OBGYN’s plans. The course also didn’t fully work: it took me working with a local doctor to receive the blood tests and prescriptions I needed to truly start hormonal healing.
I was fortunate that the woman I was working with had a particular set of professional, educationally-backed expertise. But courses, resources, and blogs like hers are cropping up all over the place, the owners of which come from a variety of specializations, ranging from personal experience to a formal education. Because of social media, people from all over the world are now able to share their talents, products, and advice with audiences of millions. If social media has done anything, it’s increased access to both the intimacies of a person’s life as well as factual information in general. But what happens when we start confusing personal experience with factual information? Well, we can begin to think that experience is expertise, that professional (audited) training doesn’t matter, and that knowledge from any two sources is always and everywhere equal in truth and value.
This sharing of information online can fill huge gaps in things like education, mental health services, and faith-based communities. I have benefitted immensely from Instagram accounts run by licensed counselors during intermittent times when I could not afford personal therapy. I know, though, that these accounts are not a replacement for personal therapy. The same can be said for many kinds of accounts. Having lots of followers is not the same as having friends who drop everything to help you during an emergency; following a lot of Catholic influencers doesn’t replace spending time in prayer or getting to know your parish community. When we think of the true, the good, and the beautiful, we must consider that the resources or benefits we’re receiving via social media may only be a facade of these greater goods.
One of the questions that has been emerging, then, is whether or not social media content and online personal courses can replace conventional methods of education. In this article, I will in part be exploring what many are calling “the death of expertise,” after Tom Nichols’ book of the same name. In his book, Nichols explores how our culture of individualism, aided by social media, has paved the way for the distrust of true expertise. Instead, we have come to associate popularity and personality with value, which breeds a sense of trust, even among people we don’t really know and facts we have never corroborated. Nichols outright says, “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths [the ones we have been trained to know the intricacies of] to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
Our Growing Distrust of Experts
The death of expertise begins with the distrust of experts. Who are considered experts? They’re people who have received formal training in a variety of fields in which they are entrusted with relationship to and well-being of the public: lawyers, doctors, scientists, theologians, politicians, etc. Through a combination of formal education and length of practice, experts have a depth of knowledge in an area that impacts others. Experts are also those with particular technical knowledge: plumbers, electricians, architects, mechanics, etc. These types of experts are equally responsible for public well-being, but our interactions with them are often more transactional; rather than receiving knowledge or information, we are receiving goods and services.
The distrust of experts is not surprising. In recent history, technology has allowed for widespread broadcasting of expert mistakes ranging from maternal mortality rates among women of color to consistent recalls of family products, from sexual abuse scandal cover-ups to decades of international warfare that have yielded few publicly supported results, and so on. Now, more than ever, we are aware of when doctors, priests, and politicians fail us, when science changes, and when people are hurt as a result.
It is okay, even good and necessary at times, to think critically about expertise. Who holds the microphone? How did they get that power? What education or professional development have they undergone? How would their experience differ from others’, including my own? However, thinking critically about rhetorical strategies as well as doing research to corroborate rumors, is very different than writing off experts based solely on the offices they hold or valuing non-experts simply because “all knowledge is good knowledge.”
Bypassing Education
If anything, the distrust of trained experts has seeped into the distrust of the institutions that trained them. “If these people jumped through all of the traditional hoops and still made mistakes, why would I go through the trouble?” This line of thinking neglects the near inevitability that, no matter how you go about claiming your share of the expert title, you will make some sort of mistake. Unfortunately, social media and individualist culture makes it all too easy to sidestep this problem all-together: “If they won’t do it right, I’ll do it myself.” In response to the failures and mistakes of others, and with the amount of information that is now one Google search away, we have begun to believe that we can be our own experts.
This may seem harmless when it comes to the second type of expert I mentioned: it can indeed save us money to learn how to fix our own leak and patch our own tire just by watching a YouTube video. However, access to this information can lead us to disvalue technical experts and look down upon this type of career path. What’s more, devaluing this type of expert may bleed into the devaluing of all experts. We can come to believe that we can form our own opinions on the information previously communicated by that first type of expert, just as we come to believe we can change our own oil.
In response to this movement away from traditional experts, we’re seeing an explosion of content, online businesses, and personal courses, from workout regimens to masterclasses to courses on how to make your own course! This oversaturation of information is not only designed to replace those pesky, imperfect experts, but is meant to side-step the traditional route of pursuing a degree or certification in the area of interest.
Now, I’m not talking about online schooling. I’m talking about the recent, unique category of “online courses” given by influencers without formal or educational background. These often take the form of month(s)-long access to video and audio curriculum, including in the price tag membership to a private Facebook group, and perhaps PDF files of additional materials. The biggest differentiating factor of these “online courses” and online schooling is that anyone can make a course––you don’t need any training to start a website or any formal editing to self-publish a book.
To be sure, it is important to examine how online sharing meets needs created by the exclusivity of certain conventional education methods. For one thing, education is increasingly expensive, whether pursued publicly or privately. Even more important is the opportunity to change the narrative around whose voices are doing the teaching. Formal education––both the texts and the teachers––is still a very white, male culture. The freedom of online courses allows those previously marginalized groups who have historically been excluded from the educational rat race to be at the helm of history.
It is good to critique the histories and narratives we are taught in school, and identify ways in which they may be oversimplifying or generalizing experiences that are not in fact universally shared. However, without formal education or training, an influencer whose first-hand experience varies from the norms taught in school can suffer the opposite problem: they claim to have something so unique, so unusual, that you simply must pay to acquire their knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. This is also probably an oversimplification and generalization. Not only might there be other people who have gone through something similar––in fact, doesn’t the targeting of an audience presuppose that viewers identify in some way with this alternative knowledge?––but there very well might be literature, research, and organizations already doing some of that work too! Human culture, society, religion, and literature, do not exist in vacuums or bubbles separate from our experiences.
In this way, online courses are not as counter-cultural as they are marketed to be. Independent courses, whether they come from doctors, counselors, historians, or fashion influencers, are often situated behind steep paywalls. While they may appear cheaper than pursuing a formal degree, ideologically, they are still reiterating the narrative that information is exclusive and must be paid for. Independent online courses would have you believe that you’re beating the system by not pursuing higher education, when in reality, you are still paying for knowledge.
What’s worse, this knowledge is limited to this one particular person’s experience, having not been trained in the broader field, area, or discipline. When we pursue conventional education, whether it’s college, trade school, or a class at the local library, to some degree we are signing on to be trained in a broad range of skills within that field––technical experience, learning the history of collective experiences, knowing and understanding pertinent proven factual information, etc.––and we can trust that those doing the teaching have themselves been trained in those skills as well in order to be hired by the institution. That is why we can trust expertise.
A Lesson in Pride
The human mind often thinks it knows more than it does. The psychological phenomenon central to this discussion of our shifting views on expertise is the Dunning-Kruger effect. It situates knowledge and confidence correlatively on a bell curve. When you get a bit of knowledge of a topic, you feel quite confident in your expertise on that topic because of the zeal it inspires (the peak of the bell curve). This is why some influencers are so certain their experience is the knowledge you won’t find anywhere else! The excitement, fueled by online opportunity, mixed with this false sense of confidence, convinces us that we’ve stumbled upon true expertise! In reality, the more information you learn on a topic––and the more time and money you invest in it––the more you realize how much you don’t actually know, and the more authentically you can convey the facts on said topic. Enthusiasm for a topic is not the same as knowledge. In fact, Nichols suggests that sometimes enthusiasm clouds our judgment of Truth. Perhaps this is partly why we as Christians are called not to be swept up by our feelings, but practice moderation and temperance.
The success of online sharing is almost always an individual experience and requires consumers to believe they can achieve comparable success on their own too. Even if you have access to a Facebook group, you are still engaging with this program alone on your computer. When have we ever really achieved true success on our own? This is the concern of the heresy of pelagianism: that we forget those who have helped us along the way, and the privileges we have received, the greatest of which is the grace of God.
The heresy of pelagianism tells us that we are capable of saving ourselves, using our tools and our intellect, without the need for God’s grace. When the focal point of our learning and growth becomes contingent upon our ability to interpret for ourselves without conversing with dissidents about the truth of a situation, we become not only averse to but afraid of learning that requires humility. When we do this, we become self-centered consumers with the goal of being self-centered producers. God did not intend us to be self-centered. Pelagianism and The Dunning-Kruger effect are just two ways of rephrasing the foundational sin of humanity: pride.
Without a conventional classroom model––even if the classroom is just you and your siblings at your kitchen table!––we lose the opportunity for dialogue with those who hold different beliefs or perceive things differently. Take one look at Twitter, and it is clear that we have lost part of the value of constructive dialogue. When we value our personal experiences over everything else, and we hold that all knowledge is equal in value, online dialogue becomes extremely personal and contentious. Rather than separating ourselves from our knowledge, it all becomes enmeshed. In a room full of people interested in learning, there can come to be an air of respect. When face-to-face with another, we are better reminded of human dignity and imperfection––both theirs and ours.
The Need for Prudence
In an online course or group, we are often entrusted with our own self-improvement. Influencers with followings of tens of thousands cannot accompany us like teachers, doctors, and peers can. Thanks to COVID-19, society has been forced to confront the disparity in quality of education between in-person and online formats, even in conventional school settings; despite technology allowing for increased access to learning, online distance learning poses real limits to comprehension, time-management, and interpersonal interaction that builds vital social skills. Humans aren’t meant to learn from behind screens, and teachers aren’t meant to balance hybrid groupings of dozens of students, some here and some there.
What’s more, influencers who are not formally trained or educated face far fewer consequences if their methods prove faulty. What would have happened if I had followed that OBGYN’s meal plans strictly and come away severely ill, perhaps even in need of a gallbladder removal surgery? She wouldn’t have faced any consequences! It was my responsibility to moderate myself.
So what do we do? Practice prudence. We must use our reason and examine our conscience to identify what we’re truly paying for. What are the fruits of investing in an online educator or content creator? Is it a more inclusive, diverse notion of history, medicine, etc.? Or is it an increased emphasis on online fame? Are we truly seeking greater knowledge? Or are we seeking to be a part of the club?
If we identify that we are truly seeking greater knowledge, it may behoove us to begin doing some preliminary research, and reach out to various experts in those fields. Don’t just settle for the person with the prettiest feed. Who else is doing this kind of work? Is there a school in your area that teaches similar topics that has a faculty member you might email? Is there a local, licensed dietician you can reach out to? Is there a community center in your area where you might sign up for discounted therapy sessions with a clinical psychologist?
If all else fails, humanity created a space where we can access troves of knowledge free of charge––the library! Books, journals, newspapers, and online databases are brimming with expertise. It might seem “old school,” but checking out books or journals not only benefits us, it benefits our local communities, wherein many might exclusively rely on these free resources. We have the power to create demand: Why not reinvest in libraries and create a demand for accessible learning and expert resources? The roots of my own love of learning, which grew into the pursuit of higher education as an adult, were first watered at the local library.
And you know what, if we try all of these things and it seems that this influencer’s knowledge aligns with the existing catalogue of information, then it certainly is not a bad thing to invest our money in a self-supported individual doing good work online. There is a place for online courses, but the virtue of prudence calls us to resist the temptations of ease and vanity. We must habitually turn to humility, consider what we do and do not know, who we are and are not, and extend respect and thanksgiving to those who have set aside true time and energy to the pursuit of expertise.
