Experts are the bodybuilders of the intellectual world; except its harder to spot them in a crowded room.
Body-builders stand out because they are tanned and fit in the exact same way that Mount Everest is not small. Their distressingly unnatural proportions make it tough for them to fit into regular clothes. This is why bodybuilding competitions always involve swimsuits. It also makes it easy to avoid them at parties.
Experts, on the other hand, tend to look just like ordinary people. They can pin you down under a high-intensity barrage of information so fast you won’t know what hit you.
Freakishly well-defined muscles and world-class intellects don’t happen by accident. People have to decide what kind of physique (or brain) they want and then work hard to get it. Both groups have the same motivation; a desire to prove themselves to the world. Bodybuilders get their chance when strength is called for; like moving a heavy object, lifting a heavy object, or opening a pickle jar. Experts have to wait for just the right question like a tricky medical diagnosis, or a complicated engineering problem or a particularly challenging crossword clue.
Bodybuilders hang out in fitness centers; experts are found in lecture halls, libraries and all over the internet. You can always tell a real expert by their big vocabulary.
Really.
If experts used the same language as the human race, you probably wouldn’t trust them. Wouldn’t you prefer a surgeon who tells you he plans to “excise the tumor from your parietal lobe” to one who says he’s going to “cut out part of your brain”?
It’s the special words that make them sound so smart. Your doctor might say, “You have an occlusion in the aorta that’s causing an arrhythmia.” The guy from IT points out, “You have a process in your registry that’s causing a core dump.” A mechanic says, “You have a bubble in the brake line that’s causing you to slide into the rear of other vehicles.”
It all comes down to “You have an ‘x’ in the ‘y’ that’s causing ‘z’.” Only it sounds so much more impressive in expert language.
Some occupations demand that candidates take special exams before they can claim the title of expert. These tests require the wannabe expert to remember and recite endless rounds of trivia; sort of Jeopardy for Jobs.
“Um yeah, Alex. I’ll take ‘Constitutional Law’ for five-hundred-thousand per year, an expense account, and a company car.”
If a guy can’t legitimately claim expertise as a result of years of study, he might take the easy route and lie about it. Seventy-eight percent of men (including me, right now) have admitted making up facts to support a bogus claim. This phenomenon is the underlying principle for sports radio, talk radio, sports talk radio and internet forums.
For the pretend expert, the safest approach is to avoid facts entirely and stick to a matter of opinion like, “The ‘94 Panthers were the most underrated team in the history of the NFL”, or “Nighthawks is the most underrated of Mondrian’s paintings” or “Hamlet Part 8: The Revenge was the most underrated of Shakespeare’s plays.”
Of course, other so-called experts will fire back with their own opinions like “The Panthers didn’t start playing until ‘95”, and “Nighthawks was painted by Edward Hopper” and “You are an idiot.” Experts are heavily invested in protecting their turf by shutting down anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Sometimes the real experts are the people with the least actual training. Like the time my wife managed to out-expert me at fence-building.
The project was simple. My neighbor Niles and I planned to built a wooden fence along our common property line. Neither of us could claim to be an expert in the sense of having ever built an actual, functional fence at any point during our lives. However, we both asserted expertise on the age-old guy right-of-expertise through tool ownership. I had a circular saw and Niles had a nail gun. We figured that gave us all the expertise we needed.
Framing the fence went reasonably well as measured on the having-to-tear-things-down-and-redo-them scale. It got tricky when we had to put up the slats. We’d run a string along the posts to get the right height, but in terms of being level and smooth the ground was surprisingly uncooperative. Every slat was going to have to be trimmed at a slightly different angle to fit along the terrain. While we contemplated the application of various trigonometric formulas, my wife suggested that we invert each slat, set it on the ground, and then draw along the string to mark the cut. Even though she didn’t have tools (and therefore couldn’t claim any real expertise,) it turned out she was right. I decided just to go with it because the one area where I don’t claim expertise is in relationships.
Which is strange because as a teen, I always seemed to find myself being asked for advice about other people’s relationships. One of my correspondents shared a similar experience. He had a crush on his junior high classmate Marilyn Monroe (not her real name.) She, in turn, had a crush on another fellow named Arthur Miller (not his real name.) Both of them asked advice from Norm Beer (yep, that is his real name.) Since Norm liked them both and didn’t want to hurt them, he had to play the role of unwilling expert and matchmaker for them. He must have been good at it because he got to repeat his performance for other couples including Sonny and Cher, Shields and Yarnell and Tigh and Rosslin (not even close to their real names.)
Norm stuck it out and pretended to be an expert for the same reason all guys pretend to be experts. It’s easier than saying, “I don’t know.”
