Where did all the real experts go?
I had originally thought to spend Easter in a relaxed and stress-free manner. However, it wasn’t long before my ire was provoked by an article on Easter Eggs. A senior brand development chef, aided by the executive science editor of a national newspaper proceeded to explain the science of how to crack your egg along the seam to maintain flavour and reduce chocolate dust.
This immediately raised questions in my mind as to what made either of these individual experts in chocolate egg cracking, and who was paying them to come up with this information that filled a whole page of a national newspaper.
More importantly, had they not ignored the common-sense practicality when developing their thesis? I had always assumed that the Easter Egg market had been created with the younger age range in mind. I could not imagine telling a child of primary school age or younger that they must consider taste and chocolate dust before opening their eggs. Indeed, breaking the egg into smaller pieces was a sure way to implement rationing and reduce stomach-ache. Neither do the excited children want to hear the seven step approach to eating their successful Easter Egg Hunt postulated by some nutritionist!
But this is a much larger problem, created by social media and the published media to fill constant daily output. Suddenly, the world is full of so-called experts with no qualifications who tell us what we eat, what not to eat, where to holiday, where not to holiday, what to wear and what not to wear, how to lose weight, how to exercise, all based on their own preferences rather than empirical evidence.
This is made worse by a public that has stopped thinking and questioning as they use number of followers as a replacement for qualifications. If an article says expert then people assume it must be true. If the article can add the title Dr somewhere in the piece, even if that is a doctorate in some totally unrelated sphere, then so much the better.
It is easy to lambast the influencers and pseudo-experts that write this material. It is also easy to decry the newspaper staff who get paid to take this stuff and pump it out as regularly as possible to get to the bar as soon as the day ends. But the real sinners in all of this are the public. Unfortunately, too many people have lost the skill of critical thinking and prefer to accept all this drivel. They have lost the common-sense to question or to look deeper, only to complain when other people’s choices turn out not to be theirs.
What a pity that common-sense is no longer common!
