The ILLUSION of DEPTH

Everyone will tell you skating on thin ice is a dangerous venture. Everyone will tell you, but someone will always venture onto thin ice with defiance and macho. Such is the case with humans. Oh, this is not about reprimand or castigation. It is a bit different. It is about what we think we know.

In these days of instant information on your fingertips, many of us think we are blessed with an a gigantic vault of knowledge that would stun, to use a very oft-used word these days, even someone a few decades ago. And indeed, it might, when the arguments are nuanced with a word-extravaganza that have minimal understanding beneath the surface. But ask a question and the only answer is another filibustered sentence or paragraph that imparts very little wisdom. In fact, one can see the many talking heads on television today that have never more than a 2-minute segment to profess their wisdom. Those 2-minutes are only for the sake of eliciting a “Yes” or a “No” from the guest. On the other hand if one of these experts were to spend any length of time explaining the cause that mattered to them, well, I kid you not, they wouldn’t be able to stitch any meaningful reasoning beneath their expertise. In fact, when in doubt ask a good reasoned question and watch them spin a web that many a spider would be proud of.

A couple of guys, Leonid Rosenblit and Frank Kreil came up with an “the illusion of Explanatory Depth” concept where they asked average people about specific daily-used objects like the refrigerator or a television etc. on how they work. All said, they knew the mechanism, but, none could explain the mechanism, much less show real understanding. Upon being explained the mechanism some grew a notch of humility on their belts of understanding.

 Another duo, you might know Justin Kruger and David Dunning came up with a “Dunning Kruger “effect. Where the gulf between the imagined knowledge and the real knowledge is quite wide initially and only with toil and experience, one gets closer but never to their original level of their imagination.

Today there are thousands if not millions of experts in every field and sub-set of every field and even the sub-sub-sub-sub (ad infinitum) subset of every field. Their growth in numbers, like rabbits, would make Fibonacci proud. They pontificate and collect dollars, yuan, Euros, Rubles what have you, and even Bitcoins if you have them.

Alas the damage these “experts” do, clings to the listener/believer with such prickliness that it can ruin him or her for life.

Pick any field and you will find a burgeoning society of middling managerial experts who “know” what to do. They claim expertise with colored glossy reference material advocating a cause they can entice you to join for a “small amount of money.” And if you decline, the wrath of their emotional blackmail ensues with a venom of the most poisonous kind.

Subjects like Climate Change, Finance, Economy, Healthcare, Science, Medicine etc. are all replete with these vacuous voices. Dispute these experts at your own peril. Any disagreement is sure to pounce on you like a den of snakes (recall the Indiana Jones in a dark cave).

I find a few experts in medicine who having majored in disparate field find it completely relevant to lecture someone who has thousands of hours of expertise in the field. And similarly I find someone with limited “Book-Knowledge” who has never even taken a pulse pontificating the value of how things should be done in medicine.

You will agree, dear reader, that there is more to knowledge then a 5-minute commercial. In fact lately seeing their own glazed stupidity even the actors are doing “Doctor Poses” before advocating for a product. Surreptitiously such spewed nonsense gets cluttered in the minds of people who have worked hard all day long and come back for entertainment on television and innocently get indoctrinated with idiocy. A recent television episode of “This is Us” was broadcast indicating that a crockpot caused fire. Thousands of people began throwing their crock-pots in the dumpster causing untold economic havoc on the crock pot maker company.

Is this our state of the state of our knowledge? Do we dwell a nose-length past the obvious? Do we smell the fragrance or imagine it? Do we reach out and pull out a dictionary to understand the meaning of a word and its context? Do we even care? Are we so embedded in the world of self that except for the tiny screen that we can expand and contract an image on, the rest of the world does not exist. And whatever is on that screen is gospel for these denizens?

Here is a glaring example of rampant idiocy in the field of medicine. After creating American Obesity by suggesting the “Food Pyramid” as the nutritional guidelines, lately these experts have walked back to a “Food Plate” yet they persist in their thought process. Now they suggest we have a “Pre-Diabetes” and that patients should be monitored for the same. Using arbitrary guide-lines they have ventured into “forecasting” health. The simplest answer is of course too complex to understand, which is encourage low carbohydrate intake and limit calories and one will never go past their “Pre” phase. In fact, it will reverse some of the most resistant obesity related Type II Diabetes as well. But no, the experts skirt that issue. Wonder why? A similar trend is growing in the “pre-hypertension” category as well. Same rules apply if obesity and lack of exercise is the issue that feed the demon, not the nurture the pill-popping hydra.

Cancer care unfortunately follows a similar path Every new cancer medicine is laced with a unique low “n” to prove the p-value in the direction of “Less is More” i.e. less than 0.05. If you can manipulate the variables to arrive at that number or one lower, then voila…fortunes are made, drug prices skyrocket while lives keep getting lost. This is a deeper subject that I have glanced at, many times in previous blogs.

There are times, in these times that one might consider that the runaway train of shallow flows of ice cannot sustain the future. Just because it shines, doesn’t mean it is wholesome. So, if you must skate find a frozen lake, frozen to a depth that will sustain your weight many times over. Look at the foundation, the scaffolding and not just the dressed-up shiny mannequin in front of you, for there in those darker depths exists real knowledge.

Okay, I will now get off my pompous podium and take my humility pill as well.

But please consider this, if you have read thus far, fight for real knowledge, not some empty-headed slogan. For life is grand. Life is interesting. Life is exhilarating. Life is full and vibrant. We can still learn from a Gecko’s webbed feet to create glue, from the spider’s spin for a fabric, from the grace of a dolphin to glide through oceans, and from the flight of a bird to fly an aircraft. Indeed, it is all around us to explore, if we could only give it our time.

Thank you for reading.