- In a 2015 poll, 30% of American Republicans and 19% of Democrats supported bombing Agrabah, the fictional hometown of the Disney character Aladdin. In a similar vein, a 2014 poll found that the fewer people knew about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily.
- Another study done by researchers at Ohio State University found that when confronted with scientific evidence
AT A GLANCE
In the past year, we’ve definitely had a lot of expertise in the world on various important topics: vaccinations, epidemiology in general, working from home, macroeconomics, diversity, and more. The problem has become: are people actually respecting and listening to this expertise anymore?
At one level, of course, they are and it’s a dumb question to even ask. If your mom has cancer, you will go to an oncologist and not ask your plumber for advice there.
But at another level … hmmm. Maybe we do respect expertise a lot less.
In one pocket of the globe, as far back as 2015, Americans were distrusting science, which is troubling. There are some crazy scientists, sure — but in general, the scientific method is something we’ve upheld and vetted for years. Foreign Affairs wrote an article in 2017 about the first world “losing faith in expertise,” and The New York Times has done some book reviews about “ignorance now being a virtue.”
We are not going to attempt to turn this into an academic paper by any means, because the target audience and typical end reader is a business-driven person looking for scale and help in growth opportunities. But it is worth discussing the idea of expertise for 4-5 minutes of your time, because if you don’t know what expertise is, and you don’t trust the right expertise, including expert tech advisory, how can you scale that business properly?
Quickly: where do we stand on expertise currently?
A few notable examples, and some good dinner party banter:
- In a 2015 poll, 30% of American Republicans and 19% of Democrats supported bombing Agrabah, the fictional hometown of the Disney character Aladdin. In a similar vein, a 2014 poll found that the fewer people knew about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily.
- Another study done by researchers at Ohio State University found that when confronted with scientific evidence
