Episode 56: Be The Expert (On Where Your Expertise Lies)

Rendezvous with Jamie McGlue

These days it’s all too often said that the individual citizen must defer to ‘the experts’; even on matters very intimate and pressing for oneself but for which one lacks ‘formal’ training. Yet nothing in life can be understood separate from its context (sorry, Reductionism!) and frequently the right answer to a question demands multiple lenses of analysis be applied. So a technocrat might have his ideas about public health, for example, but a street vendor might have life experience qualifying him to best the former man in an argument; say, via long-term observations of human nature, or his personal health regimen, or reading books. Who exactly is the expert when disciplines overlap? Who is an expert on who is an expert? The truth is we must all articulate and advocate our beliefs, but humbly admit that it takes a village to raise a child and a village to figure out just what’s what in life, by talking freely.