Lost in an expert fog

16 April 2017

Genuine authenticity is becoming extinct due to the rise of the modern day expert. There is no limit to the availability of impressive packaging and choreography with accompanying marketing which ultimately delivers the experts into our work and into our homes. So extensive and interwoven are the supporting documentation and testimonials that it is often nigh impossible to unravel the authentic from the fabrication.

Generally driven by self-interest, the experts are associated with the cathartic outpouring of endless wisdom. As a consequence, the writing about a great deal amounts to very little. We are being buried by an avalanche of self-interest driven information which is invariably aggravated by repetition – a developing veritable Tower of Babel! This makes the mining of useful information increasingly difficult. In the world of science it is the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome which further drives and aggravates this self-interest process.

Flowing from this has been the worrying trend noted in the peer-reviewed literature of increasing retractions due to doubtful supporting data. In the neuroscience literature alone there has been an eighty percent increase in retractions over the past five years! In the psychology literature, only forty percent of information communicated in major articles was reproducible.

Unfortunately we live in an age characterized by individual silo’s of interest which invariably represent the entire subjective world view of the individuals inhabiting those specific silo's. The mind state which emerges from this situation is one characterized by the need to defend one’s turf at all costs and taking a judgmental view of all other silo’s (which are generally deleted or distorted to fit into one's own subjective silo). The result is that ‘truths’ that are validated within a given silo lose their universal authenticity when viewed in the context of multiple and potentially overlapping silo’s of interest. Consequently therefore, the expert may not only lack intrinsic genuine authenticity, but is also very much limited by being silo-based.

Seeking out the genuine person imbibed with knowledge, understanding, experience, integrity and an awareness of the environment and its needs has become a challenge. We have arrived at a point where validated facts are questionable. It is at this time that we turn to those researchers with known integrity, committed to genuine value contribution and who have a track record of generating reproducible data or delivering applications which have genuinely performed to specification. But this is just the starting point. From here we need value contributors who venture beyond their interest silo’s and integrate the data from other interest areas (silo's) so as to create a more authentic and comprehensive contribution.

And so at this juncture we are required to transcend the fog of self-interest and embrace a space of genuine curiosity and awe with a view to contributing value to ourselves and to our environment and all that dwell therein.