An Epidemic of Credulity
We’re far too quick to believe online experts. We should get most of our advice from people we know in real life or at least expect our gurus to stay in their lanes.
Conclusion first: The promise of the early internet was freedom of information and an easy flow of knowledge from one person to another. But somewhere along the way we stopped questioning where the information came from and who espoused it. Anyone with enough charisma can now become an expert or guru.
I don’t have much charisma, and I’m not an expert on much of anything, so why should you listen to me? What do I know?
This week Tom asked me to write about how being an expert in one thing does not make you an expert in everything. The first (and only) related subject that came to mind was all of these influencers on social media.
No matter who you are, how old you are, or where you live, you’ll occasionally need advice. We need help with many things: managing our money, managing our children, improving our health, figuring out which dishwasher to buy, etc.
As a woman of a certain age, I’m a prime target for social media bombardment. I get advice about my fitness, my hormones, my teenager, my tween, my skincare routine, my home’s maintenance, and my finances. Between ads and influencers, I’m targeted for LED face masks, high-yield savings accounts, AI fitness trainers, and indoor trampoline parks.
Influencers want me to cover my under eye circles, clean my dryer vent, become a millionaire by the time I’m 30 (that ship sailed), donate to animal rescues, buy shorts at Costco (OK, this one worked), and fill my garden with native plants.
And to think I expose myself to all of this by choice!
We’re all familiar with influencers, influencer marketing, and the social media machine. Every kid with a YouTube channel thinks he’s an influencer. And there are legions of these mostly harmless wannabes online.
The real harm comes into play when someone who is an expert in one subject area becomes an influencer who purports to be an expert in many subject areas. This is a nonpartisan, all-discipline, non gendered phenomenon that can sucker any of us.
Today I’m going to break down what I see online when it comes to actual experts in one subject area dabbling (often dangerously) outside their field of expertise.
Out of Touch Influencers Who Give Out of Touch Advice
In lots of ways, Dave Ramsey is my neighbor. He lives in my county. A friend of mine babysat his kids when we were teenagers. He’s the owner and landlord for the house next door to mine.
Dave is good at a couple of things: selling books and real estate investment. Many would argue that he gives good foundational advice for the financially illiterate.
But Dave is woefully out of touch with the realities of life for Millennials and Gen Z. He mocks parents who spend an average amount on daycare. He continues to advise buying your first house with cash to avoid taking out a mortgage. He claims that it’s possible to do this because one can save up $100,000 within two to eight years. (Median home price in the U.S. in Q1 of 2024 was about $420,000.)
He’s also losing his clout with younger generations who call his tips outdated and depressing. They’ve even started a trend on TikTok with the tag #daveramseywouldntapprove. Users post videos of themselves buying expensive coffees despite Dave’s repeated advice to stop their “coffee habit.” Dave’s trolls say “I’d rather be caffeinated than depressed with $6.”
He also gives terrible investment advice that conflates data and fundamentally misunderstands the way markets work.
If it were able to ask my neighbor Dave for advice, I’d ask him how to write a bestseller before I asked him how to manage my money.
Experts Who Give Advice Outside Their Expertise
Just as many experience a bit of “white coat hypertension” when a doctor walks into the room, plenty of people are prone to “white coat credulity.” If someone with a PhD or MD says…anything…it must be true. But we need to beware when doctors give advice outside their field of expertise.
The worst offender in this category is Andrew Huberman. The 48-year-old influencer is an associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. His podcast, Huberman Lab, is one of the most listened to podcasts in the world.
What may have started as a good thing in 2021 has devolved into a show that typifies the promotion of pseudoscience, often to promote dietary supplements. An article in New York Magazine stated that Huberman “posits certainty where there is ambiguity.” Keeping in mind that his expertise is neuroscience, Huberman has had a lot to say about his skepticism around flu vaccination, certain types of sunscreen, and fluoridation (with convenient links to water filters and fluoride-free toothpastes).
Dr. Huber man is leveraging the “doctor” part of his name way outside the scope of his expertise.
Influencers Who Debunk Other Influencers
Influencers debunking influencers are some of my favorite accounts to follow, probably because it gets spicy from time to time. You’ve probably seen these before—in fact, I linked to one in the Dave Ramsey section on childcare costs. Typically the debunker will display a video or an outlandish claim from another influencer and make horrified reaction faces, then chime in with their own expert opinion (because the topic at hand is within their field of expertise).
The foodsciencebabe excels at calling out influencer nonsense. She’s here to explain what “natural flavor” means on your food packaging, giving the FDA’s definition, not a fear-based claim. She’ll steer you clear of holistic health solutions that could land you in the hospital. And she’ll clear up any confusion you might have about whether or not raw milk is safe to drink. (It’s not.)
While foodsciencebabe and accounts like hers are fun and often educational, I still question why I allow them in my life. She is surfacing wild claims I would not have seen had she not dug them up for me so she could debunk them. Her content rarely tells me something I didn’t already know or changes the way I live my life.
Who Should We Believe?
I try to think back to the days before social media had an iron grip on our lives. Where did people get advice about childrearing and skincare and paying for college and aging? In my mom’s generation, I suppose they heard most of this stuff on shows like Oprah or read about it in magazines or heard about it in the school pickup line from friends. I doubt those sources were much better or worse than most influencers.
It leaves me in a quandary about how to wrap up this post. I try to get my information from credible sources. I let The New York Times tell me about news. I message my actual doctor for health problems. I have one friend who’s an accountant and another who works for the chief strategist at a major investment firm—I ask them about general money questions before I call my own financial planner. And for most other things I read books.
The thing with reading books is that information flows very slowly. You might even have to read a few of them before you can compile the advice that applies to your situation. Plus a book is a lot less fun than a 20-second TikTok mocking Dave Ramsey.
“Let the tutor make his student pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority: let not Aristotle’s principles be principles to him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans…
For if he embraces Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be Plato’s, they will be his…
And let him boldly forget, if he wants, where he got these ways of thinking… Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later.” — Montaigne, Of the education of children
“Everything I say is correct. Just ask me.” Margaret the Pug
