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Good Friday morning-slash-afternoon everyone, I’m your painfully handsome and consistently modest host John Henry, and here’s what’s on my mind this morning
First: the obvious. I’ve changed the name of this newsletter to reflect the ongoing process of moving it out of meta-commentary and into production as a “real” newsletter, i.e. “not about me.”
So with that handled, let’s get on with the show!
Here’s another meme that makes me want to choke out the lower 80% of the intelligence pool.
No, you probably DON’T know more about your experience in most situations where this attitude comes up
- patients insisting their doctors are idiots because they don’t have instant magic answers
- parents who didn’t graduate junior high but are now firmly convinced they’re qualified homeschool instructors because “I’ve got a right“
- parents insisting the only way to keep their kids in line is to beat on them
- people who think the rush they get from a handful of sugar pills is evidence that it’s working better than actual medicine
- some 8th grade dropout who spends all their time at Mises dot org and Ron Paul’s website trying to explain to a political scientist what “libertarian” “really means.”
No, chances are unless you have prior specialized training, your experience doesn’t mean you know more than the experts. Given the impact of bias in human thinking, it almost certainly means your opinions and perspectives are less objectively valid than those of the experts advising you, because they’re not emotionally invested.
Having a heart attack doesn’t make you a cardiologist any more than having herpes makes you a urologist. Being autistic doesn’t make you a neurologist. Having several diagnosed neurodivergencies doesn’t make me a psychiatrist.
It can be frustrating when you’re looking for professional help and they don’t have answers, or you don’t like their answers (which is most often the case when this attitude shows up), or you don’t understand their answers (second place), or they don’t seem to understand your experiences, but that doesn’t magically make you the doctor.
Your experiences can’t replace years of education; even a bad doctor probably knows more about your body than you do…and the fact that they don’t know everything while you’re 100% convinced that hip pain is your dead aunt Shirley sending you messages from the great beyond does not mean “your experience” trumps their education, even if “they just don’t get” how ol’ Shirley used to tease you by poking you in the hip.
Even a bad doctor on “ez mode” is diagnosing you based on a set of established knowledge and criteria that you almost certainly don’t have access to (and your Facebook survivors’ group is NOT access to that information!) And their work, unlike yours, is subject to peer review.
People sitting around recounting their subjective experiences isn’t data, it’s anecdotes. Speaking of, how about a wrestling story?
Back in the late 90’s when I was working as an announcer for Southern Championship Wrestling down in NC (shout out to the OmegaPowers), my buddy Toad was involved in a match where he did a diving, somersaulting body block over the top rope to the floor – through his opponent and a table.
He immediately signaled he was hurt, the match was wrapped, and he went to the locker room and bandaged his ribs, convinced that he’d broken them. His entire torso was in pain so bad he could hardly move.
Got to the ER, did some tests and scans, and then they asked him why his torso was ace bandaged. “Well, to keep those broken ribs from moving around too much.”
They said “it won’t help.”
“Why not?”
“Your ribs aren’t injured. Your hip is broken.”
But his hip wasn’t where the pain was, his torso was. He felt the impact of the table on his ribs and that’s where the pain was, so he assumed based on his experience that his ribs were injured…but the experts took a look and found out he was wrong, by what amounts to a mile anatomically.
I get that it’s frustrating to deal with professionals who don’t seem to understand you, and I’m in no way suggesting that there aren’t bad or lazy half-asses hiding behind a degree they sailed through or paid someone else to do most of the real work on or whatever.
I am telling you that by default “your experience” is about the least-qualified evidence of anything you can find because it’s filtered through your limitations of knowledge, your biases, your beliefs, your fears, and your misinformation.
By all means, ask questions and advocate for yourself. By all means, be firm and strong when describing your issue to someone who doesn’t appear to be listening or taking you seriously. By all means if you feel you’re being ill-served find another provider.
But never, ever assume that “your experience” is somehow of greater informational value to your situation than the expert who’s studied hundreds or thousands of experiences similar to yours.
There’s nothing wrong with crediting experience as an information source. There is something very wrong when you start rejecting an entire field of study simply because you don’t like what the data is telling you.
This is a meme encouraging irrationality and rejection of objective evidence and proven science in favor of anecdote and subjective perception. In no way does it advocate for “autism” (as the page that posted it claimed to be doing) nor for anyone who is autistic.
It does, however, feed nicely into the egos of that great mass of non-autistic people who run around calling themselves “autistic” because it’s a convenient excuse to be an entitled jerk or be a pain in the ass to their waitress, while actual autistic people pay the price. Like fake “service animals” that obviously need a service animal themselves.
A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an
A final note: simply gainsaying expertise because it doesn’t flatter you also doesn’t mean you’re an “independent thinker.” It means you’re an egomaniac and have chosen to be ineducable, and I’m kind of tired of people like that hiding behind other people’s problems. Then those other folks with actual problems can’t get help with because these attention-seeking fakes have clogged the system and caused the creation of lots of barriers to prevent fraud and abuse…then those barriers only get in the way of people who legitimately need help, while the fakes and the big-mouths just lie and BS their way around the system
Don’t be one of those people. They cause harm and do little to no good, even for themselves, beyond a little ego boost from feeling like they’ve projected power and told someone else what to do…and in the end, that’s doing nobody any good at all.
