Expertise
John A. Keel spoke often in his books of self-stylized paranormal investigators. The expression always seemed kind of curious. I mean aren’t all paranormal investigators self-stylized? There aren’t any schools (to the best of my knowledge anyway) for paranormal investigators. But I think the point Keel was trying to make was that they were all created in their own image, they didn’t take cues from other documented cases and they had no sense of the broader history of the endeavour in which they found themselves. Perhaps they really were just making it up as they went along. Regardless they clearly felt they knew what they were doing, and would present themselves as experts in this dubious field.
I’m quite sure expertise is always relative. Anyone who knows more than you do about any given subject has the potential to be an expert in your eyes. You might know nothing about snake oil and your ‘expert’ might have divined that it has an oily quality about it.
I don’t mean to be critical. I really do believe in learning by doing and certainly to some extent learning on the job. But I’m concerned for the people who don’t have a broad enough scope to appreciate the degree of ‘expertise’ – or lackthereof – they are receiving (and paying handsomely for). I’ve known self-stylized social media ‘experts’ who haven’t the faintest idea how to update their own website. I’ve seen people preaching the merits of blogging who have had four or five short and rather uninspiring blog posts about nothing in particular. Internet marketing ‘gurus’ who have cluttered difficult-to-even-look-at websites. To people with a more nuanced understanding of these subjects the omissions are glaring.
Ultimately the advice for consumers is the same as with everything else – do your homework and get a lot of advice, and be mindful of any bias that might be in the advice you receive.
Oddly I find many of these self-stylized ‘experts’ as inspiring and instructive as I find them perplexing. I mean, if you actually do have skills and experiences that can help others now is certainly not the time to start being modest.
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