Have you ever wondered what it is that compels people to give an opinion on topics that they have virtually no experience with or knowledge of? I am not talking about political or social issues but topics that are more fact-based or scientific in nature.
I am sure you know many such people. At a recent gathering with friends, I met a woman who was giving medical advice on all kinds of illnesses. Among other things, she was claiming that a certain stone, once attached to the body, can prevent heart attacks and strokes and even cure many diseases.
When asked what her profession was, she revealed that she is a full-time homemaker with a part-time career in real estate. Sitting amongst the guests was a medical doctor (internal medicine), who simply listened to the conversation with a broad grin on his face.
Later, I asked the good doctor why people offer such opinions. His answer: “People give an opinion because it makes them feel important.”
This phenomenon, although universal, seems to be more prevalent among Iranians. I am sure you know many who are experts in finance, banking, real estate, medicine, immigration, law (and any other topic you can imagine) without actually having any experience in such fields. I honestly do not know what compels people to offer their opinions, so I posed the same question I posed to the aforementioned doctor on an on-line professional forum. Here are some of the answers I received:
“Perhaps some people have nothing better to do than state an opinion or, maybe at times, people find that the less they know about a topic, the better their answers turn out to be!”
“I am just waiting to come across an important problem in a topic about which I know absolutely nothing. It's obvious I know a lot about the topic that you're asking.”
“What compels people to behave in the manner you cite is what I believe has pushed the boundaries of science and enabled discoveries into unknown territories. The only differentiating factor is some people stumble upon the right answers.”
And my favorite response: “A bad answer isn't always a bad answer if you shine the right light on it. Your experience combined with someone else's less informed answer could be golden. Maybe for the same reason that some CEOs run companies without the proper skills. Maybe it is because they don't know what they don't know, or they have fooled others into thinking they know more than they do.“
But there is a very real concept of “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Some argue that if you take the sum of all the answers given by a given crowd, it is as good as, if not better than, the answers received from the experts. There is even a book written on the subject by the renowned New York Times journalist James Surowiecki, in which he asserts that the aggregate of information in groups results in decisions that are often better than one made by any single member of the group.
Surowiecki’s opening anecdote relates Francis Galton's surprise when a crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged. (The average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than each individual member’s own guess. It was also closer to the correct weight than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts.)
A successful small-business owner probably learns more about people and marketing through trial and error than any school on the planet can teach, just as many successful entrepreneurs had no experience when they started companies like Apple, California Pizza Kitchen, McDonald's, Google or Amazon.com.
At times it is the quest to know that leads to innovation and discoveries. For example, antiseptics were unknown until someone asked some pretty stupid questions about why people were dying for no apparent reason. That stupid question created a sink full of specimens to brew, and antiseptics were invented, and hospital infections decreased.
One of my professors used to say that “anyone who says they know everything about any subject has just placed themselves in the category of an ignorant. Nobody knows everything, and those who claim they do are fooling themselves. If you don’t stretch, you don’t grow. Asking questions and receiving different answers is the only way to develop.” Obviously not all the answers are valuable, but they may offer a kernel of information that can make the questioner think about their subject differently and ultimately lead them in the proper direction.
It is safe to assume that people in general are very opinionated. They like to offer their opinions as fact or advice, whether we want to hear them or not. Sometimes these opinions are not even relevant to the question. These are the types of people who truly believe they are smarter than everyone else and can just ramble on about subjects they aren’t qualified to speak on.
In my opinion, there are those who think they know everything and answer everything. There are also those who answer because they know very little and would like others to assert or add to what they know. Finally, there are those who believe that the little they know might not be known by the experts and so their little bit of information might add to the experts' knowledge.
It is also my opinion that experience and intelligent insight are two different things. There are many people with experience who have limited insight, intelligence, intuition or vision. There were people who thought that Barack Obama didn't have the experience to be President of the United States. Thank goodness there were more people who thought he possessed extraordinary vision, insight, and intelligence.
In short, no matter how much we know, there is always more to learn. And as for the cliché, “There are never any stupid questions,” I’d like to add, “Stupid opinions sometimes lead to great answers.”
