SNP11: The Death of Domain Expertise

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Sigma, Dietetics, Evidencebased, Nutrition, Training, Health & Fitness, Science, Diet, Fitness, Evidence, Bodybuilding, Health

4.8 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Never before has there been greater access to information about nutrition and health. But never before has there been such a low barrier to being seen as an “expert”. There are large numbers of people getting information from, and basing their health decisions on, people who don’t have direct expertise in the field in which they are talking about.

Moreover, some promote the lack of domain expertise as a feature, not a bug. They claim that those that were conventionally seen as domain experts are either brainwashed, lazy in their thinking, or outright corrupt. And the solution is instead to look to those with a fresh perspective that can illuminate us on the “truth”.

In this episode, Alan and Danny discuss this “death of domain expertise”, how it plays out online, and its ramifications for people’s ability to get good information.

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. My name is Danny Lennon,
0:20.2	and beside me, of course, is Dr. Alan Flanagan.
0:23.8	We're going to title this episode something along the lines of the death of true expertise
0:28.2	and we're going to maybe focus in on one element of that of maybe domain specific expertise,
0:35.0	which is I think we've alluded to on a number of our episodes before,
0:38.8	but is a really interesting topic to think about because not only has that kind of maybe
0:44.8	fallen out of favor with some people, in certain cases that is seen as a bad thing, which is
0:50.2	kind of weird for people maybe to first hear that some people are saying those with domain
0:54.7	specific expertise in an area are actually more likely to give bad information.
1:00.6	We're kind of maybe try and make the case that that is not true.
1:04.2	But really this comes about because of the increased prevalence of very strong voices in the field of nutrition.
1:13.5	I wouldn't even say in the field of nutrition.
1:15.5	People talking about nutrition online is probably more accurate.
1:18.5	Yes.
1:19.1	Who have maybe no real expertise in this area, but that doesn't seem to matter.
1:25.5	And in the sense where their voice seems just as as noteworthy as
1:30.6	someone with expertise in a specific area and there's a few different layers to this depending on
1:36.4	how granular we get that we'll certainly get into but before I lead off into some of the things
1:42.8	that I was hoping to talk about, with this general
1:46.1	idea, I know this is something that you have lamented about yourself and have probably thought
1:50.8	about quite a bit. What to you is this problem that has emerged over time of this death of
1:57.9	expertise as we're going to refer to as? Yeah, and that's, it is a death of
	...

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