Don't let social media convince you to back the wrong ideas

Giving everyone a loudspeaker has sparked a troubling devaluing of expertise and a lopsided belief in crowds.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but that makes us forget that true expertise is earned. 

Expertise is not a birthright, even though social media makes it seem like one. ChatGPT and Google can do wonders in a pinch, but neither plug the expertise gap entirely.

Blindly pushing the status quo doesn’t take brains or backbone or education, and it certainly doesn’t show expertise. How many people have you talked to who have ideas that sound just like what you saw trending on Twitter or read in a meme? 

Echo chambers are powerful, but those who navigate them with humility and skepticism fare better. 

To be sure, it goes both ways — experts are no better than status-quo promoters if they assume they’re always right. Past performance does not guarantee future results (that applies just as much to Harvard MBAs as middle schoolers).

In effect, the rise of social media — the democratization of loudspeakers with no barrier to entry — has coincided with a devaluing of expertise. Just some years ago, sharing an opinion to a large audience often required being a seasoned columnist at a newspaper, and even those writers weren’t given an unbridled platform.

But if you raise the stakes, expertise becomes not just coveted but necessary. When you’re sick, you’d rather get advice from a doctor than a prolific tweeter. If you hop on a plane, you don’t want your captain to be someone who merely thinks they can fly. You want a veteran pilot. 

Those high-stake scenarios provide a roadmap to improving our low-stake ones. 

If you inform your assumptions and words with what’s loudest rather than what’s most bulletproof, your own ideas become a reverberation of whatever’s in vogue. 

I’m not saying stop paying attention to everything on social media (although that could be productive). 

The point is to interrogate what you consume to the point where you would still stand by an idea even if a crowd wasn’t shouting out the same thing.

Complement this reading with an article on how I wrote a bestselling book while working as a full-time journalist, and the ultimate guide to habits.