Some years ago, a professional dance academy announced an opening position. Since I knew the owner, I agreed to sit with the other instructors during the selection process. Many candidates expressed interest, but a particularly confident one got my attention.
Scanning his submitted documents, I could see nothing more than a one-paragraph CV, no recommendations, no previous experience, and no performance record as a dancer. Knowing that we either had a genius in front of us or a disillusioned dilettante, I asked those sitting on the jury if I could take over. The following dialog unfolded…
– Why do you consider yourself eligible for the advanced dance studies instructor position?
Candidate: ‘I have been dancing all my life.’
– ‘Well, I have been eating all my life. That makes me neither a restaurant critic nor a chef.’
Candidate: ‘As I said, I have been dancing my whole life!’
– ‘I have been driving cars my whole life. I am no F1 racing driver now, am I?’
Candidate: ‘I have a record of thousands of hours watching youtube videos about dancing. That says it all!’
I could have replied that despite having seen all movies starring Bruce Lee, I was still no martial arts practitioner, let alone a ‘master’, but I decided to pass.
That was about a decade ago, and since then, we have all encountered similar ‘experts’ in all sorts of social gatherings: experts on foreign policy although they never read a newspaper in their lives, experts on hyper-car engineering as they don’t even have a driver’s license, experts in music performance despite not having ever attended a live concert, let alone play one, experts in coaching football or basketball teams who think they know it all while sipping coffee for hours and smoking three packs.
Youtube has visualized content created by virtually everybody, thus democratizing public broadcasting. A wonderful thing for sure, but also a creator of traps for unaware audiences. The problem is two-fold: First, anybody can broadcast. Not very selective now, is it? And second, it exudes authority, although such merit needs independent verification.
In humans, the need to know is greater than the need to double-check the validity of what they have learned. We certainly cannot accuse any platform of doing a disservice just because creators act irresponsibly and viewers consume without critical thinking.
But when we seek the right person for a difficult job, we must be careful since we stand as the last frontier between worthy candidates and disillusioned hopefuls. According to various ‘interview manuals,’ a confident candidate gets a ‘plus’ on his sheet.
We might as well check first where all this confidence comes from,
otherwise, we might choose a history professor from the Game of Thrones Fanclub or a chess master from an online gaming platform.
In such a case, the performance will be poor and the results devastating, but we will also be unable to accuse anybody of cheating. In their mind, they have studied it all!