Dr. Steven Novella

If you say, yeah, I reject that.

I want to believe this other thing because I think I know better than all those people who have dedicated their lives studying this.

That takes a massive amount of arrogance.

And that's where you go astray, right?

When you don't, again, you don't ask the question, you know, and one thing I always try to do as a science communicator is when I, you know, personally, I don't speak about a topic until I feel I wrapped my head around it and I've checked with experts, right?

In some way, either in person or published opinion, if that's easily available or whatever, right?

At some point, I make sure that what I'm thinking is aligning with the experts.

And if it isn't, I better find out why.

And I assume this is the other thing.

See, when the arrogant person like RFK Jr., when his opinion is different from expert opinion, he concludes, I'm right and they're part of a conspiracy.

Whereas I conclude I'm missing something, right?

The humility comes into, I must be missing something.

I don't understand this.

And when you do that, you find out I am missing.

So always you are missing something because you're not an expert.

You know, the expertise is, you know, is a thing for a reason because they know things.

Another aspect of that, you know, at some point I realized like, oh, all this science outside of my specialty, right?

Outside of medicine, right?

All the things I think I know, like about astrophysics or whatever, is really just a metaphor that the experts are telling us to help us wrap our non-expert brains around it.

But unless you know 12-dimensional, whatever, the math and all that stuff, unless you are speaking that language, you don't know.