Happy Fun Cog

Recently, my girlfriend and I volunteered at a local farm for a sheep exhibition that opened the farm to the public for the annual rite of shearing. She'd volunteered numerous times before, though this was my first time. We worked a three-hour shift doing something called 'skirting,' in which the wool from a freshly-sheared sheep is picked free of any major debris that could "impact the integrity of the wool" (read: sheep poop).

Because this was an exhibition, we were doing our work on a table in front of the barn and were watched by any number of people (mostly parents with small children). People would often ask us questions about what we were doing and I would answer . My answers were based purely on information that I'd just gleaned that day from the 30-second tutorial given to us by the farm hands and by what I'd read on the poster-sized presentations on the shearing/milling process in the walls of the sheep barn.

My girlfriend teased me about how authoritative I sounded; my father teaches at a medical school, so in my adolescence I received plenty of lectures from someone well-versed in the art of lecturing. And from what I could tell, people took what I said to be the absolute truth.

The experience made me think about how easy and common it is to assume that someone knows what they're talking about based purely on the situation at hand. For example, if I were to see some guy with a hard hat and tool belt working on a phone line, I am going to think (not verbatim) "There's one of the phone company's experts doing his job," as opposed to "There's some guy with a tool belt working on the phones; I wonder if he knows what he's doing?"

Not everyone is so quick to assume expertise, of course. Many people are naturally skeptical, though within that population it's been my experience that most skepticism is in fact arrogance ("I'm an expert on anything that I set my mind to so I don't need to listen to anyone else ") as opposed to genuine intellectual rigor.

Still, it was a very vivid example of how many people, including myself, perceive and make snap judgments of authority based wholly on circumstantial evidence and has made me think about how often I do that in my own life.

Also, for the record, the smell of sheep poop lingers on your hands for days. Or maybe you shouldn't take me at my word. Find some sheep poop and dig in. It's the only way you'll know for sure.