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Comment by bityard

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Comment by bityard

It took me a while and quite a few bad experiences to internalize one of the most important lessons of being an adult:

Professionals are advisors, not authorities, and at least half of them are extraordinarily bad at their jobs. If you don't take the time to learn the basics of a problem on your own and learn how to push back on bad or incomplete advice, you WILL get scammed and taken advantage of, or fall prey to someone else's sheer incompetence or lack of engagement.

In the US at least, there's this unspoken tightly-held belief that if you go to a doctor, or dentist, or plumber, or mechanic, realtor, etc for help, then you are also obligated to accept their advice without question. Well, I tried that and got burned many times. Here are some examples:

* During covid, my regular dentist had to move offices so I went somewhere else, recommended by a friend or family member. I was told I had 7 cavities. This was surprising as I took pretty good care of my teeth and I hadn't had a single cavity in well over a decade. A few months later, I saw my regular dentist again and somehow had zero cavities.

* Before I knew anything about cars, I took my car into what seemed to be a reputable shop for some brake noise. It must have had around 50,000 miles on it. They told me the car needed a whole new brake system. New brake lines, hoses, pads, rotors, calipers. They charged me about $1,200 in today's money for the work. After I learned more about car braking systems, I found out that most brake work is easy shade-tree mechanic type stuff, they did not have to replace everything that they did (certainly not at 50k miles), and also they did not actually replace everything they said they did.

* Don't want to go into the details on this one but I went to a dermatologist for a persistent and very annoying skin rash. He gave a diagnosis that didn't fit with my situation (read: STD-adjacent), said there was a test for it, the test came back negative, and he still stuck with the diagnosis despite these facts and sent me on my way with three pointless descriptions. A week later with the prescriptions doing nothing to help, I finally did my own research and literally typed into google something like, "what can cause this kind of rash" and had the (very common!) real cause in about 20 minutes.

I have many more.

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