I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the notion of experts. These are people we defer to on often important matters. “I don’t know enough about this subject,” we say, “So I will do whatever so and so says.”

The problem is that sometimes experts are wrong. When I first starting having forearm pain, both physical therapists and books I read on the topic advised correcting posture. They recommended a upright sitting posture where the head is balanced above the shoulders which are balanced above the knees. They also recommended placing the hands on pillows. I dutifully did all this – after all, they were the experts – and saw no results. On top of that, it’s very difficult to sit in that position for hours a day. Then I also heard advice that you should change your sitting posture. That seemed contradictory – on one hand they’re saying sit in this rather rigid “correct” posture, on the other hand they’re saying move around. That’s when I started suspecting these experts were full of shit. “What are they basing their advice on?” I wondered. What kinds of studies could really be done to validate these ideas? They seemed like guesses.

The truth is, I think you can damage yourself physically if you’re really negligent with your posture, but I think if you are basically smart about how you sit, and also move around enough (which is a basic human urge anyway) then you should be fine.

So what do we do when experts are wrong? I say we should drag them out of their houses, take them to our basement and strangle them to death. Then we should feed them to hungry puppies and videotape the scene as the puppies eat their corpses and then poop them out. Then we should send a film of all this to the families of these experts and include a section in the video where a puppy says, “I want you to know I killed and shit out your loved one and I don’t give a fuck.” (Only – get this – it wouldn’t really be the puppy talking, it would be me speaking while hiding just under the view of the camera. Because puppies can’t actually talk.) The expert’s family would say, “God Damn you puppy! I will hunt you until the ends of the earth!” But the puppy would soon grow into a dog and one dog looks much the same as any other and a sense of great injustice would permeate the life of the expert’s family.

That’s what we should do.