“Hey honey!” I shout from the kitchen as I mix up my baking soda concoction. “Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Kelly Clarkson told me I would literally not be able to stop losing weight if I drink this.”
Except none of them said that. The claim is viral, and false. I know because I checked. Also, I wasn’t in the kitchen. I was sitting on the couch, playing Wordscapes with one hand and eating sugar-packed homemade ice cream with the other, wondering how I got thirty pounds overweight and how to lose it fast.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who gives trust away freely. When that trust gets betrayed, it’s hard to get it back, but people almost always start with my trust by default. That’s potentially dangerous. I know. It’s also why this subject has been on my mind so much recently.
Incompetence carries a negative connotation. So does ignorance. “Weaponized incompetence” entered the vernacular a few years ago. It’s the thing where someone pretends they can’t do a task so you do it for them. That’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m talking about ordinary ignorance: the lack of ability, skill, knowledge, or qualification to judge a claim properly. That’s not a character flaw. It’s the default condition of being a human with a finite number of hours.
We can’t be experts at everything. That sentence, of course, isn’t revolutionary. In a world where knowledge expands faster than any of us can chase it, being even slightly educated on every topic is impossible. Most people will be lucky to develop high-functioning knowledge in one or two domains, with another dozen where they can pass for competent. Everything else is almost unknowable.
And as it turns out, that unknowable territory has tremendous economic value.
The old line says that if you don’t pay for a product, you are the product. Fine. Even when you are paying, there’s a decent chance someone is monetizing you anyway #capitalism. More to the point: a lot of modern marketing isn’t just selling you something you don’t need. It’s selling into the gap between what you need to decide and what you have time to verify.
Sometimes that looks like clothing brands promising fabric that gets “softer with every wash,” when what they mean is the large shirt will shrink two sizes the first time you ignore their thirteen-step care ritual and it ends up at Goodwill in the pre-teen section. (Not speaking from personal experience.)
Sometimes it looks like a deepfake celebrity pitching baking soda as alchemy to melt pesky belly fat.
The hard part is that we’re hit from too many sides to validate every claim. Full verification is impossible for a normal life. Blanket distrust has a cost, too. You might ignore something with legitimate value. Zero trust feels safe, even if it will eventually diminish you.
So where’s the middle ground? How do you live in a world where people will bald-faced lie to sell a product without paying a second tax for your own ignorance?
You don’t need a PhD in every subject to make decent choices. Competence doesn’t require omniscience. It requires knowing the basic concepts of a domain well enough to smell snake oil.
For weight loss, most of us already know the core: consume fewer calories than you burn, and make the calories you do eat better ones. That doesn’t stop me from eating homemade ice cream and half-hoping some miracle drug will cancel the math. It does mean I don’t need a chemistry degree to distrust a beverage that claims I’ll “literally not be able to stop losing weight.”
Same idea at the grocery store. A protein bar brags about thirty grams of protein. Fine. Flip it over. How many grams of refined sugar came along for the ride? One, two, forty? You don’t need to become a nutritionist to make a judgment call inside a tight scope of information.
Not all advertising is outright fraud. A lot of it aims at something a bit more sensible: a plausible life you could have if you owned the thing. Drink this beer and evenings with friends stay golden. Buy this software and your life gets ten times more productive. The pitch isn’t always “this is false.” Sometimes it’s “this is the shortcut past the part of your life that feels stuck.”
The pattern is usually the same. When you already feel behind in health, money, and relationships, marketing sells urgency, certainty, and simplicity as the escape hatch.
There’s a real temptation to answer that with total cynicism. All advertising is lies. That’s becoming increasingly true on the internet, but not absolutely true everywhere. Another temptation: only engage where you’re already competent. That sounds wise until you remember it’s impossible, and that living that way means paralysis, missed help, and a smaller life.
As we get older, we accumulate a core of useful knowledge: lived experience, plus what other people have paid to learn the hard way. If a claim requires the same suspension of disbelief as a superhero movie, it’s probably suspect by shape alone. Baking soda miracle weight loss qualifies in this category.
A few other questions help when you’re out of your depth:
Who makes money if you believe this?
Is the pitch built on urgency + certainty + simplicity? That’s a warning triad. Run, unless deepfake Michelle Obama is the one selling it, in which case run faster.
Where the downside is high around health, money, and family, raise the bar. Do more homework. Everywhere else, blissful ignorance is allowed.
And when you can’t verify quickly, buy time. Default to slow, boring actions you already understand. In many cases, the fad will fade while you’re busy making a boring decision anyway. That’ll spare you from more than one night writhing in agony after you try that Jell-o weight loss miracle.
There are still says when I’m sitting on the couch, wishing I could just wish away the pounds fast. I suppose I’ll always be capable of giving trust away before there’s a real need to be that open. The win isn’t becoming an expert in everything, and it isn’t deciding that everyone is out to get me.
The win is simple and pretty basic, actually. It’s simply refusing to let your blind spots become someone else’s easiest revenue target. Skip the baking soda. Keep the boring math that’s made sense for generations. Eat ice cream less often, not because a celebrity told you to, but because you already know enough.
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