Credibility

The biggest problem faced by anyone who tries to do trailblazing work is a lack of credibility. It’s not that people don’t believe you, it’s that they can’t figure out a way to trust information coming from just one source. One of the great things about our modern academic system is the way the new information can, in fact, be incorporated into the body of knowledge. On the other hand, one of the worst things about our modern academic system is that while it is possible to incorporate new knowledge, it isn’t nearly as easy as it should be. New ideas are scary. Even scientists recoil from brand new information as if it were the plague.

For me, delivering the “good news” of brushpainting is a challenge because I have to overcome the natural reluctance of any person to choose the idea with one supporter over the idea with millions of supporters. After all, we say to ourselves, if only ONE person likes it, is must have SOMETHING wrong with it. It just stands to reason.

But of course it doesn’t stand to reason at all. Just having a large number of supporters does not make something true, and merely having a single proponent does not make the ideas proposed by the single proponent any less credible. But it still feels awkward to actually put your money on the barrel head and pony up for a share in the brand new idea, because, well, it’s just risky and feels wrong, somehow.

After all, if I suddenly dropped dead tomorrow, anybody who was relying on me for brushpainting information would find that the line had gone dead, and no further information would be available. You hitch your wagon to a single, solitary star and that star may burn out and leave you holding a, um, star or something. Anyway you’ll be abandoned and no one else will step up to fill the gap.

This situation is very discouraging. By that I mean it tends to sap the enthusiasm of anyone promoting a lonely idea to a larger audience. The only thing more discouraging might be the avalanche of craziness that unfolds when, in our information age, a previously lonely idea suddenly goes viral and everybody claims to have known about it for years.

There is a lot of work to do. I have big plans. I want to produce some videos demonstrating my methods (this is a high priority). I want to continue to add to the knowledge base here, and possibly even develop that using a wiki format of some kind, although, even to me, that sounds a little too 1998. Whatever I do, I’ll need to keep on it day by day, because the airbrush army is out there, and they are working night and day promoting their agenda, and like good soldiers they don’t even know they have an agenda.

2 Replies to “Credibility”

  1. Stick with it. My blog is not at interesting as yours (mine has no real objective other than a place for me to write) but apparently has a few hundred anonymous followers around the world. Some months the clicks hit into the thousands. It only has 4 formal followers, and they comment. It took a few months before it became obvious that what I was writing was actually being read.

    I’d like to do more but I can’t quite my day job just yet…

  2. I agree with Tim, stick with it. I know of many that paint their models with a brush, whether it be aircraft, army vehicles, ships, sci-fi, etc. Unfortunately, many always end their ‘admission’ with the disclaimer that ‘well, obviously I mean to get an airbrush some day….’.

    But hey, that is the world we live in. I see it all the time in this hobby, where brush painting is denigrated as ‘non serious modelling’ whatever that is. Every freaking book I have ever bought on modelling, even those by the mighty Shephard Paine (RIP) have the standard line “of course if you really want to become a serious modeller, you will need to buy an airbrush at some time”. The only book I myself have read that doesn’t contain that line was the Airfix book of scale modelling.

    In any case, get those videos up, I am eager to see how you do your brushing thing and compare it to mine.

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