Their tone of "unquestionable authority" doesn't count for much here either, though. I've met plenty of PhD-level folks who were actually pretty clueless overal

Their tone of "unquestionable authority" doesn't count for much here either, though. I've met plenty of PhD-level folks who were actually pretty clueless overall and didn't really know what they were talking about in the end; some of them were even scientists. Fun fact: Not too far from me is an infamous "green energy" project which turned out to be a massive and expensive failure. A considerable amount of the money lost here was taxpayer dollars, too. An after-the-fact analysis showed that one big reason for the failure was having too many clueless PhD-level types running around making mostly empty promises, and not enough experienced Joe-the-welder types running around who know how things really work. All is not lost, though, because after having shut down and written off the green energy aspects of the project, it's now just a plain old fossil fuel plant which is doing well enough for itself. A very expensive plant, of course, but at least one that actually works.