4 ms·

Expertise exists, but people misidentify experts too easily. That's a problem. I think this manifests in multiple ways. 1. People respected in one field should

• jkingsbery 6y ago
  > Trustworthy journalists wouldn't print something without multiple sources. There are unfortunately too many recent examples of media organizations that do just this, publishing articles with a single source that turn out to be biased or unreliable.
• xyzzyz 6y ago
  All of the above is true, and I would add one more: 5. Legitimate, credentialed experts can be full of shit too. Sometimes they are simply wrong, as being expert on a given topic does not mean you can correctly answer every single question related to it. Sometimes the expert might be correct about the facts, but wrong about recommendations, because real world policy decision making is complex and difficult, and experts in one thing, as you observe, rarely are experts in many things. Finally, it might also happen, and it sadly does more and more often these days, that the experts are actually deliberately conning you, misrepresenting reality to make you draw wrong conclusions that match better their agenda — experts, after all, are still just human.
  • cfn 6y ago
    Just to add that all disciplines have more than one current of thought and the expert's advice is influenced by his affiliation. It is a difficult to find someone who is skilled enough to overcame this problem.
• alexfromapex 6y ago
  I think the defining theme of this decade will be "how do we establish trust digitally?" This entire article is based on an assumption that knowing who can be trusted as an expert is easy but it's increasingly hard when all of our media is digital and can be manipulated by those with an agenda.
• philwelch 6y ago
  > It used to be that you could trust the nightly news. Your parents vouched for the anchor. They were right 99% of the time, and if they were wrong, they published a correction, so they also independently earned your trust over time. These days, though, anyone can tweet. Anyone can get a blue check. Anyone can have a news blog. Anyone can appear on your screen. It doesn't mean anything without a strong track record. You can't trust a Twitch star like you can trust Walter Cronkite. Cronkite earned our trust over years, if not decades. Walter Cronkite lived in an era when there was little way to know any better if Walter Cronkite was lying to you.
• marcosdumay 6y ago
  About #2, a random news anchor used to tell the same story every other one would, so that they corroborated each other. But it's a very far fetched conclusion that the story was true, and very often it wasn't, it was just the propaganda all of them were paid to repeat.
• clairity 6y ago
  these are all good observations but they miss coalescing an approachable framing of understanding, not the least of which, by accepting expertise as a legitimate concept in the first place. one elucidating observation is to realize that the term 'expert' is largely a mediopolitical assertion. that is, people who have no qualifications in a given field use 'experts' to assert the credibility of their narrative by choosing a single/small voice from that field to represent the entirety of it's esteem. that's quintessentially a political act, to influence others, perhaps unduly, perhaps against their own interest, which is where the trust dies away. trust develops among humans through direct interaction and obseration, and most experts haven't gained that directly with an audience. at best, they've done so among a small, arbitrary (to observers) group of people around the 'expert'. moreover, trust isn't a singular concept. people trust others for their political motivations much more often than technical skill, for instance. bury that under many layers of credentialism, an abstraction specifically designed to convey trust where it can't be built naturally, and where we go wrong societally starts to become clear. when seeking information in a mediopolitical context (e.g., all of social media and news), the most reasonable course of action (for most people most of the time) is to disregard expertise entirely, because the purpose in that context is to mislead via an appeal to (constructed) authority, even if subtly and relatively benignly. it's propaganda built on top of slivers of factuality loaned in from 'experts', in a grand jostling for voice, relevance, and power. none of it should be taken seriously from a technical point of view.
• watwut 6y ago
  Did you checked somehow accuracy of evening news?