Tom is really smart, and he has written a book about this topic. I respect him. But he's fighting a losing battle. As he points out, expertise is a relationshi

Tom is really smart, and he has written a book about this topic. I respect him. But he's fighting a losing battle. As he points out, expertise is a relationship between experts and audience. It depends on social and technological structures that accord experts more authority and a bigger megaphone than non-experts. We don't have that anymore. We have the Internet, where everybody votes with their attention to support the voices they want to listen to. It turns out, people vote for entertainment -- powerful storytelling and tribal snark -- much more consistently than they vote for good, objective information, which most of them are not qualified to evaluate anyway. How can you vote for that which you cannot identify? Does Tom want every conversation to be one long argument on authority? Tom misses the old broadcast hierarchy, the few-to-many information flow where gatekeepers chose experts who told ordinary people what to think and how to act. The Internet and social media killed the old way, and it's not coming back. And that's too bad, because personally I do want experts deciding some things. I want doctors to be in charge of diagnoses; I want engineers in charge of building bridges. But in public fora, those experts are being drowned out, because we democratized how people write and consume opinions.