Asking "why?" seems to be a good way to distinguish experts v. imitators without needing to be an expert yourself. As a bonus, if the other person is an expert

Asking "why?" seems to be a good way to distinguish experts v. imitators without needing to be an expert yourself. As a bonus, if the other person is an expert, you'll get good answers to those "why?" questions and end up knowing more than you did before. That's indeed what the post's linked article on first principles covers. Yeah, the author's a bit high on Elon's Musk in that article, but the premise and conclusion seem pretty sound: it's hard to expand your knowledge of a topic if you're unwilling to acknowledge the limits of that knowledge. On the other hand, that differentiation strategy is vulnerable to the "Calvin's Dad" gambit: an expert imitator tends to be good at coming up with bullshit on the fly to generate plausible yet inaccurate answers to those "why?" questions.