I'll start with the articles bullet points - 1. We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right. All humans are fallible, including "experts", such as

I'll start with the articles bullet points - 1. We can all stipulate: the expert isn’t always right. All humans are fallible, including "experts", such as Albert Einstein, who famously rejected Quantum Mechanics. 2. But an expert is far more likely to be right than you are. On a question of factual interpretation or evaluation, it shouldn’t engender insecurity or anxiety to think that an expert’s view is likely to be better-informed than yours. (Because, likely, it is.) There are "experts" in things that have no basis in anything other than the expressions of other people which may have no or very limited evidence to support them, priests, Marxist historians, Freudian psychoanalysts etc. Is their "expertise" of any actual value to the rest of humanity? What about "experts" in subjects that we as a species do not have a good understanding of? Does the conflating of those subjects with those that we have much better understanding of, for example conflating public policy with engineering disciplines, help or hinder this discussion? 3. Experts come in many flavors. Education enables it, but practitioners in a field acquire expertise through experience; usually the combination of the two is the mark of a true expert in a field. But if you have neither education nor experience, you might want to consider exactly what it is you’re bringing to the argument. If the "field" is nothing more than some ideology, not backed by evidence, then any "education" in it seems to be open to challenge. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair 4. In any discussion, you have a positive obligation to learn at least enough to make the conversation possible. The University of Google doesn’t count. Remember: having a strong opinion about something isn’t the same as knowing something. Do I need to know the 12 Astrological Houses to reject astrology? Do I need to know the King James Bible to reject Christianity? Do I need to know Mein Kampf to reject Nazism? Do I need to know the Talmud to reject Zionism? 5. And yes, your political opinions have value. Of course they do: you’re a member of a democracy and what you want is as important as what any other voter wants. As a layman, however, your political analysis, has far less value, and probably isn’t — indeed, almost certainly isn’t — as good as you think it is. So if someone wanted to bring about the destruction of humanity, that would be of equal value to someone who does not? Perhaps an Orwell quote would help here- "Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Okay, so how about trying to find out what is actually happening? I would posit the following- 1. The Internet has allowed the dissemination of both fact and fiction, evidence and opinion. 2. Critical thinking, the use of evidence and reasoning seems to be lacking from most educational systems. A population that can be swayed with propaganda rather than evidence and logic is more pliable to the will of the political class and therefore this state of affairs seems unlikely to change. 3. The rise of "Truthiness" as a consequence of 2. 4. The speed of scientific and technological progress is now so great that expertise in these fields has become much narrower and the ability to communicate this effectively to the non-experts in a timely fashion has gone down. 5. The lack of progress in understanding of the complex social, political and economic systems we inhabit while simultaneously an increase in that complexity. 6. The increasing perception of many people that the current political, economic and social systems are overly beneficial to an increasingly small number of people and those, like the author of this piece are no more than courtiers to the beneficiaries. As this idea becomes more prevalent, the courtiers must defend themselves and so they try to convince the rest of us that they are experts who have the same precise answers that engineers could give. 7. There is no ideological solution to 6. 8. People in forums like HN who do have the ability to think critically increasingly critique articles like this and hopefully spur some critical thinking in others, this is then twisted by some, like the author into an attack on all "experts".