Experts Don't Exist in a Dynamic World
The existence of experts has become a hot-button topic. Trust in an expert is now a reflection of confirmation bias.
Expertise is relative and dynamic. As knowledge increases, relative knowledge shifts. Newton could once predict every movement.
Knowledge increasing is a given. Better instruments will always yield more detail and precision.
Someone remaining an expert for years is the exception, not the rule.
There's another dimension to this: the *accessibility* of knowledge.
Way back in history, there were people who could not read. So, knowledge was limited to the privileged few who were literate. Those who were literate were clearly experts because they knew much more than the masses of people who couldn't. That's where your point about the relative nature of expertise comes in. Because it's not necessarily that those experts knew a lot in general. But they knew a lot more than the people around them who couldn't read.
That's why dictators limit access to knowledge. Because they want to be the ultimate source of knowledge (or "expert") within their dictatorship.
Literacy, the printing press, the internet... each of these allowed knowledge to increase among the masses in much of the world. The lower classes gained access to knowledge they didn't have. So, the gap between those who had knowledge and those who didn't narrowed.
If we couple this with the psychology of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," then it's easier to see why people who can look up Wikipedia, Google or ChatGPT think they know as much as an expert. That decreases the (perceived) value of experts.
In Dive 27 of my newsletter, I talked about how a tech influencer on Twitter who lived in Europe thought he knew more than I did about a law local to where I work, even though I was tested on it by the entity that created that law. I'm still befuddled by that.
Thanks to ease of access to knowledge, we're also seeing charlatans selling themselves as "experts" only to discover later that they're frauds. This also makes it harder to trust in any self-proclaimed experts *unless* they've demonstrated their knowledge. The fraudulent "experts" further erode trust in experts.
So, I would say the reason experts seem less trustworthy nowadays has less to do with the increase in the quantity of knowledge, and more to do with an increase in the *accessibility* of knowledge. Or the *distribution* of knowledge. But that doesn't mean knowledge can't become siloed once again (see the dictatorship example above).
"Someone remaining an expert for years is the exception, not the rule." Was this always the case, or a sign of our times?