For years now it has been a pet peeve of mine to see journalists write headlines like “scientists say” or “according to scientists”, which make “scientists” into a sort of infallible prophetic group who all think exactly the same.
Credentialism seems to be subject to a Gell-Mann amnesia dynamic, in that the more highly credentialed people I meet in areas that overly with my expertise, the more I'm inclined to think that their expertise has very little tendency to bleed over into adjacent fields of knowledge. I think most everyone with expertise in both X and Y has had the experience of finding someone with much more expertise in X but substantially less in Y. In our honest moments, we also realize this about ourselves.
This ought to cause us to believe that expertise is very tightly localized for pretty much everyone, rather than antilocalized around everything other than a handful of issues like Y.
Credentialism seems to be subject to a Gell-Mann amnesia dynamic, in that the more highly credentialed people I meet in areas that overly with my expertise, the more I'm inclined to think that their expertise has very little tendency to bleed over into adjacent fields of knowledge. I think most everyone with expertise in both X and Y has had the experience of finding someone with much more expertise in X but substantially less in Y. In our honest moments, we also realize this about ourselves.
This ought to cause us to believe that expertise is very tightly localized for pretty much everyone, rather than antilocalized around everything other than a handful of issues like Y.