We didn't run out of experts.
We ran out of ways to identify them.
That's a much bigger problem.
There was a time when publishing your opinion to thousands of people required some friction.
You needed a newspaper.
A television station.
A publisher.
A radio transmitter.
Credentials helped.
Experience helped.
Knowing what the fuck you were talking about occasionally helped.
There were obvious problems with that system.
Gatekeepers controlled information.
Good ideas got excluded.
Institutions protected themselves.
Then the internet kicked the door off the hinges.
Good.
Anyone could publish.
Anyone could challenge authority.
Anyone could teach.
Anyone could learn.
For about eleven minutes, this seemed like it was going to be incredible.
Then everyone became an expert.
Today the world's leading authority on whatever happened this morning is a 24-year-old with a ring light.
He hasn't read the report.
He watched another guy's video about the report.
That guy read a tweet about an article written by somebody who skimmed the report.
But our guy has excellent lighting.
So we're listening.
This isn't really his fault.
We built the system.
Expertise used to compete primarily against other expertise.
Now expertise competes against content.
Those are very different things.
The expert says:
"It's complicated."
The creator says:
"Here are the THREE THINGS they're NOT TELLING YOU."
The expert needs forty minutes.
The creator needs seventeen seconds.
The expert qualifies their statement because there are variables.
The creator points at words appearing above their head.
Guess who wins.
Worse, we started confusing communication ability with knowledge.
Someone who explains something confidently and clearly feels knowledgeable.
Sometimes they are.
Sometimes they're just really fucking good at explaining something incorrectly.
Real expertise is ugly.
It contains hesitation.
Exceptions.
Failed experiments.
Changed opinions.
Years spent discovering that the thing you thought was simple isn't.
It doesn't always package nicely.
Spend enough time around genuinely competent people and you'll notice something.
They ask a lot of questions.
They want context.
They rarely give universal answers.
They'll tell you what they don't know.
Meanwhile the guy who discovered the subject last Thursday has already established three immutable laws.
There's a reason.
Beginners see rules.
Experts see variables.
The solution isn't to go backward.
Gatekeepers weren't inherently trustworthy either.
A title doesn't make somebody right.
A degree doesn't make somebody right.
A uniform doesn't make somebody right.
A million followers sure as fuck doesn't make somebody right.
Authority is not evidence.
Popularity is not evidence.
Confidence is not evidence.
Credentials aren't even evidence.
They're signals.
Sometimes useful ones.
But still signals.
So we're stuck with something harder.
We have to evaluate information ourselves.
Who is making the claim?
What do they actually know?
How would they know it?
What evidence are they showing?
Can it be tested?
What would prove them wrong?
Have they ever publicly changed their mind?
Are they selling something?
And the most important one:
Does reality agree with them?
That's considerably more work than checking whether somebody has a blue checkmark.
Too bad.
The internet didn't kill expertise.
It buried it under an infinite pile of people who look exactly like experts from six inches away.
Your job is learning the difference.
Trust NTHNG.
Especially experts.