Sunday With Sisson | Mark's Daily Apple

The Age of the Expert is dead. It's gone. Dust and ashes on the wind, scattered into a billion particles.

For some people, this is scary. These are the former Experts, the ones whose meal ticket depends on people trusting their word and paying fealty to their position in the hierarchy.

It's also scary to people who came to rely on the Experts. Not everyone has the time or capacity to get acquainted with the data on their own or to learn the science. They have jobs to do, mouths to feed, dogs to walk. There's too much out there for any one person to figure it all out. That's why the idea of experts is good. They're how we historically outsourced our limited mental capacity to do and know everything.

But all that's gone. Now, someone sitting in a position of authority is initially diminished in my mind. They can get their credibility back if they prove themselves worthy of it, or if I dig into their accomplishments and body of work and find it impressive, but long gone are the days where you could trust that someone with a fancy acronym after their name was worth listening to simply because of the acronym.

I'm disappointed, because it sure would be nice to have a bevy of experts we can reliably rely upon for showing us the way. But I'm also happy, because it means that truth and reality are winning out. It might take a bit of elbow grease, reading, and discernment to arrive at a suitable answer now, but that's a good thing.

And look, expertise hasn't died. There are still experts around, just not Experts. Local experts. Experts you've sussed out.

It's a brave new world. A scary one, in some respects. But it's for the best. And the rewards—truth, the unlocking of human ingenuity and potential, the growth of local "small batch" experts—are worth the risk.

What do you think about experts, folks? Have they died out as a concept in your mind? How do you approach the idea of experts and expertise? Since there isn’t a New and Noteworthy this week, you can leave a comment in last week’s.