This evening I stumbled upon two blog posts by Tom Nichols AKA @TheWarRoom_Tom that contain deeply insightful observations about the way that expertise has been devalued by our society its impact on the political disposition of the millennial generation. Reading both of these posts helped me better understand my own thoughts on these subjects, and I have an important follow on observation that I would like to add. Unfortunately, comments on these blog posts have been closed, so I am posting my observations here, on my own blog.

Expertise isn't truly dead. At the end of the day, getting things right matters, and as Mr. Nichols observes, "an expert is far more likely to be right than you are." Furthermore, as Mr. Nichols also observes, people who have PHDs deserve to be respected as experts in the domain in which they've been trained

The problem is that expertise no longer comes exclusively through the halls of academia, so its harder than it used to be to tell the experts from the laymen.

For example, I am a computer security expert. I did not gain that expertise from an educational institution, because when I was young there was no educational institution that taught it. I have a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering, which is largely about digital hardware design, but I do not presume to know half as much about digital hardware design as I do about computer security.

In my field I've had the pleasure of working with peers who have a variety of academic credentials. I've worked with colleagues who have no formal post-secondary education or who are educated in completely unrelated fields who are as good or better than I am at what I do. Fortunately, in my field there are no professional gatekeepers who tell you that you are lot allowed to practice if you don't have the "right" credential.

Today there are institutions out there who will grant formal academic credentials in my field, and in fact several colleagues have gone back to school to pursue these advanced degrees. I think these are valuable, but they simply are not determinative of expertise in my field. In fact, the academic institutions still have some work to do to demonstrate that formal training is a better route to proficiency in my field than self study.

Technological change has made self study increasingly possible across a variety of domains. While we might reasonably mock the University of Google, its far easier today for motivated people to access both raw information as well as the analytic insights of experts. If those people are disciplined in their study and intelligent, they can obtain for themselves a certain degree of analytical expertise.

Whats missing is a way to measure their ability to put that expertise into practice. Academic institutions don't recognize paths that don't flow through their halls. Many of our formal professional gatekeepers don't recognize those paths either.

Its important to appreciate the fact that what we're calling the death of expertise is a consequence of technological change that has been anticipated for decades. It carries with it both positive and negative consequences, and whats really important is how we react to it culturally. The present disposition of millennials IS that reaction, and if we want to understand where things are going in the future, its really important that we comprehend that reaction.

I think that young people appreciate that expertise doesn't always come from a degree issuing institution. Unfortunately, they don't understand how else to measure it, and that is a significant problem. We won't solve that problem by insisting that we go back to the past where the only analysis that mattered was the analysis offered by PHDs. However, it is important for this generation to develop, as it ages, better approaches to measuring expertise, and more respect for what it means.