The internet made expertise free to access and impossible to verify
There's something strange about how we consume information now. Twenty years ago, getting a specialist's opinion meant making an appointment, finding a book, or knowing somebody. Now you can read a cardiologist's take on statins, an attorney's breakdown of your lease, or a climate scientist's model — all in the time it takes to boil water.
The problem is that the blog post by the cardiologist looks exactly the same as the blog post by someone who read one WebMD article and has strong feelings. Both have clean typography, both cite studies, both sound confident. The visual and structural cues that used to signal credibility — published in a journal, aired on a broadcast network, printed by a reputable house — don't exist when everything lives on the same platform and gets typeset by the same CSS.
So we've replaced the access problem with a verification problem. The old system was bad at distribution and okay at filtering. The new system is incredible at distribution and has basically given up on filtering — or outsourced it to the reader, who doesn't have the domain knowledge to do it.
Credentials haven't disappeared, but they've become unprovable in context. Someone can claim to be a structural engineer in a forum thread, and they might be, or they might not be, and there's no way to know without leaving and doing the kind of background check that defeats the whole point of getting a quick answer.
Has anyone figured out a workable middle ground — something between "trust every anonymous commenter equally" and "only trust gated institutions"?
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