We live in an often bewildering information environment, where we struggle with what to trust and what to reject. Not only are there multiple voices, but a percentage of those voices seem actively determined to deceive us. Conspiracies abound, and there seem to be a lot of dumb notions out there about any topic under the sun.
It would be brilliant to have some simple tool, a garbage meter, that could filter out the evil and the stupid from genuinely valuable information. No such tool exists, though we do have something close to it: Expertise. We’ve all seen expertise. When you go to a doctor or a dentist or a car mechanic or your favorite professor, you are experiencing expertise.
So, what is it? Merely to say that experts know more than the rest of us is to miss the point. Certainly, expertise demands knowledge, but just as importantly, it demands a profound skill based on experience. The Hebrew language has a word for it: בִּינָה (Chokhmah), which has the basic meaning, “To have a skill.” The word was used for artisans, like metal workers, who not only knew their materials, but could shape those materials into works of beauty. Expertise is the ability to transform knowledge into art, into profoundly wise application.
Experts are everywhere. We need them and we tend to trust them. Thus, information provided to us by experts has a much greater potential to be trustworthy than information provided by non-experts. The power of expertise, however, is not absolute. Experts can be biased or deceptive. Non-experts sometimes come up with better answers than experts.
That is why we need a second principle: Authority. Authority speaks of the degree to which we trust a piece of information, whether produced by an expert or not. Authority resides in us, the receivers of information. We are responsible to evaluate what we receive. The best tool for evaluation is probably the qualifications of the author (expertise), but we must also judge for bias and even for deception. If we do a good job of this, we come up with an accurate judgment of information’s authority.
We might not have a garbage meter available to us, but it is still possible to rely on expertise and to use solid judgment to measure authority.
For more reading:
William Badke, “Expertise and Authority in an Age of Crowdsourcing,” in Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think about Information. Ed. Troy Swanson; Heather Jagman, 191-215. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2015. http://williambadke.com/BadkeExpertiseAuthority.pdf