The more you know about something, the easier it gets to evaluate what you’re looking at. An art expert can take one look at a painting and draw your attention to details you hadn’t noticed, for reasons you didn’t know existed. A “gear head” can do the same thing with cars.

And so on and so forth for every area of expertise. This is essentially what Gladwell’s Blink was about: experts develop an intuition through intensive experience, and the more expert someone is, the more inexplicable their intuitive judgments become. They “just know”.

The problem with experts is that it takes one to know one.

It takes a lifetime to become an expert in a single area of life. To become a deep expert in two, or three areas of life is an amazing feat. But, there are thousands of areas of life. In most areas of life, we are non-experts, simply because we do not have time to become experts.

So, everyone has the experience of being a non-expert, with most things, most of the time.

But, this is not to say that expertise isn’t real, or valuable. It is. We know this through experience the minute we gain expertise in something. Once you have expertise, it suddenly gives you the ability described in Blink: you can easily identify what you’re looking at. You can tell the grifters apart from the prophets. You can distinguish the amateurishly simplistic from the elegantly simple. You can easily (and sometimes instantaneously) evaluate whether something is high or low quality, or whether something is ordinary or unusually clever.

So, we know from experience that expertise is real and that it is useful.

We non-experts, in the pursuit of as much success as we can manage, consult the people who we guess are experts for guidance. But, we non-experts can’t reliably identify the experts. It takes one to know one, and we are not one.

You can see this problem arise, all over the place, in digital life. There’s been a flood of information that’s become available to us, and the flood appears to be accelerating.

And yet, we are left with The Problem of Expertise. It’s easier than ever to ask a question and get an answer. But it seems that it’s becoming more difficult to identify if that answer contains any real expertise.