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Medium and The Problem of Expertise
Does anyone know what they are talking about?
Late-night show host David Letterman once said “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I don’t think you do either.” The beauty of this malaprop is it works either way you interpret it.
Recently there has been much discussion regarding Medium and the quality of the work published there. The new CEO has been quoted as saying he is interested in raising the bar on the quality of Medium articles, calling into question the expertise of the people publishing there. He apparently wants only people with expertise in a particular area to write about it.
This is hardly groundbreaking.
We all want to know that the people whose work we read know what they are talking about. We don’t want to waste our time reading gibberish written by people who are making it up as they go. We don’t want to read of theories or ideas long ago discredited. We want to know the people whose work we are reading know what they are writing about, and that they have some degree of expertise on the subject matter.
But what, exactly, IS “expertise?”
