Yes! I did read the article, and was about to say something similar. The article makes the following argument:

> In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems. A typical example of a closed system would be a car engine or a knee joint.

What about economics or investments? That's a massively open system on which people trust experts all the time. The true deciding factor is whether following (or rejecting) expert advice costs you something. If you have a brain tumor, an incompetent neurosurgeon is going to cost you a lot more than an incompetent president.

In the parlance of Antifragile (which I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone who works with people & systems—so, most of us), the question turns on whether you have 'skin in the game'.

"What about economics or investments?"

Those are exactly the experts who are being most strongly questioned. They are the ones who predicted economic disaster from Brexit and Trump's bizarro-land policies, and yet the wheels have not come off. (Yet.) Therefore, they must not know what they're talking about, right?

> feedback

A professor writes a children's picture book, about a subject within their field. They are unusually careful about correctness, for they fear the embarrassment of "getting it wrong" in front of their peers. But the book contains an error outside their field, and addressing that, isn't a priority.

So one thing I look for, are the incentives around getting things wrong. It varies at a finer grain than one might expect. Two individuals saying the same tiny thing, may have vastly different associated reputational risks. And an individual's risk, can vary greatly over adjacent subfields and types of claim.

> domains

Imagine a lunch-time party. You overhear an elderly gentleman ask: "So, you are a doctor?" "Yes, of medieval french literature." "Good, I have this question about my digestion...". Did you laugh? Ha! So many people just don't understand how expertise is distributed.

Then across the room, you see a five-year old approaching a group of first-tier astronomy graduate students. She asks them "I have a new set of finger paints! I'm painting space! What color is the Sun? Which paint should I use?". Did you laugh? Ha! How large a group would she need ask, to get even 50-50 odds that they don't all give her the same wrong answer? Silly five-year old - she didn't even ask if any of them had a research focus in spectroscopy! So many people just don't understand how expertise is distributed within the science research community. [From my [1]]

Understanding becomes ramshackle surprisingly rapidly, as you move away from someone's active research focus.

A couple of years back, the PBS News Hour did a "free energy from water in your basement" story. In their later on-air retraction, they seemed defensive. After all, they'd checked the story with, as I fuzzily recall, some "Italian scientists".

I suggest there is widespread misunderstanding about what expertise looks like.

[1] Scientific expertise is not broadly distributed - an underappreciated obstacle to creating better content http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/MHjx6

It also occurs to me that there's an interesting meta-commentary here, which is that an outlet like Quillette can publish an article like this with such obvious counterarguments. They don't even have sufficient editorial feedback to understand that they don't understand.

The reason "experts" have such a bad reputation is that anyone who is a qualified expert in something has a more specific title relevant to their expertise, where their reputation can be judged: Scientist, Professor, Author, Pilot, CEO

People have credentials, and they have areas of expertise. You get in trouble when you assume that the area of expertise matches the area of the credential.

Example: CEO. If you're a CEO, you know how to run a company, right? So if you know how to run Pepsi, then you know how to run Apple, right? In practice, it turns out, no you don't.

Example: You're an atomic scientist with a specialty in nuclear weapons. People interview you about the danger of nuclear war, because you're an "expert". But you're not an expert on the military, or on international relations, or on game theory. You have an amateur's understanding of such matters - maybe slightly better than the mouthy guy at the bar, but not much. But they're interviewing you for serious, mainstream media because you're an "expert". (Note: I don't have a concrete instance that I'm pointing at in this paragraph, unlike the previous one. None the less, I think that people get interviewed as "experts" far outside their actual expertise. And some "experts" like to stretch their "expert-ness" to add weight to their pronouncements on areas in which they are amateurs.)

Feedback might be exactly the differentiator between the "open" and "closed" systems to which they refer.

So there's no such thing as a historian?