The Problem with “Trust the Experts”

We’ve been through all this before. It was known as the Dark Ages.

Long ago, in a distant, halcyon epoch known as the mid-90s, I took a philosophy degree. I specialized in the History and Philosophy of Science. I took classes in what, to most people, probably seems like a senselessly esoteric subject: epistemology, the study of the foundations of knowledge itself.

We studied things like: when can a knower be said to “kn…