297 - Genuine Expertise
The world doesn't need a million experts on X, Y, and Z. What it really needs is for claims of expertise (from whatever number of experts are necessary) to actually be true. If you have a million people claiming expertise and only 100 of them actually have any, then overall your society is far worse off than if you had no one claiming any expertise in that domain at all.
Much as misinformation and disinformation spread 6x further and faster than sanitary data, bad actors always hold a strong advantage when their activities face virtually no risk of punishment. The net result is a very expensive and damaging illusion of expertise, where knowing that none was present could have at least disarmed many of the sources of impending distress.
It is OK to not be an expert in something. It is also OK to defer to the expertise of someone else, if that someone else actually has it. However, genuine expertise is becoming vanishingly rare in a few fields, with several well-known memes in the AI industry making fun of the speed at which people declare themselves "experts". Few things hold greater potential for inflicting large-scale damage to society than such fake expertise, especially when those claiming it go directly against all scientific evidence and are rewarded with a Nobel Prize, as we saw last year.
The translated phrase "I neither know nor think I know" is credited to Socrates, via Plato's writings as Socrates's response to the claim that he must be the wisest man in Athens, illustrating one of the tenants of wisdom, recognizing and accepting that which you do not know. Only by doing so can you both know where you stand and take steps to move forward.
Even the most expert of experts in any given room is only standing at the cusp of another hill, beyond which vast and unexplored lands remain. Counter to human psychological tendencies, they're likely to be the most bored person in the room, not the most excited or charismatic, as the rest of the room is often too busy staring at the ground under their feet as they hallucinate about the future, while the expert looks to those lands beyond.
It is exhausting to drag people along through the education process, like rolling them up a hill, and there is always another hill beyond it. Rather, it is more practical to pave the road behind you and leave those of ample competence to walk up it themselves.
Pioneering the cutting edge and educating people on that same edge are two distinctly separate things, and one can easily detract from the other. Do whatever you do best, be it education, research, or engineering, and let others who specialize differently do what they do best. For those who are best at staring at their own feet and hallucinating about Utopian or Dystopian futures, just walk away and leave them behind.
