Subject Matter Expert Quotes

Charlotte: "It’s too bad they don’t give out diplomas for what you learn at the mall, because I could graduate with honors in that subject. No really. Since I’ve worked there, I’ve become an expert on all things shopping-related. For example, I can tell you right off who to distrust at the mall: 1) Skinny people who work at Cinnabon. I mean, if they’re not eating the stuff they sell, how good can it be? 2) The salesladies at department store makeup counters. No matter what they tell you, buying all that lip gloss will not make you look like the pouty models in the store posters. 3) And most importantly—my best friend’s boyfriend, Bryant, who showed up at the food court with a mysterious blonde draped on his arm.

Being a subject matter expert on one subject alone will get you respect, but not a well-rounded perspective of the world.

It's great if you are a subject matter expert (SME) in something, Otherwise you have to know a little about a lot of things.

Instead of feeling like you are the computer genius, descending from computer heaven to save your poor customer from purgatory, turn the tables around. If you’re, for example, working in the insurance industry, think of your customer as a subject matter expert in insurance from which you have to learn in order to get your job done.

It doesn't matter whether you are an expert or a novice in photography. As long as the lense of your camera fucoses the "nature" as a subject, you will always capture the best picture.

You can teach the person who knows everything, nothing. We have all met them. No matter what the subject; they are an expert. They refuse to listen to advice. They refuse to learn and, therefore, end up being ignorant of everything.

borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability.

Thoughts said aloud are mutant by nature. No matter how expertly one plumbs the depths of subjective understanding, Gorgias realized to his horror, or how artistically rendered and devastatingly precise language may be, truth still falls on ears that hear something altogether different from what exists in reality.

certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

You must let the color to set for as long as it is possible.The darker the stain,the more that he loves you," she says,her English halting,broken, but the message is clear. Emphasized by the meaningful look she shoots Vane and me. "Oh,we're not-" I start to say. We're not in love! But Vane's quick to stop me. Slipping an arm around my shoulder, he presses his lips to my cheek, bestowing on the old woman the kind of smile that encourages her to smile back in a startling display of grayed and missing teeth. His actions stunning me stupid, leaving me to sit slack faced and dumb-with heated cheeks,muddied hands, and a rising young breakout start draped over my back. Having never been in love,I admit that I'm definitely no expert on the subject. I have no idea what it feels like. Though I'm pretty sure it doesn't feel like this. I'm pretty dang positive Vane's just cast himself in yet another starring role-playing the part of my dashing young love interest,if only to appease this strange,Moroccan woman we'll never see again. Still,Vane is an actor,and an audience is an audience-no matter how small.

Imagine the day of an expert who frequently gets interrupted by everyone else’s questions. They may be fielding none, a handful, or a dozen questions in a single day, who knows. What’s worse, they don’t know when these questions might come up. You can’t plan your own day if everyone else is using it up randomly. So we borrowed an idea from academia: office hours. All subject-matter experts at Basecamp now publish office hours. For some that means an open afternoon every Tuesday. For others it might be one hour a day. It’s up to each expert to decide their availability. But what if you have a question on Monday and someone’s office hours aren’t until Thursday? You wait, that’s what you do. You work on something else until Thursday, or you figure it out for yourself before Thursday. Just like you would if you had to wait to talk to your professor.

It is possible to know all there is to know about a subject—medicine, for example—but if you don’t have M.D. at the end of your name, few will listen. The M.D. is what I term a “credibility indicator.” The so-called expert with the most credibility indicators, whether acronyms or affiliations, is often the most successful in the marketplace, even if other candidates have more in-depth knowledge. This is a matter of superior positioning, not deception.

We live in the information age and the sheer volume of it being available everywhere, creates a need for information that has value. Yes, we can look anything up on Google but who has the time? Can we trust that the information comes from a trustworthy source? Your experience has given you a deep knowing of your subject matter. You have insights and ideas that others may not figure out on their own. You are holding a roadmap that has great value to someone. What has been stopping you from sharing your knowledge? Perhaps you have been afraid to put yourself out there because of a fear of rejection? Let me get straight to the point. Get over it right now! Ponder the following quote for a moment and then move on with the decision to write rather than not to write, because not to write is not “to be”. You deny yourself and your audience. You have had an incredible journey to get to where you are and have amassed experience and knowledge. Now combine that with your unique voice and be heard. You are already an expert. Accept it.

I believe Nancy said that her aunt married beneath her.” Which you wouldn’t let me do. He went rigid beside her. “Ah. That does happen.” Unless you’re Dom the Almighty. “The marriage seems to have turned out well enough.” Jane would goad him into revealing the truth of what he’d done, no matter what it took. “Nancy said Mrs. Patch misses her late husband dreadfully and refuses to decamp from York, though she could easily live with my uncle. Apparently, she doesn’t miss her life as a knight’s daughter.” “Oh? And exactly how far beneath herself she marry?” Jane colored as she dredged that little detail from her memory. “Her late husband was an architect, I believe.” “So, not a gentleman of leisure but still in a profession respectable enough that Nancy felt no compunction about visiting her.” He smirked as he navigated the phaeton expertly through the narrow streets of York. “There are levels of marrying beneath one, after all.” Oh, she could just smack his face for that. After all these years, that he could still be so certain of the wisdom of the course he’d set them upon…”Yes, just as there are levels of being in love. Some people’s love for each other transcends all obstacles. Some people’s love does not.” His smug expression vanished. “And some people do not understand the meaning of the word.” “Really? I thought love was about enduring any sacrifice to be with the object of one’s affection.” He drove through an archway and reined in the horses. “Here we are. The Elephant and Castle.” So he was avoiding the subject. Again.

A woman's demand for emancipation and her qualification for it are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her. The idea of emancipation, however, is many-sided, and its indefiniteness is increased by its association with many practical customs which have nothing to do with the theory of emancipation. By the term emancipation of a woman, I imply neither her mastery at home nor her subjection of her husband. I have not in mind the courage which enables her to go freely by night or by day unaccompanied in public places, or the disregard of social rules which prohibit bachelor women from receiving visits from men, or discussing or listening to discussions of sexual matters. I exclude from my view the desire for economic independence, the becoming fit for positions in technical schools, universities and conservatories or teachers' institutes. And there may be many other similar movements associated with the word emancipation which I do not intend to deal with. Emancipation, as I mean to discuss it, is not the wish for an outward equality with man, but what is of real importance in the woman question, the deep-seated craving to acquire man's character, to attain his mental and moral freedom, to reach his real interests and his creative power. I maintain that the real female element has neither the desire nor the capacity for emancipation in this sense. All those who are striving for this real emancipation, all women who are truly famous and are of conspicuous mental ability, to the first glance of an expert reveal some of the anatomical characters of the male, some external bodily resemblance to a man.

The book’s secondary message, more implicit than explicit, is this: It is also time to render unto equality that which is appropriate to equality, and unto excellence that which is appropriate to excellence. Equality is a fine ideal, and should have an honored place. To have understood that each person is unique, that each person must be treated as an end and not a means, that each person should be free to live his life as he sees fit, so long as he accords others the same freedom, that each person should be equal before the law and is equal in God’s sight, and to incorporate these principles into the governance of nations—these are among the greatest of all human accomplishments. But equality has nothing to do with the abilities, persistence, zeal, and vision that produce excellence. Equality and excellence inhabit different domains, and allegiance to one need not compete with allegiance to the other. Excellence is not simply a matter of opinion, though judgment enters into its identification. Excellence has attributes that can be identified, evaluated, and compared across works. The judgments reached by those who are most expert in their fields, and who work from standards of excellence that they are willing to specify and subject to the inspection of logic, are highly consistent—so consistent that eminence in the various domains of accomplishment can be gradated with higher reliability than is achieved by almost any other measure in the social and behavioral sciences. When the rating of eminence is scrutinized against the reasons for that eminence, it also becomes apparent that those who rank highest are those who have achieved at the highest levels of their field.

Most common discussions of political authority presuppose existing political institutions and ask under what conditions do institutions of that kind have legitimate authority. This begs many questions, and precludes many possibilities. It presupposes that either this government has all the authority it claims over its population or it has none. Here again we notice one of the special features of the account of the previous chapter. It allows for a very discriminating approach to the question. The government may have only some of the of the authority it claims, it may have more authority over one person than over another. The test is as explained before: does following the authority's instructions improve conformity with reason? For every person the question has to be asked afresh, and for every one it has to be asked in a manner which admits of various qualifi cations. An expert pharmacologist may not be subject to the authority of the government in matters of the safety of drugs, an inhabitant of a little village by a river may not be subject to its authority in matters of navigation and conservation of the river by the banks of which he has spent all his life. These conclusions appear paradoxical. Ought not the pharmacologist or the villager to obey the law, given that it is a good law issued by a just government? I will postpone consideration of the obligation to obey the law until the last section of this chapter. For the time being let us remove two other misunderstandings which make the above conclusion appear paradoxical. First, it may appear as if the legitimacy of an authority rests on its greater expertise. Are political authorities to be equated with big Daddy who knows best? Second, again the suspicion must creep back that the exclusive concentration on the individual blinds one to the real business of government, which is to co-ordinate and control large populations.

The best way to get a handle on the subject would be to ask the experts, but one does not simply walk into a church or synagogue and ask to speak with a demonologist. There are not that many of them; their names are confidential, and they are obliged to report their experiences only to their superiors. Even Ed Warren will not tell all about these horrendous black spirits that come in the night bearing messages and proclamations of blasphemy. When pressed on the matter, in fact, Ed’s reply is: “There are things known to priests and myself that are best left unsaid.” Upon what, then, does Ed Warren base his opinions? Is there proper evidence or corroboration to substantiate his claims? “People who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon sometimes ask me if I’m not involved in a sort of ultrarealistic hallucination, like Don Quixote jousting with windmills. Well, hallucinations are visionary experiences. This, on the other hand, is a phenomenon that hits back. My knowledge of the subject is no different than that of learned clergymen, and they’ll tell you as plainly as I will that this isn’t something to be easily checked off as a bad dream. “I can support everything I say with bona fide evidence,” Ed goes on, “and testimony by credible witnesses and blue-ribbon professionals. There is no conjecture involved here. My statements about the nature of the demonic spirit are based on my own firsthand experiences over thirty years in this work, backed up by the experiences of other recognized demonologists, plus the experiences of the exorcist clergy, plus the testimony of hundreds of witnesses who’ve been these spirits’ victims, plus the full weight of hard physical evidence. Theological dogma about the demonic simply proves consistent with my own findings about these spirits in real life. But let me be more specific. “The inhuman spirit often identifies itself as the devil and then—through physical or psychological means—proves itself to be just that. Again speaking from my own personal experiences, I have been burned by these invisible forces of pandemonium. I have been slashed and cut; these spirits have gouged marks and symbols on my body. I’ve been thrown around the room like a toy. My arms have been twisted up behind me until they’ve ached for a week. I’ve incurred sudden illnesses to knock me out of an investigation. Physicalized monstrosities have manifested before me, threatening death,

content represented a lot of different types of knowledge from a variety of groups: marketing-generated content in the form of corporate presentations; content generated by product management and engineering in the form of product knowledge; content generated by subject-matter experts from weekly company calls that are recorded and shared; user-generated content from individual contributors like salespeople; executive-generated content, including business plans and quarterly goals; and customer-generated content from customer interviews and stories. Kelly then said that the sum total of this content is what makes his company who they are. He said that it was bigger than their culture, that it was their secret sauce.

In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and producers no longer have the patience—or the financial luxury—to allow journalists to develop their own expertise or deep knowledge of a subject. Nor is there any evidence that most news consumers want such detail. Experts

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

These days, writing is a team effort. The traditional image of a writer is of a rather solitary figure, but the reality is that technical writing is now often a highly collaborative process. Don’t be surprised if you end up more in the role of an editor rather than a writer – collating, assembling and editing chunks of documentation from subject matter experts into a coherent whole. That’s fine – you’re writing a technical document, not a novel!

for two thousand years after his death Aristotle would set the way in which Christians and Muslims alike shaped their thoughts about the best way to organize and think about the physical world, about the arts and the pursuit of virtue. The Christian Church began by being suspicious about Aristotle, preferring the otherworldliness of Plato’s thought, but there was no other scheme for understanding the organization of the world as remotely comprehensive as his. When Christians were faced with making theological comments on natural subjects like biology or the animal kingdom, they turned to Aristotle, just as Christian theologians today may turn to modern science to inform themselves about matters in which they are not technically expert. The result was, for instance, that two millennia after the death of this non-Christian philosopher two monks in a monastery somewhere in northern Europe might consider an argument settled if one of them could assert, ‘Well, Aristotle says …’ Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ. Aristotle fuelled the great renewal of Christian scholarship in the Western Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (see pp. 398–9), and even in the last twenty years the leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome have reaffirmed the synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian thought which Thomas Aquinas devised at that time.

The inner school is home to activist academics, organizations, subject-matter experts, teachers, consultants, and policymakers who have undergone cult initiation and are familiar with the cult’s teachings and practices.

Teaching others the topic you want to master is a sure key to becoming an expert on the subject matter.

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It’s easy to lose awareness that we’re talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge, like the tappers in the “tappers and listeners” game. It can feel unnatural to speak concretely about subject matter we’ve known intimately for years. But if we’re willing to make the effort we’ll see the rewards: Our audience will understand what we’re saying and remember it. The moral of this story is not to “dumb things down.” The manufacturing people faced complex problems and they needed smart answers. Rather, the moral of the story is to find a “universal language,” one that everyone speaks fluently. Inevitably, that universal language will be concrete.

Post Interview Don’t forget to send a written “Thank You” card to each interviewer (no e-mails unless it is in addition to a written one with additional info like a personal thank you video). This is especially important between multiple rounds of interviews; take the opportunity to show new information demonstrating you are a subject matter expert (article, video, portfolio, etc.) after each round of interviews. And follow up minimally by phone to show continued interest without coming off as desperate or a stalker.

The speeches she is making with almost weekly regularity are a further satisfying feature of her royal life. Some she writes herself, others by a small coterie of advisers, including her private secretary Patrick Jephson, now a firm ally in the royal camp as she personally appointed him last November. It is a flexible informal group who discuss with the Princess the points she wants to make, research the statistics and then construct the speech. The contrast between her real interests and the role assigned for her by her palace “minders” was amply demonstrated in March this year where on the same day she was guest of honour at the Ideal Home Exhibition and in the evening made a passionate and revelatory speech about AIDS. There was an interesting symbolism to these engagements, separated only by a matter of hours but by a generation in personal philosophy. Her exhibition visit was organized by the palace bureaucracy. They arranged everything from photo opportunities to guests lists while the subsequent media coverage concentrated on an off-the-cuff remark the Princess made about how she couldn’t comment on her plans for National Bed Week because this was “a family show”. It was light, bright and trite, the usual offering which is served up by the palace to the media day in day out. The Princess performed her role impeccably, chatting to the various organizers and smiling for the cameras. However her performance was just that, a role which the palace, the media and public have come to expect. A glimpse of the real Diana was on show later that evening when in the company of Professor Michael Adler and Margaret Jay, both AIDS experts, she spoke to an audience of media executives at a dinner held at Claridges. Her speech clearly came from the heart and her own experience. Afterwards she answered several rather long-winded questions from the floor, the first occasion in her royal life where she had subjected herself to this particular ordeal. This episode passed without a murmur in the media even though it represented a significant milestone in her life. It illustrates the considerable difficulties she faces in shifting perceptions of her job as a Princess, both inside and outside the palace walls.

Ingrid Seward Ingrid Seward is editor in chief of Majesty magazine and has been writing about the Royal Family for more than twenty years. She is acknowledged as one of the leading experts in the field and has written ten books on the subject. Her latest book, Diana: The Last Word, with Simone Simmons, will be published in paperback in 2007 by St. Martin’s Press. Although Diana assured me that she was happy and finally felt she had found a real purpose in her life, I could still sense some of her inner turmoil. When we were gossiping, she was relaxed, but when we moved on to more serious matters, such as her treatment by the media, her body language betrayed her anxiety. She wrung her hands and looked at me out of the corner of her starling blue eyes. “No one understands what it is like to be me,” she said. “Not my friends, not anyone.” She admitted, however, that there was a positive side to her unique situation in that she could use her high profile to bring attention to the causes she cared about, and this, she assured me, was what she was doing now and wanted to do in the future. But it was the darker, negative side that she had to live with every day. After all this time, she explained, it still upset her to read untruths about herself, and it was simply not in her nature to ignore it. “It makes me feel insecure, and it is difficult going out and meeting people when I imagine what they might have read about me that morning.” Diana had no idea how much she was loved. To the poor, the sick, the weak, and the vulnerable, she was a touchstone of hope. But her appeal extended much further than that. She had the ability to engage the affections of the young and the old from all walks of life. That summer, she wrote a birthday letter to my daughter that read, “I hope for your birthday you managed to get those grown-ups to give you a doll’s house and the cardigan and the pony hair brush you wanted. Don’t believe their excuses.” She wrote similar letters to thousands of other people and always in her own hand. The effect was magical. “Please don’t say anything unkind about her. She’s my friend,” our daughter instructed her father. That, I think, explains the extraordinary outpouring of grief we witnessed when Diana died. Her appeal was as simple as it was unique. Diana touched the child in each and every one of us. She wasn’t the “people’s princess”--she was the people’s friend. The words of a London cabbie still ring in my ears when I think about the week after her death. “We’ll never see the like of her again,” he said as he dropped me off near the ocean of flowers outside Buckingham Palace. He was right.

CIOs may not be the subject matter expert of all IT domains, but they should understand technology enough to ensure they have a keen sense of judgment on the priorities for IT investment.

Collins had, in his own words, “been accustomed to slavery from his earliest days,” and, from “long experience,” considered himself something of an expert on the matter. In fact, his brother Charles, with whom he frequently did business, was later reputed to have been a slave trader. Robert would secure his own legacy as a slaver through authorship, penning an Essay on the Treatment and Management of Slaves—a kind of slave owner’s manual, which details his thinking on the subject.

I am Anna Jones, Professor and HOD Finance at Ohio University. I am also the subject matter expert associated with Crazy For Study and belong to this profession for a decade and solved numerous problems for subject related.

But why the obsessions? And why these specific subjects? Experts think predictability is a factor. Most autistic people’s hobbies can be categorised or are logical or predictable. Horses or birds belong to animal species and have certain characteristics. Computers do what you tell them to do. (And if they don’t, that’s usually because you – or the software developer – made a mistake. A computer can’t just go and decide to do something wrong because it doesn’t like you, no matter how many people say it can.) Stamps can go into an album, bicycle race results can be compared. And sorting, categorising and calculating simply makes most autistics very happy.

Are you passionate enough about a specific topic to become a subject matter expert, or entrepreneur in a particular field?

imagine being a subject matter expert in the Trump administration and there was a meeting on your subject, something you knew more about than anyone else, something you’d slaved away for months on to come up with a coherent workable plan, and no one told you the meeting was happening while decisions were made by people with a tenth of your expertise on the subject. Well, welcome to the Trump White House. That’s how we rolled.

Networking also helps to build your reputation and credibility in your industry. By attending events, participating in discussions, and sharing your knowledge and expertise, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and subject matter expert. This can help to attract new clients, collaborators, and investors who are looking for someone with your level of expertise.

Socrates’ search is for expertise in matters of importance in human life. Hence he is particularly keen to question self-styled experts in virtue, or what is worthwhile in life, such as the sophists claimed to be. He questions them on the topics that they claim to be experts in, and always succeeds in showing that they lack understanding of these topics, since they fail to explain satisfactorily why they say what they do, and indeed often make inconsistent claims. Socrates’ questions do not start from a position of his own, since this would only weaken the point that it is the other person who is supposed to display understanding of what he claims to know. When Socrates deflates the self-styled experts by showing them, just from premisses that they accept, that they don’t understand the subject they have been pontificating about, they cannot defend themselves by faulting his views, since these have not come into it.

A leviathan yearly grant budget gives Dr. Fauci power to make and break careers, enrich—or punish—university research centers, manipulate scientific journals, and to dictate not just the subject matter and study protocols, but also the outcome of scientific research across the globe. Since 2005, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funneled an additional $1.7 billion3 into Dr. Fauci’s annual discretionary budget to launder sketchy funding for biological weapons research, often of dubious legality. This Pentagon funding brings the annual total of grants that Dr. Fauci dispenses to an astonishing $7.7 billion—almost twice the annual donations of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working in close collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and other large grant makers, including Bill Gates—the biggest funder of vaccines in the world—Dr. Fauci has consistently used his awesome power to defund, bully, silence, de-license, and ruin scientists whose research threatens the pharmaceutical paradigm, and to reward those scientists who support him. Dr. Fauci rewards loyalty with prestigious sinecures on key HHS committees when they continue to advance his interests. When the so-called “independent” expert panels license and recommend new pharmaceuticals, Dr. Fauci’s control over these panels gives him the power to fast-track his pet drugs and vaccines through the regulatory hurdles, often skipping key milestones like animal testing or functional human safety studies. Dr. Fauci’s funding strategies evince a bias for developing and promoting patented medicines and vaccines, and for sabotaging and discrediting off-patent therapeutic drugs, nutrition, vitamins, and natural, functional, and integrative medicines. Under his watch, drug companies engineered the opioid crisis and made American citizens the globe’s most over-medicated population.

On the bright side—and in the best Foreign Service tradition—I got a tremendous amount of on-the-job management training. It was humbling to learn that I usually wasn’t the smartest person in the room, but empowering to discover that I didn’t need to be. I realized that my team could accomplish way more if I trusted the subject-matter experts to take the lead. I was pleased to realize that I had the ability to recognize the best ideas and the skill to lead teams in implementing the heck out of those ideas. I learned that success at the top was about growing other people’s talents rather than trying to make myself the indispensable person in the room.

In this hypercompetitive media environment, editors and producers no longer have the patience—or the financial luxury—to allow journalists to develop their own expertise or deep knowledge of a subject. Nor is there any evidence that most news consumers want such detail. Experts are often reduced to sound bites or “pull quotes,” if they are consulted at all.

When I first launched my business, I created a three-month authority push campaign to build authority as a subject matter expert in email marketing.

Where the cutting has been wholesale, and has lasted, is in Congress—Congress: the first branch of government, closest to the people; Congress, which on our behalf keeps an eye on all those unelected bureaucrats. Congressmen and -women have sabotaged their own institution’s ability to do that for us. They have smashed the tools it possessed to help fashion laws in the public interest. They have crippled their own capacity to come to independent conclusions as to the nature of the problems such laws would address. Congress has been disabled from inside. Most of this happened in one of those revisions of the House of Representatives’ internal rules when an election flipped the majority party. It was January 1995, and a last-minute geyser of campaign cash had delivered an upset Republican victory two months before. Newt Gingrich held the gavel. The very first provision of the new rules he hammered through on January 5 reads: “In the One Hundred Fourth Congress, the total number of staff of House committees shall be at least one-third less than the corresponding total in the One Hundred Third Congress.” Congressional staffers are the citizens’ subject matter experts. Over years, these scientists and auditors and lawyers and military veterans build up historical knowledge on the complex issues that jostle for House and Senate attention. They help members, who have to be generalists, drill down into specifics. Cut staffs, and members lose the bandwidth to craft wise legislation, the expertise to ask telling questions in hearings—the ability to hold oversight hearings at all. The Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office all suffered the cuts. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished—because, in 1995, what new technology could possibly be poised on the horizon? Democrats, when they regained control of the House, did not repair the damage. Today, the number of staff fielding thousands of corporate lobbyists or fact-checking their jive remains lower than it was a quarter century ago.

Know a little about a lot of things. When you cannot be a subject matter expert.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

If you want to co-operate in a group to solve a large problem, you need some amount of hierarchy, just so you know who is the expert on which subject. It really doesn't matter if the subject is computer support, roving the rivets in lapstrake ship planking, or washing the wort kettle; the point is that division of labour implies specialization implies hierarchy, because once you have specialization you have specialization in keeping track of things, and thus taxonomies, and telling a taxonomy from a hierarchy in the presence of a determined will to keep them separate requires good light and some squinting.

The lack of metacognition sets up a vicious loop, in which people who don’t know much about a subject do not know when they’re in over their head talking with an expert on that subject. An argument ensues, but people who have no idea how to make a logical argument cannot realize when they’re failing to make a logical argument. In short order, the expert is frustrated and the layperson is insulted. Everyone walks away angry. Even