Expert Identification Problem
Recently I've been reading C. Thi Nguyen , along with social epistemology more broadly, and have come across what's referred to as the expert identification problem. Here is the main idea: there is a difficulty of determining who genuinely qualifies as an expert in a given domain, especially when non-experts lack the knowledge or skills to make such a determination. This creates an epistemic asymmetry, there is an inherent epistemic gap between experts and non-experts. If non-experts had the expertise needed to evaluate an expert, they would, in a sense, be experts themselves. This creates a circular problem: non-experts are asked to identify who the experts are, but they lack the knowledge to do so effectively. I see this problem as three fold. We must first define critical aspects of "expertise", second we must identify the entities to which that label could possibly refer, and third we must establish criteria/heuristics/rules of thumb that allow us to minimize o