Consider the following comments on expertise.
We mock the expert until the bridge sways, and then we want only the expert.
A society that distrusts everyone who knows more than it does will be governed by those who know less.
Expertise is the discipline of being wrong in narrower and narrower ways.
The deepest knowledge of a single tree can leave a person blind to the forest.
We resent experts not for being wrong, but for reminding us how much we cannot know.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that a healthy society needs both deference to expertise and the freedom to question it, and that our era has lost the balance in both directions at once. Open by granting the populist suspicion its kernel of truth, that experts have at times been captured, arrogant or simply wrong, and that credentials are not the same as wisdom. Then complicate it: the remedy for fallible expertise is better expertise, not the flattering fiction that a confident amateur and a trained specialist are equally worth hearing. A strong third move separates trusting the method, which earns trust by exposing itself to correction, from trusting the individual, who may not. Caution: resist the elitist mirror image, the assumption that ordinary people are simply too foolish to be reasoned with, which breeds exactly the resentment it fears.