I've spent a lot of pixels bashing experts, noting many, many cases where such puffed up buffoons preening on the public stage have demonstrated their ignorance and lack of expertise. It's as true of congeries of experts as for individuals. Much of that criticism has dealt with subjects related to my narrow and modest expertise in agriculture, and includes general environmental and ecological subjects. Consideration of economic and cultural issues is inevitable too since the boundaries of such systems are not sharp.

What then is expertise? If it's not an attribute of individual experts, and not the consensus view of groups of experts, does it mean anything? Does it exist? IMV it can be better understood as an emergent property most easily identified in hindsight, which is never embodied in any particular location, is never durably instantiated. It arises from full context and includes the disparate views of many individuals which influence one another. It's a combined vector, perhaps something like a quasi-particle, an emptiness that behaves something like a particle in an energetic stew of real particles. Or perhaps less esoterically, it's the fifth voice in a barber shop quartet that arises from harmonic concordances. It's the "angel's voice" arising from the physics and psychophysics of hearing.