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Having dealt with a few 'experts' in my time, I can say that it is easy to declare oneself an 'expert' in anything, as long as others agree with you. In one case, we had a situation at my workplace where the janitorial staff wanted to install a camera in the teacher's lounge because the teachers were worse than the kids when it came to cleaning up after themselves. The janitorial staff were tired of it (They had just re-modled the room), and wanted empirical evidence of who it was so that some real action could be taken. A firestorm erupted almost immediately. There were two staffers who started to pass out stuff they had gotten from a 'surveillance expert' that was very militant about how such things were wrong and illegal and all this other stuff. The janitor came to me and asked about the information on the papers. I decided to do some research on the 'expert on surveillance'. This person touted all kinds of things as to her qualifications of being an expert. I decided to start really digging. That was when I discovered that the 'expert on surveillance' was just an English Major from my old stomping grounds (N.C.). There was absolutely nothing that I could find anywhere that showed her 'expertise' in this matter. Basically, she was just a disgruntled person who decided she did not like such a thing and then created an online persona of an 'expert'. (She would do things like cherry-pick cases that the defendant won and use them to denounce any and all camera surveillance on the planet. Some of her claims were not even true.) So, I decided to check on the situation, i.e.: the legalities of putting a camera in that room to observe what was going on. I looked at court case dockets, not fifth person stories about the cases. In every legal case of the same parameters, the courts always decided for the organization putting up the camera. One judge said it was no different than if the company had assigned a person to stand there and watch the room. Plus, the camera was not allowed to have audio, even. The 'room supervisor' would have been listening as well as watching, and it was all completely legal for the company to do this. Time and time again, as I checked out what she said vs what the courts said, this 'expert' was proven to be wrong.

Now, yes, this person was not an actual 'expert' on anything, excepting maybe English and running a website (She had convinced many people that she was someone who had intimate knowledge of surveillance, both covert and security. In fact, she was just a person who did not like something and used the internet to have a platform to yell about it.)

The experts we keep referring to, however, are actually experts. They are scientists, they are doctors, they are developers. They have the knowledge and experience to be seen as an 'expert'. However, the term has been pretty well corrupted these days. We need to start referring to them by their titles. This will help create the proper aura for their addressing what is going on. We should not indicate that information came from an 'expert', we should be saying that it came from 'DR. So And So, leading researcher at the National Weather Insititute'.

The rethugs are always trotting out 'experts'. We need to trot out Scientists, Doctors, and so on to make sure everyone sees that the positions we hold will stand up to being attacked by 'experts', because the scientist's information is probably going to be way more stable and solid than these so-called 'experts'.

(I say 'probably' because even a few scientists are going the MAGA route and that makes anything they say suspect.)