Re: [tlug] What would happen to the Internet if the US fell off the map

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Dave M G writes:

 > Steve is undoubtedly a person with great knowledge about
 > economics. But I feel that his title as a professor is a short hand
 > for giving him the benefit of the doubt,

Heh.  A professor is the *last* person to give the benefit of the
doubt.  "To profess" means to advocate.  I certainly do.

 > With all due respect to Steve and or all other experts of their
 > fields who may read this, if a person truly is an expert and they
 > have internalized their base of understanding in their field, then
 > the validity of what they say should be manifest in the statements
 > they make.

Manifest to other experts, yes.  But the value in expertise is
precisely that the expert can make valid statements that non-experts
can't evaluate with a reasonable amount of effort.

 > So I guess what I'm saying is that I don't believe anyone here
 > should have to explain their credentials, nor should anyone
 > question someone else's ability to speak on a matter based on their
 > credentials of any kind.

Well, I agree that Josh went too far in suggesting an obligation to
introduce oneself.  But there is great benefit to knowing somebody's
credentials.  Experts are authorities (though the field of authority
is far smaller than the field of expertise), and that should normally
shortcut certain silly discussions.  Credentials can also point out
potential bias.[1]

One thing we do have to be careful about is that for *us* degrees or
even job titles are often not very important credentials.  Attila
Kinali is a salient example; he had Josh convinced he was an avatar of
Jon Postel[2], when he "merely" has made a hobby of understanding the
Internet ... at precisely the level that was relevant to that
discussion.  One of the things I like about geekdom is that we all
have our avocations (for the lucky, vocations), and we all have our
expertise in those fields.

I consider it to be a rare privilege to be associated with the posters
to TLUG (*all* of them, and without distinction!), far more so than my
current employer or my profession as a whole.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Unfortunately, evaluating the biases of social scientists is very
hard to do, since one's own biases are very hard to filter out.

[2]  The late great Editor-in-Chief of Internet RFCs.