Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.
I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.
As an aside, if you're interested in history and you don't yet follow Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, you're really missing out. He's great at finding sources, his historiography is sound and just heterodox enough to be appealing, and the man can tell a story like nobody's business - definitely worth the time of anyone with an interest in the subject.
Lindybeige is a fantastic explainer when it comes to that sort of thing - it also highlights how quickly a person can go from knowing nothing to practically hobbyist levels of knowledge in 20 minutes post internet
Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert - was recently ridiculed for suggesting that someone could become an expert on a topic after an hour of talking with the brightest minds in that field. While "expert" needs to be defined, I don't think it's far fetched.
How many times have we had that conversation with someone who knows their topic backwards and forwards and after minutes, we have a deeper understanding of it than almost anyone around. Expand that out to an hour with a few key/relevant questions to frame the conversation and it is totally believable.
I recently attended a lecture by Hadley Wickham on his latest tools built for R. It was both edifying and deeply saddening. I learned a great deal about R in a short time from (IMHO) one of the masters, and I realized that if Haldey is typical of a Rice University professor I should have challenged myself to get a better education than I did.
I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.