Once upon a time, in order to have an opinion that mattered, you had to spend years studying, arguing, researching and developing ideas based on a steady trickle of ever changing input.
Fortunately, that is no longer the case. Along with our stunted attention spans and our belief that the most cogent and cutting social commentary derives from anonymous voices on internet platforms, we have the advent of Instant Expertise. You don't even need to add water!
Because we have the accumulated mass of human intelligence at our fingertips and can see anything and everything from the last couple of thousand years, we can establish positions and craft lines of thinking without all that mucking about in the process of learning. We can read all the documents, or get them summed up for us, so that we can find the voice in the wilderness which supports our pre-existing point of view. Everyone can swim in the pool of unvetted claims and bob for the one which best validates our already-thinking.
But expertise is not about knowing or even having access to data. Expertise develops over time and is equal parts fact-accumulation and judgment. Some sources are less useful than others. Some times of year engender certain types of information. Words have subtleties of meaning and use that need to be contextualized and understood. Claims are proven, unproven and disproven over time so a snapshot in the middle era won't present the ultimate understanding. In brief, though we can read everything a real expert can, though we can see anything that the great historians saw, we should not consider ourselves experts because a singular data dump does not equate to the gradual growth of an informed opinion.
Consider the AI that's figuratively sweeping the nation (I have looked and still see dirt everywhere so it is only metaphorical). It has access to everything but still knows nothing. Looking up a claim on google and then insisting that you are right and substantiated because one of the top results includes a sentence which parrots that claim is not the same as being able to construct a persuasive argument. It just means that a computer search of a fixed database of words matched a serach term. That's not "knowing," -- that's a muscle reflex. Just because the doctor can make my knee unbend doesn't mean that being hit repeatedly with a rubber hammer is the same as my exercising my knee.
Go to a debate website. People will be citing webpages, historical documents and recent news clips as if every source is equal in utility and validity. Quotes will be mined and bits, combined with pieces to make what appears to be a coherent whole, but which is more a castle in the air. Old people don't just know more -- they have seen all that stuff ripen (and in some cases, rot) so they have more of an expansive world-view in which to consider it.
People now love authority not because it is definitive and stops argument, but because it is personalizable and can become a source for an equally valid but ridiculous position. We stop being interested in ultimate truth because we can find that we are not alone in our personal truth, so we surround ourselves with cherry picked support and insulate ourselves from opposition. We dig in. That position is all we need to establish -- no one needs to rethink anything because the position was innovated in the light of "everything" so there will be nothing new to shake that foundation.
We are instantly, as informed as the most erudite scholar and our research assistant (the internet) has instant access to the wisdom of the ages so I can find the opinion I need. Who needs years of tempering and reconsidering? I can ask the google and it can tell me not just what to believe, but it can reassure me that holding that position is the only valid way to live.
Put me in front of a piano -- every note is there, every postential song, right in fornt of me. But access doesn't make me a piano player. And using a series of lights, guiding my fingers just means that I can copy what a computer decides is right. A real piano player struggles and learns WHY and HOW and WHEN and more importantly, WHEN NOT.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Or just walk in and refuse to leave because you are just as important as a ticket holder.
