[xanderlewis]

It depends on the field of expertise.

Some fields are such that they are hard to be expert in, but it’s trivially easy to verify expertise when observed. For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all. Another classic example is cooking. Even the most caveman-like philistine knows good food.

On the other hand, for some fields, verifying expertise (or ‘mastery’) is as hard as achieving it. Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples. In those cases, you probably have to rely on a trusted authority to verify legitimacy. Without that, you can’t distinguish the accomplished experts from the crackpot blowhards.

[AlotOfReading]

I don't think it's as easy as you make it sound. I probably couldn't differentiate an expert Shandong chef from a generically skilled chinese chef, even if I like their cooking. It's difficult as a non-expert to even know what the differences are, let alone be able to see (or taste) them.

[duckmysick]

> For example, playing tennis. It’s easy to identify a good tennis player even if you can’t play tennis at all.

I'm not so sure. Identifying good talent is difficult when it comes to sports. There's an entire industry of scouts that try to find decent players ahead of the others. More so, they are tasked with finding out why a particular players is good. It's anything but trivial.

[xanderlewis]

I’m just demonstrating that the two categories are different, which they clearly are.

Not that one is trivial and the other is impossible. Of course, if you want to do any task well it becomes nontrivial.

[j16sdiz]

It could be both at the same time.

One can be a master in certain art, yet can't explain what's going on.

Think cooking: Many chef "searing steaks" to "keep juice in". It don't keep juice in, but it taste good.

Think language: Most native speaker can form grammatically correct sentence, but they can't really explain how. Yet many linguists, knowing how some languages work, keep bullshitting about another language.

[Jensson]

> Academic disciplines — particularly technical ones like science — are examples

Technical sciences are much easier than the social sciences. Social science is much more full of people who have no clue what they are doing than technical sciences, because technical sciences can be verified by experiments while social science is mostly about trust.