Comment from the #1 google result for Broccoli Casserole (http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,178,135180-244199,00.html):

I found this website from a New York Times article I read today and I am so happy I did! This was the best broccoli casserole ever and my family devoured it and they will not even eat broccoli most of the time. I just wanted to say thank you for a wonderful recipe and a great site!

I understand Kimball’s sentiments. That is not to say that I agree with them necessarily, but I think I understand where he’s coming from.

A couple years ago, somebody got the bright idea to have Joshua Bell, who is apparently an extraordinarily accomplished violinist, play as a busker in a New York subway. Among the community of professional musicians and critics, there is little disagreement that Bell is one of the finest violinists in the world.

As you might expect, the New York subway rabble mostly ignored him. Despite the fact that he could fill Carnegie Hall with an announced performance, most people just walked on by without even stopping.

The first fascinating question: is Bell’s playing objectively better than a common subway busker’s? How would we tell?

Music is one of those fields that seems pretty subjective, so maybe we can’t. But let’s ask a simpler question: is it just complete bullshit? Is Bell’s playing objectively distinguishable from a common busker’s? It turns out that, to trained ears, the answer is very likely yes: if you put 100 buskers and Bell behind a screen and let them play for an expert audience, they would be able to pick out Bell. Bell’s playing has some qualities: technical accuracy, tonality, whatever, that distinguish him from amateurs, against some objective standard.

But if you put Bell and 100 buskers behind a screen, a lay-audience may not be able to pick out Bell. You have to study and train to pick out Bell from 100 buskers. Laypeople would not have a well-defined standard to evaluate the violinists, nor would they have the skill to fully evaluate a violinist against the standard.

In a world where it costs a lot (relatively speaking) to publish an opinion, the people who are trained in a subject are generally the ones who have their opinions solicited. You can argue about whether the standards they use really separate “good” from “bad,” but you probably can’t argue that they are incapable of evaluating something against that standard.

In a world where experts have publishing power, experts primarily defined the standards and evaluated things (violinists, recipes) against those standards. Although we could treat the standards as entirely subjective, it’s possible that at least some parts of the standard were objective: based on objective measures of technical correctness, or based on informed knowledge of social preferences gathered through studies and experience.

The Internet has shifted the balance of power. Now, amateurs can also speak loudly. Instead of a few standards, we now have millions. Instead of consistent evaluations against those standards, we now have inconsistent evaluations. And society at large does not have the expertise to understand or tell the difference.

The folks at Gourmet and violin aficionados are lamenting this, because their power has been diluted, and for their skills to remain marketable, they may have to achieve the impossible: convincing a huge majority of amateurs, who are largely incapable of evaluating their judgments, that their judgments are somehow superior (in objective quality, in consistency, whatever). Before, they just had to convince the publishers at Conde Nast, who were a small group who were apt to select experts for their expensive publication. Now they have to convince everybody. And “everybody,” in the aggregate, won’t select the best…they’ll select the good-enough. They will select the broccoli casserole that barely doesn’t suck, rather than the one that’s truly great.

The problems of Joshua Bell and the folks at Gourmet are the reasons that I am an engineer, and not a musician or a chef. In engineering, the standards are much less set by social preference, and much more by nature. The results are much easier to evaluate: either this black box produces the right outputs or it doesn’t. The rocket either made it to space or it blew up. The bridge either held up during the earthquake or it collapsed. “Better” is much more often quantifiable and explicable. I don’t have to spend too much time trying to argue that an expert engineer’s bridge designs are better than those solicited from amateurs on Twitter, because gravity will explain better than I ever will.

I find it interesting that “looks good to me” is a really, really obviously dangerous standard for bridge design, but “sounds good to me” and “tastes good to me” are socially acceptable in the violin and cooking domains. (Some would even argue that these “good-enough to a layperson” standards are the natural result of market economics and therefore are preferable almost by definition.)

Call me a snob, but on the whole I don’t want “the average person” designing my bridges, creating my recipes, directing me to violin music, performing surgery on me, or running the government. In fields where I have some expertise, I have seen great social damage done by decisions made that amateurs were sure were “good enough.” Literally millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of hours, all gone into a black hole like tears in rain.

A phenomenon that makes it harder for experts to be experts concerns me a little, and maybe we should not be so unconcernedly excited about the newfound power and volume of the amateur.

“I will punish the world for its evil, And the wicked for their iniquity; I will halt the arrogance of the proud, And will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.” (Isaiah 13:11)

Is this not a prophecy about these days in which we live, it is not like that it hasn’t been foretold. Is this not that same pride and arrogance in the extreme? This is just the weeding out of what is contrary to the good of humanity. So why is this news?