Experts Revisited

EXPERTS REVISITED....I'm not quite sure why Atrios unleashed the snark on Ilan Goldenberg's post (here) about how to tell a foreign policy expert from a foreign policy "expert" — though perhaps Goldenberg's VSP credentials were reason enough. In any case, his advice seems reasonable enough to at least deserve an airing. Basically, Goldenberg provides two rules of thumb:

• "Regional experts generally tend to be more well informed than functional experts because of their narrower focus." If you want to learn about the Middle East, listen to Arabic-speaking Middle East experts, not generic terrorism experts or nonproliferation experts or whatnot.
• "There is an inverse correlation between the number of areas of expertise listed in your bio and your actual expertise." Genuine experts have a limited number of areas on which they claim genuine expertise, and those areas are usually related. Conversely, a long, jumbled laundry list of areas may be a warning sign of someone who's spread too thin to have deep expertise in any single field.
  

"None of these rules are hard and fast," Goldenberg says. They seem like a decent provocation for further discussion, though.