The wisdom of the ill informed

[Perry E. Metzger]

Allen <netsecurity at sound-by-design.com> writes:
>> There are well-attended conferences, papers published online and in many
>> journals, etcetera.  So it's not so difficult for people who don't know
>> anything about security and crypto to eventually figure out who does, in
>> the process also learning who else knows who the experts are.
>
> Actually I think it is just about as difficult to tell who is a
> trustworthy expert in the field of cryptography as it is in any field
> of science or medicine.

Indeed. In fact, one even finds many people who post to public mailing
lists who know less than they should. However, it is reasonably
straightforward to figure out who knows what in a given field. Things
like citation indexes, journal impact factors and such make a number
of these things reasonably easy even for the outsider, provided that
outsider knows what they're doing. One can also go through the
expedient of finding what a substantial number of practitioners
think. If most have one opinion, and one or two who don't seem
terribly sane have a very different one, you know who's who.

One of the most interesting things I find about most fields is the
fact that people who are incompetent very often fancy themselves
experts. There's a great study on this subject -- usually the least
competent people are the ones that feel highly confident in their
skills, while the people who aren't have more doubts. One sees this
very phenomenon on this very list, and not infrequently.


Perry

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