You read an article on your topic of expertise, it’s bullshit, you read another article, a relevant expert on it pipes up that “that’s bullshit!”, and the prevailing response is, “no, you’re wrong, I’ve read a bunch of articles on this topic.”

That is, the Gell-Mann effect as a justification for over-ruling expert criticism.

I wish there were an equally clever idiom I could trot out when people criticise professions they probably know noting about.

Journalism is an incredibly difficult field to work in, and journalism as a profession is just barely still a thing due to loss of advertising revenue to online platforms.

Think about it, we've traded a profession that has historically been one of the few to tell truth to power for free cloud software.

And we paid for our cloud software and for our and social media¹ skinner boxes, by voluntarily giving our own surveillance data to private non-acountable entities² which probably collude with the government, and which lose our data to organised crime a few times a year³.

To me that doesn't sound so clever.

1: A kind of casino with the doors welded shut where the chips are the precious minutes of our lives.

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism. See also: https://privacysos.org/blog/nsa-calls-the-iphone-using-publi...

3: Equifax, yahoo data breaches just off the top of my head.