Scrymarch . # .

Specialists: On the blog side, I was envisioning something like an NYT-tracker site.  Scoop set up to take a feed of the headline and precis, say.  So you\'d read an article in the NYT and then say - I wonder if the guys on NYT-tracker have anything to say about this?

I think all societies require specialists.  Reading specialists kicking about on their favourite subjects, and then desperately trying to fill in the gaps in your own model of the world, is a great way to learn.

You read stuff by Virginia Postrel - some great stuff on the way solutions emerge given an opportunity - and she uses technocrat like a swearword.  I don\'t have that view, my view is closer to that of David Foster Wallace - a technocrat is someone putting her expertise at the service of a democratic society.

To me, in a scarcity driven society a specialist is a magician who has to be certified from years of official study and promoted and underwritten by an institution.   I\'m not going to completely give up on this model.  If I go to a vet it will be one registered with the Queensland Board of Veterinary Surgeons.  

I agree that an abundance driven society would be supportive of quick and unorthodox sequences of study.  And I\'m certain flocks of fast-moving interdisciplinarians would deliver a freer more prosperous society than squads of square eyed factory men.  But when a person spends 25 years studying the subject they love I\'ll give their opinion more weight, especially when I have little else to go on.

In wikipedia, where people go for details on obscuria, this is a real problem, as Larry Sanger has pointed out .