Fake Experts

In late spring of 2023, Rafael Nadal lost in the first round of the French Open. This came as a sad surprise to millions of tennis fans — sad because Rafael Nadal is a tennis legend, and surprising because he has won the French Open more than any tennis player in the history of the sport. In fact he has won it so much that millions of tennis fans call him ‘The King of Clay’. They want a stadium named after him.

But by 2023, Rafael Nadal was no longer one of the greatest tennis players in the world. And if anyone was in doubt of that fact, it became clear with his first-round loss. This is a perfect example of one of the many great things about professional sports: it is clear who is great and who is not. And who used to be great, but is perhaps not so great anymore.

In sports there is no faking. If you play well consistently, you are good. If you do not play well consistently, you are not good.

If only life were that simple.

The revealing nature of professional sports is an outlier in how our world works today. Most ‘experts’ you will meet or hear about in the real world — like a new manager at work or a famous academic — will rarely be asked to prove that they are experts. Often, they are just average people who have failed upwards. But there is no public arena for most experts to consistently show the world that they are great.

The experts problem is especially pronounced in industries where success is opaque and you don’t have to show your work. Lawyers, academia, doctors, some kinds of scientists, mental health professionals, most kinds of consultants, people in tech, and so on. The public — people like you and me — rarely, if ever, get to see a record of outcomes from these people.

This is troubling, because accepting the word of experts at face value can lead to extremely dangerous outcomes if they turn out not to be an expert.

In business, it could mean changing the direction of your business based on a fake expert that’s giving you poor advice (like a VC or a new exec hire). In life, it could mean making drastic changes to your living situation or relationship because of someone you believed to be an expert (like a therapist or a friend who claimed to have experience). So we thought it may be helpful to come up with a short list of red flags — signs someone might be saying they are an expert, but are actually not.

They prominently (or frequently) reference their years of experience.
They justify their ideas using flawed analogies and comparisons.
When you meet them, they default to talking about their credentials rather than their actual work.
They hesitate to share their work with you.
They speak in vague, glossy terms about their past experiences.
They make things harder than they need to be and/or are quickly dismissive of big ideas.
They talk in absolutes. ‘You have to do this. You can never do this.’
They reference their age as a way to justify their expertise.
They often wear fancy, extraordinarily expensive things.*
They are focused on doing things designed to make themselves look good to a wide audience.
They like listing qualification acronyms next to their name (e.g. on LinkedIn or Twitter).
They reference social credentials instead of actual ideas.
They talk in fluff and nebulous statements instead of pointing to specific details.
They namedrop famous/notable people unsolicited, usually to establish some connection between themselves and those people.
They do not react well when someone disagrees with them.
They are gatekeep-y. ‘You can’t talk about X because you didn’t do Y.’
They find cosmetic reasons to discredit others rather than addressing their actual ideas.
They post on social media all of the time.**
They justify arguments via vanity metrics (followers, likes, fancy degree).
They make things sound more complicated than they really are.
They don’t believe that someone outside of their job/field can have an opinion related to their job.
They justify ideas with intuition or ‘trust me’ rather than real arguments and evidence.

This is not a comprehensive list. Nor does someone exhibiting one of these traits mean they are faking being an expert. Sometimes people are great at things and are also just annoying. But if things on this list apply to any experts you know, ask why. We think that if you consider this question for those people that come to mind, you may come to some interesting conclusions.

* This is on the list as a general heuristic. People who wear extraordinarily fancy things (like a $10k watch or bag) tend to be more focused on outward appearance than the average person. And overindexing on your outward appearance is one sign you might care more about faking than actually being, or doing, the thing you want to be known for.

** The people who post the most on social media are very rarely the people who are actually the best at the thing. Sometimes they are. Usually they aren’t — the experts are doing other stuff. Less relevant for people whose job it is to communicate (e.g. Substack writer).

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