Never Underestimate the Value of Expertise
Experts develop formidable skills that non-experts just don't have--skills that require years of study and experience to develop. In this example, Shulman senses something is wrong but can't explain why.
"...The director of the institute was a professor named Marshall Shulman, a well-known Sovietologist who had also served in Jimmy Carter's White House as an advisor on Soviet matters.
"Like all Sovietologists, Shulman studied the Soviet press very carefully for indications of policy positions within the Kremlin. This process was an almost Talmudic exercise in textual analysis, and it was a mystery to those of us who had never done it. How, we students asked him, did he make sense of any of the stilted prose of Soviet newspapers, or divine any meaning from such turgid passages? How could a thousand formulaic stories on the heroic struggles of collective farms illuminate the secrets of one of the most closed systems on earth? Shulman shrugged and said, "I can't really explain it. I just read Pravda until my nose twitches (p. 34)."
Source: Nichols, T. (2017). The death of expertise : The campaign against established knowledge and why it matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.