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>expertise =/= authority.

They aren't the same thing, but the former certainly implies the latter. The thing that makes expertise distinct from skill is the associated power dynamic. Someone good at medicine isn't necessarily an expert, but even the worst doctor is.

>one has expertise regardless of how another views them. it is when another somehow conflates the expertise with some sort of authority, that the terms get confused.

Most forms of authority, in practice, exist even without lenses. The cop on your corner doesn't need you to acknowledge his authority, he can make you do what he wants just fine.

>it points directly to a core issue i have with many people, who look at some singular aspect of another (expertise, writing, action, whatever) and make that one aspect the entirety of how they see that other. like saying james brown's music sucks because he allegedly hit his wife. or dismiss everything bob black ever wrote because he allegedly snitched. to me, that is NOT critical thinking.

I agree that there is a lot of this type of reasoning lately, but I also think there is the converse problem as well, and these two phenomena feed into each other. There's a tendency among some people to try to divorce ideas from their context. If someone listens to James Brown's music and it immediately gives them unpleasant reminders of domestic violence, then the music *does* suck; the fact that the displeasure comes from the association with the artist's image rather than the composition doesn't make it less valid. But no, for some people, the author is completely dead, and there is no context involved with the song (which is on its face absurd, given how obvious it is that musical taste varies around cultural norms). This causes people to react, saying shit like not only is the song bad, *you* are bad if you enjoy it, and this death spiral feedback loop just ends up shitting all over any real dialogue or discourse.