- this has also occurred to me and I'd say that professional demeanor and actual expertise are only maybe ~50 percent correlated. a lot of quacks are well dressed smooth talkers and a lot of legit scientists are goofy as hell
- one funny consequence of educational polarization is that dems become the party of sober experts and GOP the party of wacky cranks. this has been electorally bad for democrats but crucially i think it's also substantively politically bad. many experts are wrong! many conspiracies are in fact true!
