Prompt:

Critical judgment of work in any given field has little value unless it comes from someone who is an expert in that field.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

My essay:

Despite the deep-seated Western ideology of individualism and self-reliance, people nowadays find themselves unwittingly dependent on strangers: they check the reviews on TripAdvisor before booking vacations, or refer to Rotten Tomatoes as they decide what movies are worth their money. Such prevalent unsolicited review systems suggest that we tend to place unmitigated trust in other people's opinions for our own decision-making, even though we have no knowledge about their tastes, educational backgrounds, social status, or areas of expertise. When reviews from experts such as film critics are readily available, what accounts for such popularization of public reviews from seemingly unreliable sources?

This topic draws our attention to an important issue in the process of manufacturing and consumption, artwork's creation and reception, and general knowledge production: are experts the only people who can claim the authority to critically judge the value of work? In this essay, I seek to grapple with this question by first historicizing the statement in the contemporary era and then moving on to a discussion of aesthetics and ethics that often complicates the issue of critical judgment. I intend to show that it is tremendously difficult to argue for such sweeping generalization that critical judgment of work is valuable only when it comes from experts.

Surely, in certain areas, expertise is hardly transferable without professional training, so only experts can offer adequate critical judgment. For example, people go to dermatologists to find out why they have a persistent rash, or they consult divorce attorneys for advice on divorce settlements. Not to mention that in advanced areas of study such as quantum mechanics or psychometrics, knowledge becomes highly specified insofar as it caters to only a narrow audience.

However, technological advancement has dramatically revolutionized the ways in which knowledge is produced, archived, and shared, so much so that it has blurred the lines between experts and laymen. With online services like Wikipedia and WikiHow, anyone can contribute their knowledge of a specific topic without necessarily being an expert in that field: fragmentary pieces of information, life hacks, useful tips, and even trivia from both experts and non-experts can be digitally archived for the general public to access, who can also engage in open discussions online to ensure the quality and credibility of that knowledge. In this light, we come to see that, in the era of high-speed information exchange, expertise no longer belongs to experts per se; it has transformed into a virtual repertoire of knowledge gained through not only professional training, but also personal experience and accidental discoveries. This suggests that valuable judgment does not necessarily come from only experts in contemporary times.

One significant underlying assumption of the prompt is that there is only one true value of work, and that value can only be determined by experts. This assumption is unwarranted, particularly when we consider the prompt in industrial production and consumption. For example, in designing a car, while a development engineer cares about fuel efficiency and a manufacturing engineer values safety, customers may be concerned first and foremost about the car's cost. In this case, critical judgment from nonexperts such as customers is valuable because it has made production and consumption a much more informed and targeted process: producers may look for areas to improve their merchandise from negative customer reviews, and consumers could seek recommendations for quality products from positive feedback.

Building upon the argument in the prior paragraph, we can further complicate the issue by thinking about the roles that aesthetics and ethics play in critical judgment and cultural life. There seems to be no way to evaluate an artwork from an entirely objective perspective, because its aesthetics may trigger divergent affective responses. As Theodore Adorno suggests, there is no standard for what is considered beautiful. Accordingly, aesthetics is not so much a way to render judgment as to share the joy from appreciation of the art. In this way, critical judgment of an artwork from a non-expert viewer also has value, because it expresses how such artwork is received. In juxtaposing the discussion of critical judgment with ethics, we come across tough dilemmas. For example, should euthanasia be performed upon the patient's wish, even when the doctor insists that there is a chance of survival with active treatment? Here, we see another problematic assumption of the prompt that experts' judgment is valuable, because it tends to be correct or can be validated by empirical evidence. When ethics comes into play, it becomes staggeringly difficult to say whether the doctor's judgment is valuable, and to whom. It reminds us that while knowledge, expertise, and experience can certainly help inform our decision-making, we should also not dismiss where our feelings and emotions direct us.