“The idea that some people were better than others at interpreting things—that was a new concept. It’s the idea of expertise, and the whole notion of expertise was still being worked out. William Herschel was the great astronomer of the day, a deeply learned man, and yet his views about sunspots were not taken much more seriously than the views of the man who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard something from somebody who’d heard that the sun was going out the day after tomorrow. All the evidence from the Tambora years didn’t add up to anything. It just inspired wild guesses about earthquakes and lightning rods and rice paddies. This is the fate of a world without the idea of expertise, a world without any sense of whom to trust. In that world, any story was a relief. It’s not a surprise that people migrated from explanation to explanation to explanation. Any story was better than nothing at all.”
Nicholas Day, from his book A World Without Summer
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