Pieces on a chess board

I read once that if you show a chess master a snapshot of a game in progress for just a moment, he can re-create the placement of pieces on the board with a very high degree of accuracy. However, if you place pieces at random on a board, the chess master does no better than anyone else at correctly re-creating the arrangement.

This demonstrates that chess masters see the underlying structure of a chess position - so-and-so's opening or Knight's Gambit, call it what you will, while an ordinary person just sees chess pieces.

The message, I think, is that context is everything. Or perhaps that more is going on than meets the eye of a casual observer. Maybe both.

In another way, you can drop some techno-babble and pretty pictures into a document or presentation and concinve the casual observer or layman that it means something, while a real expert will often sense the lack of underlying structure and recognize a fraud.

But the world is so complex that experts in any given field are rare. We're taught that vox populi is vox dei - but the majority of people can be tricked on any given subject. If the real experts aren't paying attention to the public or aren't as good at painting pictures for public consumption, the public will go with what it is shown - the fraud. I think that the fact that we've begun to accept that the universe is far bigger and more complex than we ever imagined before makes the problem worse - not only is there more to know, but things that are illogical on their face are often true. The world being flat makes more intuitive sense than the world being round - else why don't we fall off? Yet it is round. We accept that. And so we move on to accept more and more things that are less and less likely at first glance. Most of them are true.

Now along comes the internet - the ultimate test of the theory that an infinite number of primates at an infinite number of keyboards... suddenly all the information in the world is out there. Experts have no more voice than anyone else - just one person on a forum.

So how do we know what to believe when it comes to things we ourselves are not experts in?