Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> There are well-attended conferences, papers published online and in many >> journals, etcetera. So it's not so difficult for people who don't know >> anything about security and crypto to eventually figure out who does, in >> the process also learning who else knows who the experts are. > > Actually I think it is just about as difficult to tell who is a > trustworthy expert in the field of cryptography as it is in any field > of science or medicine.
Indeed. In fact, one even finds many people who post to public mailing lists who know less than they should. However, it is reasonably straightforward to figure out who knows what in a given field. Things like citation indexes, journal impact factors and such make a number of these things reasonably easy even for the outsider, provided that outsider knows what they're doing. One can also go through the expedient of finding what a substantial number of practitioners think. If most have one opinion, and one or two who don't seem terribly sane have a very different one, you know who's who. One of the most interesting things I find about most fields is the fact that people who are incompetent very often fancy themselves experts. There's a great study on this subject -- usually the least competent people are the ones that feel highly confident in their skills, while the people who aren't have more doubts. One sees this very phenomenon on this very list, and not infrequently. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]