Few things are more likely to (0) UNSETTLE a specialist than being asked, in public, to for a prediction that has conspicuously failed to materialise. For decades, economists, epidemiologists and political analysts were to a degree of professional deference that now looks rather quaint. A steady of forecasting misfires — coupled with the rise of social media, where every prediction is archived and retrievable — has that deference away. The public, once content to take an expert's word on , increasingly demands to see the working. This is not, in itself, an unhealthy development. Expertise that cannot scrutiny is arguably not expertise at all. The danger lies in the opposite : a wholesale dismissal of specialist knowledge in favour of gut instinct or ideological allegiance. Navigating between credulous trust and blanket suspicion requires a kind of civic literacy that no institution has yet worked out how to at scale.