Through my own research on the CIA and its “sister-agencies,” I’m getting the anecdotal impression that there are some discourse communities in which expertise can actually be a liability.  I’d be curious if others, working in any, any other areas, have noticed or suspect similar trends/liabilities.  I’m speculating based on my own anecdotal impressions that this issue rears up most frequently and most problematically when experts interact with non-experts.  This idea is really germinal in my brain, so I’d simply be interested in batting the idea around, hearing if others have encountered similar phenomena, and if others have noticed it, speculating a bit as to what might be behind such a notion.  In this way, I and others interested in the issues might be able to set a research agenda.  If others think this problem does exist, I’d be interested in speculating/strategizing  further about how the digital humanities, broadly conceived, might address the problem.  Is this problem, if it exists, part of a larger ethical failure, and what is the role of ethics in the digital humanities, or the role of the digital humanities in ethics?