Keeping the baby while changing the bath water
By Roger W. Burdette, special to CoinWeek …..
[EDITOR’S NOTE: A portion of this piece was posted by the author on the NGC Grading forum on November 14. –CoinWeek]
Many an Auld Tymer will swear on Granny’s grave that one coin or another is something special, rare, unique, or of distinctive provenance. In their pale eyes, they will be right; for it is all they know from those who came before and all they need to know to count among the mighty.
These Auld Tymers have seen an ocean of rarities, seas of oddities, frozen mirrored lakes reflecting frosted mountains, and great caverns of golden treasure. All judged, labeled, certified, attested, calibrated by the best old eyes and the greatest of judgement as looking like what is believed.
They have done this for a long time. They have great expertise. They are experts – such we believe and tell others. “The experts know. The experts cannot be in error. They beheld the scripted tablets and mysteries of unconsuming fire.” Such is the delivered wisdom cut in strong stone.
Today’s Auld Tymers are, however, not the authentics they might once rightly supposed themselves to be. Their expertise is created on that of centuries-gone forebearers of different time and place.
Auld Tymers of the Expert Class have a special capability–we’ll call it “We know what we know!” or “WKWWK.” For Auld Tymers, this is a very good thing. It is coin knowledge on a scale, depth, and density not found among most.
It says the Expert WKWWK can identify a coin from a distance and immediately attribute and classify it, be it a Proof, unusual alloy, specimen, special strike, private commemorative, or any other numismatic primate. This is great because it also gives the Expert general esteem, intellectual authority, a small income, and emotional assurance of their self-worth and status among peers and others.
They have nothing to prove and little opposition.
But within the last two or three decades, WKWWK Experts have gradually become uncomfortable. Their knowledge was built on a scant thousand pages of direct information, more of assumed production, and still more of raw assumption. Others, attuned to a wider experience outside the Auld Tymers, began to ask questions. Uncomfortable questions.
Over time, the outsiders accumulated direct information from original sources. First a few thousand, then tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, now in millions. To sample the scale of newly official records acquired consider that in less than one month in early 2024, more than 74,000 pages of original United States Mint documents were digitized and added to the Newman Numismatic Portal (NNP). That is estimated to be more original archival numismatic pages than existed in 1990. All of this is available to anyone with internet access, and all for free.
During this transition, Auld Tymers’ WKWWK knowledge base barely changed, while new data vastly overwhelmed what was once thought secure.
This change is not without difficulties. Auld Tymers feel threatened and become defensive when their authority is questioned. Outsiders are inundated with masses of disorganized data that seem to defy simple WKWWK principles. We’ve already seen considerable revision of once-sacred dogma, and more is coming until American Numismatics can aspire to meaningful scientific understanding.
The future is to avoid repeating the rigidity of we-know-what-we-know and openly accept standards and definitions that allow orderly incorporation of new information.
Just an opinion.
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