The Dark Side of Expertise
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The Dark Side of Expertise
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Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#2I don't buy this headline at all, the author does not prove there are actual experts behind this story at all...
The primary story used here is that a sagging arena roof was consistently deemed safe by "engineers" (no proof of expertise provided) based upon their calculations...and this is somehow a "dark side" of expertise? It reads much more like ineptitude; that'd be like any coder here constantly ignoring terrible performance and numerous bugs and claiming their architecture is just fine.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#3I am super surprised to see this on LWN. But it was a fascinating read.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#4This was pretty ramble-y and pulled in some pretty unrelated examples.
* We never get a clear answer for why the Civic Center Engineers got the inputs wrong, so we can't conclude that it was because of their expertise.
* With the firefighters, there's a pretty easy proximal explanation, which again is not their expertise misleading them: panic. If anything, the solution to the problem shows that expertise was the solution to the problem, not the cause of it: by adding running without packs to their expertise in a concrete way, they were able to override panic.
* With the priming examples, I can see how this might be related, but the only example which actually involves expertise leading them astray is the baseball example. But this priming research, contrary to what's claimed in the article, isn't reproduce-able. And even if it were, these sorts of lateral thinking exercises have pretty limited applicability: detectives or theoretical physicists use a high degree of lateral thinking, but many careers don't, and I didn't get those examples from the article, I had to come up with them myself: that hardly speaks to this being an insightful article. And ultimately, it's unclear whether expertise leads detectives or theoretical physicists astray: surely part of gaining expertise in a field that requires a lot of lateral thinking involves building the skill of putting aside preconceptions. Again, I don't think we can conclude that expertise is the problem: it may be the solution.
Overall, this topic could be interesting, but this isn't an insightful article on it.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#5I was glad to see that the comments on the webpage provided a link (https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...) to a summary of how priming research has been cast into doubt in recent years. Any talk, article, or premise that uses priming experiments to explain something, is a red flag for me. I'm not saying none of it really works, but I am saying that it is clear that something more complex is going on than we think, and many of the priming experiments, at a minimum, have been misinterpreted (and in some cases are just totally unreplicable).
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#6TBH, if you gave me the list "dark," "shot," and "sun" I'm not sure I'd ever think of "glasses" as a word that went with all three, since I still don't really know what dark glasses are. I guess like dark sunglasses? Or maybe they mean "through a glass darkly"? Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems like it was poorly selected.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#7I don't buy this headline at all, the author does not prove there are actual experts behind this story at all... The primary story used here is that a sagging arena roof was consistently deemed safe by "engineers" (no proof of expertise provided) based upon their calculations...and this is somehow a "dark side" of expertise? It reads much more like ineptitude; that'd be like any coder here constantly ignoring terribl…
There's also an unexplained leap from "the calculations are correct" to "we should proceed as planned even though it's sagging when it shouldn't".
Even if the engineers were infinitely arrogant and assumed nothing could possibly be wrong with the design, you'd expect them to react by saying "you must be building it wrong or using substandard materials", or something.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#8TBH, if you gave me the list "dark," "shot," and "sun" I'm not sure I'd ever think of "glasses" as a word that went with all three, since I still don't really know what dark glasses are. I guess like dark sunglasses? Or maybe they mean "through a glass darkly"? Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems like it was poorly selected.
> Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems like it was poorly selected.
Except maybe it's not even a real effect: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#9TBH, if you gave me the list "dark," "shot," and "sun" I'm not sure I'd ever think of "glasses" as a word that went with all three, since I still don't really know what dark glasses are. I guess like dark sunglasses? Or maybe they mean "through a glass darkly"? Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems like it was poorly selected.
> Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems like it was poorly selected. Except maybe it's not even a real effect: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
Interesting! Thanks.
Re: The Dark Side of Expertise
#10I don't buy this headline at all, the author does not prove there are actual experts behind this story at all... The primary story used here is that a sagging arena roof was consistently deemed safe by "engineers" (no proof of expertise provided) based upon their calculations...and this is somehow a "dark side" of expertise? It reads much more like ineptitude; that'd be like any coder here constantly ignoring terribl…
There's also an unexplained leap from "the calculations are correct" to "we should proceed as planned even though it's sagging when it shouldn't". Even if the engineers were infinitely arrogant and assumed nothing could possibly be wrong with the design, you'd expect them to react by saying "you must be building it wrong or using substandard materials", or something.
This is the same annoying problem I found with Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. He draws this conclusion that we can trust our first impressions, but it's really unclear how he comes to that conclusion: some of his evidence comes to no conclusion, and some of it directly contradicts that conclusion.