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The Dark Side of Expertise

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Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#11

Post by quindecagon »

kerkeslager wrote: post #4

This 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 sol…

Re point 1:

> This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned out that the computer worked fine, but it was given the wrong inputs. There was an emotional investment that the engineers had made in the new technology, so it was inconceivable to them that it could be giving them the wrong answers.

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#12

Post by pm215 »

nemo wrote: post #6

TBH, 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.

Well, it depends whether you happen to have that idiom in your personal dialect or not. The most high-profile use of it I happen to know of is from the 80s hit "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades", which starts out "I study nuclear science / I love my classes / I got a crazy teacher, he wears dark glasses"...

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#14

Post by kerkeslager »

quindecagon wrote: post #11
kerkeslager wrote: post #4

This 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 sol…

Re point 1: > This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned out that the computer worked fine, bu…

Yes but we don't ever find out why they got the inputs wrong.

Does this sound like expertise to you?

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#15

Post by JackFr »

Priming with respect to the Florida effect is a famously not replicable result. It's not a real effect. I'm more sympathetic to the word game example, yet it's not obvious how that translates to anything beyond.

With respect to the Hartford Civic Center, as always, it's a little more complicated than that. Yes the architects stood by their calculations, but this was more of a process issue than hubris. Despite the new techniques used, the plans were subject to peer review. Additionally the construction was not fully according to plan. Weaker struts were actually used than called for in the design, and that's on the construction manager rather than the architect.

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#16

Post by mjw1007 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
quindecagon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re point 1: > This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned out that the computer worked fine, bu…

Yes but we don't ever find out why they got the inputs wrong. Does this sound like expertise to you?

I think "wrong inputs" here is an odd way of saying that the model was bad (presumably to distinguish that problem from outright bugs in the design software or computer hardware failure).

https://eng-resources.uncc.edu/failurecasestudies/building-f...

says

« The roof design was extremely susceptible to buckling which was a mode of failure not considered by in that particular computer analysis and, therefore, left undiscovered. »

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#17

Post by jkingsbery »

> They then told the students to go up the hallway to a different room where there would be another test. What the students didn't know was that the test was actually in the hallway; the time it took each participant to walk down the hall was measured. It turned out that the students who had been exposed to the "elderly words" walked more slowly down the hall. Attendees might be inclined to call that "absolute crap", Brady suggested, but it is not, it is repeatable and even has a name, "the Florida effect", because Florida was used as one of the words associated with the elderly.

I haven't ready widely on this, but from what little I have, most attempts at reproducing this and other priming experiments have failed.

(see, e.g., https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-..., https://replicationindex.com/category/priming/ and https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/reproducibility-crisis...)

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#18

Post by kerkeslager »

mjw1007 wrote: post #16
kerkeslager wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but we don't ever find out why they got the inputs wrong. Does this sound like expertise to you?

I think "wrong inputs" here is an odd way of saying that the model was bad (presumably to distinguish that problem from outright bugs in the design software or computer hardware failure). https://eng-resources.uncc.edu/failurecasestudies/building-f... says « The roof design was extremely susceptible to buckling which was a mode of failure not considered by in that particular computer analysis and, therefore, left und…

Okay but again: was this failure because their expertise misled them?

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#19

Post by phkahler »

kerkeslager wrote: post #14
quindecagon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re point 1: > This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned out that the computer worked fine, bu…

Yes but we don't ever find out why they got the inputs wrong. Does this sound like expertise to you?

They ignored the actual fact that it was sagging more than predicted and insisted the calculations were right. That might be ok, but someone allowed the project to proceed without explaining the contradiction. Real observations were dismissed in favor of believing in the expertise.

Re: The Dark Side of Expertise

#20

Post by lonelappde »

This is a write-up of a pseudoscience gobbledygook just-so stories that don't do justice to the complexities of the catastrophes they draw trite morals from.

Here's a more thoughtful write up of the Civic center collapse, attributed largely to a large project with diffusion of responsibility and no one empowered the fix the problems they were held responsible for. https://eng-resources.uncc.edu/failurecasestudies/building-f...

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