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Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

commoncog.com

111–120 of 177 posts

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is this really the point of the article? The article argues that it is difficult to identify expertise. However, the situation you describe is one where (if I read you correctly) not your expertise was questioned but your recommendation. If there wasn’t any tangible difference between the CTO’s and your suggested course of action on a metric that he as a customer cared about, then maybe his proposal was indeed th…

I'm finding this entire line of discussion incredibly curious because not only does it confirm my original argument and the that of the article, but it hammers the point home. Everything you've just said is gibberish to a master. It's like making a straight-faced argument that setting the speed limit to 1 mph on a motorway might make perfect sense, and the traffic engineer is actually at fault for not making it clear…

> There's levels of expertise, and if two people are too far apart, meaningful communication between them becomes impossible.

You've disproved this yourself earlier in this comment. You made an analogy to explain a concept to a non-expert.

It is entirely on you to make yourself understood to non-experts. It is both possible and extremely important.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#112
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see zero problem with having no children and studying evolution. You don’t need to become superconductive to study the physics of superconductivity. You don’t need to become infected by every virus to study virology, and you definietly don’t need to be a virus to be a good virologist. So why would you need to pass on your genes to study evolution?

// So why would you need to pass on your genes to study evolution? You can study whatever you want, I am questioning if you can be considered "expert" if you profoundly fail at the topic of your field.

> I am questioning if you can be considered "expert" if you profoundly fail at the topic of your field.

You are confusing the person with the field of study.

This confusion is more obvious if you think about the superconductor/ expert on superconduction example.

A superconductor is a material which conducts direct current with near zero resistance. You can test if something is a superconductor by aligator clipping a voltage source on it and measuring the resistance.

An expert on superconductors is a person who is knowledgeable about the phenomenon of superconduction. You can test if someone is such an expert by asking them questions about what materials are superconducting, under what circumstances they are, what phenomena can be observed during super conducting and etc etc.

If you get confused and clip the aligator clips on the expert you will measure a larger than zero resistance. If you start asking quiz questions from a superconductive material about superconductivity you will observe that it does not answer any of them.

These two things are fundamentally different. You can be good at one while miserably failing the other, or vice versa.

Similarly someone who studies evolutionary biology is someone who studies the effect of evolution on different kind of living things. They are good at predicting things which they can prove later either experimentally, or with observations about creatures and their circumstances. It has nothing to do with the act of procreation. A disembodied AI can be an expert at evolutionary biology as long as it has good theories on the topic which it can support with relevant evidence.

Through two practical examples. Someone who is good at surviving at evolutionary timescales is for example a person with a handfull of healthy, and fit children. Each of them carrying a mutation which makes their female offspring (daughters, grand-daughters and so on) have a tiny bit wider hips thus increasing their chances of having uncomplicated births, thus increasing the chances of having lots of lots of offspring a tiny bit.

Someone who is good at studying evolutionary biology for example might be able to explain why animals trapped on an island all over the world seem to change in a way that their offspring becomes smaller in stature.

Mixing up these two is as silly as measuring the resistance of your superconductivity experts.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#113
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really does sound like you have difficulties with communicating your points that do not have to do with external factors, but with your actual skill at communicating. Experts manage to successfully argue fine points to laypersons all the time to non experts in every field. You are coming across as deflective.

He is not deflective. Your comments are rather dense. The orthodoxy of ‘changing frame’ and ‘putting it in a language they understand’ is layman drivel. It is not always possible to do so and it is overwhelmingly untractable if you eskew the fundamental reasons in a discussion with a non-expert that insists on technical justification and just doesn’t take your cookie-cutter time/money/competitive advantage talking po…

It's the job of an expert to communicate their understanding of the world in a way that motivates non experts to make the correct the decision. If an expert isn't successful in this, they need to improve their methods of communication. Everything else is an excuse.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#114

This is an extremely important article to read for professionals of all sorts, not just freelancers. It's an issue that I struggle with nearly daily. I can't convince customers to pay me what I'm worth, because they can't judge my true value. Meanwhile, they'll happily pay Deloitte or Accenture 3x as much as what I charge, and then take the misguided ramblings of a junior-sold-as-senior at face value, not knowing the…

Branding is real.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#115
post #87

This seems like a factor in Dunning-Krueger. Experts can see all the gradients in ability and will extrapolate how far they are from the top, but all novices know is how far they are from the bottom. If those distance estimates are biased, it’d lead to novices overestimating ability and experts underestimating

Dunning-Kruger is more of a statistical effect than a psychological one. The same graphs can be reproduced using random noise.

I really regret how hard of a hold the Dunning-Kruger report has had on our generation. Worse, it seems every reference trying to point out that it is, in fact, not saying what people think it says just reinforces folks believe that it says what they want it to say. :(

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the economist, he may have the best theories but it doesn't mean it's correct. He is likely saying his theories have too much uncertainties. In the case of the evolutionary biologist, successful procreation does not require any knowledge of biology. When it comes to planes, there is a high correlation between the quality of the plane and the quality of the design.

// successful procreation does not require any knowledge of biology. Maybe this is a good point. I would argue that a high school kid who knocks up his girlfriend has demonstrated a better intuitive grasp of biology than my PhD friend.

Your conflating understanding biology and performing biology is very odd.

A bacterium can perform cell division, but it can't explain it. The evolutionary biologist's job isn't to personally have sex, it's to explain what happens when many generations of organisms do so.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#117

This is why arguing with people from industry and reading a lot is very useful, because it allows you to build your nomenclature In software world such a word for me was "modeling" It no longer was "coding", "programming", I started modeling real world

But that's only for code that's painted using the mouse, not for code typed on the keyboard.

I'm curious what you mean? Code is very much a symbolic modeling of a problem domain.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#118
post #25

great article and well supported (loved the tennis example). i can't help but notice that Cedric (author of commoncog, and a friend) is accumulating a good body of work exploring knowledge and expertise acquisition. is this something that is generically applicable or are we reading convincing-sounding text generated by a very advanced human expertise language model? I guess the only way to know for sure is for Cedric…

great substack and podcast (love the guests you have on)

i can't help but notice that Swyx (author of latent space) is accumulating a body of work exploring LLMs and covering AI progress. is this something that is analysis by an expert or are we reading convincing-sounding text generated by a very advanced AI hype language model? I guess the only way to know for sure is for Swyx to train an LLM or do deep learning research and see the results?

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#119

Not directly related to the article but I had two amusing encounters with expertise recently. I sat next to an Econ professor (at an Ivy) on a flight. I told him I had worked at a hedge fund, and he was like "wow, I could never put myself in a situation where my living depended on my economic theories being right." A good friend of mine is a kinda-famous evolutionary biologist. He's in his mid-40s now, unmarried and…

> What's most interesting to me is that neither of these scenarios strike us as "super wrong.

I don't think they are wrong at all. That's what I would expect. In my experience, one of the marks of being an expert in a subject is being very aware of the limits of their knowledge and expertise in it.

Re: Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, your explanation resonates with what I think are the superficial reasons society is accepting of both of these cases. You have to think a little bit deeper to feel why this might be problematic. If the economist weighs the risk to not put too much stock in these theories (no pun intended actually), why does he not likewise hesitate to teach these theories to his students? Like "I don't believe 100% that this is…

The biologist example is, respectfully, ridiculous. Would you expect experts in criminal psychology to be serial killers?

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