The Dark Side of Expertise

Yeah, that's difficult. The only answer I've found is experience. Gaining experience for yourself is painful because it's slow, and part of the experience is consequences of your mistakes: in fields like fire-fighting (or rock climbing, which I love) your mistakes can literally kill you. So hopefully you learn form other people's experience and mistakes as much as possible.

> With the firefighters, there's a pretty easy proximal explanation, which again is not their expertise misleading them: panic.

Exactly, plus while his idea was fascinating, its understandable that the others didnt follow suit; he essentially invented the idea:

> Similar types of escape fires had been used by the plains Indians to escape the fast-moving, brief duration grass fires of the plains, and the method had been written about by James Fenimore Cooper (1827) in The Prairie, but in this case Foreman Dodge appears to have invented it on the spot, as the only means available to him to save his crew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Gulch_fire

or experience can create a bias where you know you are right even when the evidence says otherwise.

Age usually humbles people by them experiencing this often enough they tend to check things... if they mature properly

>I feel like the "dropping your equipment" is a part of this. You need to know the right tool for the right job, and sometimes doing the same thing for years might lead you down the wrong path.

This happened at my last job. The company I worked for hadn't really changed their methods for about 7 years. Jobs went slow, we worked ridiculous amounts of overtime and mistakes were a regular part of the job. Over the years I worked there, I went through everything, replaced a few processes, convinced the owner to get newer more efficent tools and in the end, cut down the amount of overtime we worked to almost nothing, reduced actual human operater times on our machines from about 2-3 hours per run to 20 minutes, and reduced mistakes and error from once a week or so to once in a blue moon.

The thing is, I didn't do anything amazing or groundbreaking, they could have been operating that way for longer, they'd just found something that had worked and never bothered to try and improve their system. I was left alone for a few years and given free reign to do pretty much whatever I wanted, I got sick of being overworked, so I started figuring out and changing whatever I could to make things quicker, easier and better and it really didn't take much in the end to make a drastic improvement.

The civic center arena roof collapse is similar to the FIU pedestrian bridge collapse in that the engineers trusted their calculations over physical evidence of imminent failure:

> At 9 a.m. on March 15, a university employee heard a loud "whip cracking" sound while under the bridge span, waiting for a red traffic light. At the same time, the design-build team met for about two hours at the construction site to discuss the cracks discovered on March 13. Representatives from both FIU and FDOT were present. The FIGG lead engineer's conclusions were that the structural integrity of the bridge was not compromised and that there were no safety concerns raised by the presence of the crack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...

Fortunately for NYC, when William LeMessurier received a phone call about Citicorp Center from a student, he went back and re-ran some calculations and realized that quartering winds would put his building under more stress than he originally realized. But no harm, that would be handled by the extra safety factor built into his calculations. Unless it turned out other changes had been made during construction he wasn't originally aware of. Well, I won't give away the whole story:

http://people.duke.edu/~hpgavin/cee421/citicorp1.htm

http://www.engineersjournal.ie/2015/12/08/citicorp-centre-to...