The Death Of Expertise

The problem with this article is that the author's field is full of experts who have wildly different opinions. There is no way to appeal to expertise in this situation. For example, he says

> The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself. Yes, I said “Western civilization”: that paternalistic, racist, ethnocentric approach to knowledge that created the nuclear bomb, the Edsel, and New Coke, but which also keeps diabetics alive, lands mammoth airliners in the dark, and writes documents like the Charter of the United Nations.

But there are many experts in sociology who would ask us precisely to reject science, rationality and Western Civilization.

I think a far better approach is to educate all people better, so they are able to properly appreciate the knowledge of experts because they understand the field. One aspect of this would be teaching a lot more statistics, although the classical fields of debate and critical reasoning are also important.

Another problem is that many people, especially academics, think it is more important to push a particular agenda, than to make the public more informed in general. Hence people who want to promote gay rights, for example, don't want people to know that the probability getting AIDS from heterosexual intercourse with a White woman is extremely low. But in order to do this, they have to actively lower people's understanding of probability and statistics. They have to teach people to ignore their (admittedly imperfect) intuition about conditional probability.

You notice it's rarely the physics professors, or the (good) programming teachers, or the medical profs going, 'Our students don't respect our expertise any more'?

Expertise needs to grant you a visible advantage in some way, or of course people aren't going to respect it. You can respect experts with computers very easily, they can do things you can't, or they can do things you can much more easily.

Expertise in other areas is similar. Trained doctors produce measurably better outcomes than laymen and the system in which they're trained is trustable enough, and the systems they practice in are generally well designed enough, that it's pretty common wisdom to trust doctors. Of course not everyone does, but then again people have believed in crap like homeopathy for a long time, that's nothing new.

Experts in philosophy? Social science? English? That's a lot harder to measure, and to then be sure that you've got someone who's a well-vetted member of the expert group, rather than someone with a degree who's spamming noise is harder still. Not that I'm saying that they are, just that the visible manifestations of their expertise are very hard for the average person to see in some areas.

And let's face it, as students - by and large - aren't expected to do particularly hard things any more in most subject areas, that provides less and less opportunity for the expert to demonstrate their skill even when someone has the rare opportunity of interacting with them.

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> Once upon a time — way back in the Dark Ages before the 2000s — people seemed to understand, in a general way, the difference between experts and laymen. There was a clear demarcation in political food fights, as objections and dissent among experts came from their peers — that is, from people equipped with similar knowledge. The public, largely, were spectators.

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And thus you can't say either way whether they respected you enough to change their opinion, at least not based solely on that observation. Their thoughts simply weren't on display.

This recalls a recent article that made the rounds of various news sites: A 1929 book perfectly captures the distrust of authority, the distrust of elites we so clearly see in our modern, digital society.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/05/the-smartes...

As someone who studied economics I believed I had well thought out positions before studying and wasn't sure how my opinions were going to change. It turned out all my theories were worthless compared to the combined knowledge of the field and the genius observations over the centuries. So your example of not needing economists is unconvincing. We do need to check up on them frequently though and no one should get a free pass.

Interesting comments. I was surprised to see so much dissension.

I'm in agreement with the author on the idea that expertise has been cheapened by our culture.

I like to use the term "mastery" over "expertise" because I think the concept of mastery better embodies what a true expert brings to the table.

To me, a true expert (master) is someone who has deep knowledge in a given domain (or set of related domains).

You can't fake mastery. Mastery is, in part, the ability to produce consistent, high-quality results over time.

Anyone can get lucky once, or even a few times, but a master can deliver superior results more consistently than anyone else in that domain.

The issue now, as I see it, is what the author calls entitlement. I would add to that, impatience.

People want to be masters (experts) now, not later. We want to hack our educations and get results faster than the 1000's of people who came before us.

In the process of our impatience and unwillingness to submit to the rigors of craft, we, instead, settle for the illusion of expertise.

It's strange to me that people think a deep level of knowledge can come from anything other than a lifetime of hard work and dedication to a given subject.

Yet, we still kid ourselves into thinking that being the next Picasso, Sergey Brin, or Yo Yo Ma is just a matter of reading a few books and blogs.

An expert spends a lifetime learning a few things deeply. A dilettante knows a little about a lot.