The Death Of Expertise

The first (something considered trivial) is Parkinson's Law of Triviality, also known as the parable of the bike shed. I ran into this at Google in the Real Games debate. It's useless to get into the details, but this was an area where I was the expert, but because everyone thought "games are trivial" (mostly based on exposure to shitty games) there was an incredible amount of product-manager-style bikeshedding, with the actual experts aggressively pushed back. (Google may be a weird case. If a company thinks that engineering is Smart People Stuff and design, product management, and HR are Stupid People Stuff, what kind of product management is it going to get?)

The second and more dangerous case is the one where anxiety (especially involving children) comes into play. There's no good reason to think that vaccines cause autism, or are in any way more dangerous than not having them, but because the stakes are so high, people feel a need to "do something" and take charge, but often end up making bad decisions. I think the insanity around expensive, private pre-schools ($40k per year, from preschool to college) in Manhattan and San Francisco is the same thing. It seems like a wasteful expense, and expectancy-wise it probably is, but when you consider the extreme stakes and what happens to people without connections, it's easy to see why people incinerate so much money on the hoity-toity private schools (most of which aren't even that good).

People resent taking their car in for maintenance only to be told that they need to pay $110/hour to fix a problem or two and it will cost them several hundred dollars at the end. The reset that The Expert (a man covered in oil and grease stains who probably hasn't even attained the same level of formal education as them) is charging so much money as well.

People often resent plumbers, electricians, computer technicians, etc, etc ... anyone they have to pay three figures an hour to help them do something they are so dependent on, many times citing that the work they do isn't complex or difficult and that their annual salary divided by the hours they work per year works out to nowhere close to these workers' rates.

This resentment often falls into one of two categories, either "I don't know how to do this myself" (which is the lack of expertise) or "I don't want to do this so I'll hire someone" (which often is associated with the "this work is beneath me, I can't believe these people charge this, I guess I'll have to pay" idea).

When you say that you resent this experience with your optometrist, is it the first type of resentment, the "I don't know how to get to the right prescription strength myself" idea?

I think a lot of this stems from gross oversimplifications of other fields. For example, you wear contact lenses to correct your vision. But there's more than just near-sightedness here. Do you have astigmatism and if you did would you consider toric lenses? How's the shape and fit of your current lens, maybe that needs to be adjusted? Keratitis because you sleep with them in too much? Any signs of glaucoma? There should be a whole host of things checked, not simply just bumping the strength another notch.

This same oversimplification happens with technology so often. I'm sure everyone here has plenty of anecdotes of "hey, my son showed me his WordsPass blog yesterday and it got me thinking how much easier it is to get a web presence these days, you work in web development, do you think you could show me how to make an online store for my business next weekend?". PCI compliance, merchant solutions, inventory software integration, SSL certificates, redundancy and backups, custom shopping cart workflows, search engine optimization, etc, etc never enter their mind. They think you can whip something together after the BBQ on Saturday. "Hey, my computer is acted funny, I get this message that I need to send some guy bitcoins to get my files back, could you just uninstall that for me?"

I tried explaining to a lawyer once why his company was migrating from WinXP to Win7. He didn't believe me that a software company wouldn't support a product for at least 20 years. He said it would be like buying a car and then ten years later not being able to get any parts. (!) Then he didn't believe me that Windows had millions of lines of code and that it needed to be extremely precise, that if I were to edit the code and type in a few random characters in a few random places, it's possible that large portions would completely stop working. "You see, Brian, this is why computers will never work out, there's got to be something wrong if it takes millions of fragile lines to do this!" as he gestures at his monitor with a few icons on the desktop.

Here's a lawyer, An Expert, whose field has chosen to artificially limit the number of experts (because there's too many of them), who resents the computer on his desk, Bill Gates, An Expert who has personally wronged him thanks to any and every incarnation of Windows, his company's system administrators (Experts) and tech support (Experts) and anyone else associated with the machine.

Yet, despite the resentment, the attorney hasn't switched back to a typewriter or a stack of reference books. Similarly, I'm assuming you still, despite the resentment, let The Expert tell you exactly what type of contact lenses you need.

> What I love about computer programming is that basically all you need to be an expert on something is time, persistence, and an Internet connection. Contrary to the author's claims, the alternative to institutionalized expertise is not that "Everyone is an expert". It's that "You don't have to go to a prestigious university to become an expert". Sure, there are a lot of charlatans running around in the programming world, but the free exchange of knowledge and the absence of licensure has led to both a flowering of human creativity as well as (outside of San Francisco) non-resentful relationships between experts and laypeople.

The problems is charlatans do harm. A charlatan doctor will kill people. A charlatan optometrist will have you going through life blurry (and possibly killing people as you drive on a sidewalk instead of a street). A charlatan IT person can "do no harm"?

healthcare.gov [0]

Target [1]

Patriot Missles [2]

Therac-25 [3]

Starbucks [4]

So we're back to the issue of how do we prove not just competence but excellence in a field? I get why academia has their method and the trades have their method. I'm not sure I have better systems to replace these. But I disagree with the idea that just letting some programmers/IT people take their best shot at things is an OK thing.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare.gov#Launch_and_techn...

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/target-hack/

[2] http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-05-20/news/1991140090_...

[3] http://www.ccnr.org/fatal_dose.html

[4] http://mashable.com/2014/01/16/starbucks-mobile-passwords-pl...

Or any general history text from say the last few hundred years.

There was also a lot of opposition to translating the Bible into vulgar language as opposed to having a Latin speaking elite interpret it for the peasants and yeomen