"[N]ew experts had to earn their place at the top of the knowledge pyramid by gaining a reputation among their peers. To become an authority, with all the privileges thereof, it was not enough to be learned; one was expected to have contributed to the body of knowledge."~ Joel Mokyr, from his 2017 book A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
Friday, 27 October 2023
How do you define an "expert"?
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3 comments:
I'll link whore my 2022 post on this subject if you don't mind, because I can't be buggered writing it all again in a blog comment, The suicide of expertise:
-The Vietnam war and “The Best and The Brightest”.
- The War on Poverty (still being lost the last I heard).
- Government nutritional advice from the 1960s on.
- Failing to foresee the fall of the USSR.
- Failing to foresee the rise in Islamic extremism.
- Iraq and other “democracy building” projects gone awry. (2022 added Afghanistan to that ilist)
- The Housing and Subprime mortgage bubbles of the 2000’s, leading to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008; a failure in both forecasting and handling.
To me an expert has always been someone who thoroughly understood his subject via the repeated, practical application of his intellectual understanding, with constant learning and tinkering with the intellectual side to improve the application.
I don't see that in a lot of "experts". Nassim Taleb (of Black Swan fame) says this:
“With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
"... entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
No, I don't think we're quite there yet --- down that path lies only madness.
Instead, best to seek out those in each field who DID foresee, foretell, and explain the GFC, the subprime bubble, the problems with coerced 'democracy building,' the rise in Islamic extremism, the fall of the USST, etc, and to pay THEM the proper attention they deserve, rather than pay any heed at all to those random numpties and academic empty-heads paid to pop up on TV screens to spout nonsense.
I'd define an expert as possessing these traits:
1. Sufficient detailed knowledge of the concrete facts in a particular field.
2. You keep up with new developments in your field (i.e. if your knowledge is static it becomes outdated and you gradually lose your expert status)
3. You don't possess an ideology that stops you coming to the right conclusions (i.e. you remain objective).
Note I stated the last point negatively. I didn't say you need the right ideology. Any idealogy, even a good idealogy such as libertarianism or a good philosophy such as Objectivism more often gets in the way of expert status in my experience. That's because people start coming to conclusions based on what their ideology tells them should be happening, without sufficient knowledge of concretes and what actually is happening. It doesn't have to be that that way, but in most cases it is.
That's why there's lots of genuine experts in the physical sciences and business world, but very few in the social sciences. The former are less ideological.
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