Why Are Experts So Often Wrong?
The important distinction between knowing how to do something and knowing how to understand the information used to do something
First of all, I want to be very explicit about the intent of this article: it is not to pretend “we don’t need experts.” Only a moron or someone being intentionally duplicitous would make such a claim. Do you really want your appendix removed by someone who’s had precisely zero training and precisely zero prior experience? Or to have your heart medication formulated by someone who can’t even understand what chemical symbols mean?
The problem is not that we depend on experts in so many areas of our lives. The problem is that we use the word expert in the same vague way we use most of our words, and so because we haven’t defined it we get tangled up in mental errors. Language is inherently imprecise. Think of two sentences using the word love. “I love ice-cream” and “I love my children.” Same word, totally different meanings (I hope…. ).
So what do we mean when we say someone is an expert?
It means the person we’re talking about has mastered a skill or set of skills in a particular domain. For example, a mathematician is an expert at manipulating the language of mathematics, at least in some particular…
