Kevin Tumlinson's Blog

How to Have (and resolve) an Existential Crisis in One Weekend

Over the weekend I went to Austin for the 2015 Sterling & Stone Colony Summit. I got to hang out with not only Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant of the Self Publishing Podcast, but also around 25 brilliant, talented, amazing up-and-comers in the indie publishing world. Everyone in that room is going to do something huge with their career—I was honored to be a part of it.

One the most powerful things to come out of the summit was the chance for each of us to do a hot seat—a 15-minute session during which we can ask a question we're desperately seeking to answer, and get the benefit of being showered with wisdom from everyone in the room. My own 15-minute session was a trigger for all sorts of rethinking and reassessing. Being in that spotlight forced me to think about what I've been working toward over the past several months, in light of the goals I have for my entire career. And something didn't match up.

Here's what I know: I love helping people. I love talking to people and sharing what I know—about building authority, about getting better at writing, about using it to build and grow a business or career, about creating strategies and systems to make your work easier and your life better. I love that. But I love writing fiction more.

The realization I had, as I asked questions and got feedback and advice, was that I have fallen back into the same rut I always fall into—I started treating the writing I love like it was some sort of childish fantasy that couldn't possibly be real work. 

If I love it, if it's fun, if it makes me feel amazing, then it can't possibly be work, right? 

And if it isn't work, then when I do it I'm a slacker. I'm a failure. I'm a fraud.

I realized—as I sat in that chair and made myself vulnerable, as I opened myself up to the scrutiny of the room—that I have been hugely disrespectful to the work I love. And I've been rowing my boat against the stream, under the assumption that anything anything that comes easily and causes me to be happy and excited has to be the wrong direction. If I'm not struggling, then I'm not doing it right.

I also realized that I actually do love helping people build authority through writing, and helping them develop a daily writing habit. I love talking to people about their lives and their businesses. I love connecting with other entrepreneurs, and I love having something of value to offer them. 

I love the Wordslinger Podcast, too. Love it. I wouldn't stop doing that for anything. It's my chance to connect with people who have fascinating lives and who are doing brilliant things. I get to learn from people who are doing work that is connected to their passion. I grow from that. And I get to share it with people every week, which makes me feel amazing. I can help people by exploring one of my passions. Who wouldn't love that?

What I realized in 15 minutes

So in 15 minutes (and three days of chatting and connecting and learning), I came to some pretty big conclusions about my life and career.

I realized that writing fiction is my passion, and I've been putting that on the back burner while I build an entirely different business.

I realized that I love helping people for the sake of helping them. I have no objections to or compunctions about making a profit from things that help other people, but my passion isn't in building a business solely around that work. That's something that evolves out of my own journey of discovery and growth. It isn't the reason I get out of bed in the morning—it's just a sided of effect of my "why." 

I realized that it's the writer in me that makes me kind of "all over the place." Reading my resume is like reading a list of random job board postings. I've been all over the map. And the reason is that I have a passion for stories, for learning new things, and for expressing what I've learned. I've spent a lifetime misinterpreting that passion as "I do this now," rather than seeing it for what it really is. So, as a consequence, I've spent a lifetime making a career out of redefining my career. 

The truth is, I did a huge disservice to my passion by being ashamed of it. And that has to stop.

So right now, my very public promise and commitment to you is this: 

I will treat my passion with respect, and I will commit to building a career around writing and telling stories that matter to me and to my readers.

I will continue to help people who need encouragement, guidance, and advice for using writing to build and grow their business, and to fulfill their own dreams of writing full time. And I'll do it by creating tools and resources, courses and webinars, books and blog posts, podcasts and anything else I can think of that will bring real value to my audience—with one caveat.

I'll do all of that only if, and as long as, it aligns with my passion and my goals. 

I'll do it out of love, or I won't do it at all.

So what does this mean for you?

You're amazing. And you're wonderful. Because you've been a part of this journey of mine as I figure things out and work out my own kinks and my own issues. And I'm not going to leave you to just wander in the wilderness. 

My commitment to you is that I will continue to do all of the above, and I will continue to grow in my own career and my own passions, so that I have even more to share with you. 

My commitment is that I will pursue my passion and learn as much as I can, and then share it with you with all the enthusiasm I have.

I commit to you that I will go live as amazing a life as I possibly can so I can show and tell you how to do the same.

That's the best I can offer. It's all I've got.

I'm going to write fiction, and I'm going to write non-fiction. So this blog, the podcast, the stuff I do in every corner of the internet—it's going to change just a bit. You're going to see more fiction-related stuff here in the blog, for starters, as well as the continued exploration of authority and expertise, writing and publishing, and anything else that I find fascinating and inspiring and feel driven to share.

The content I produce going forward has inspiration and growth and passion as it's unifying and underlying ideas. It may seem disjointed for a while, as I figure things out. But I promise you, it's connected. It's all part of one big story. My story. Our story.

So expect some hiccups.

Introducing TumThack

I'm working with Nick Thacker to build a business around the non-fiction stuff. TumThack (see what we did there?) will eventually be the place where all of the non-fiction career and entrepreneur stuff will go. This site, including the blog, will be more about my own passions. There will be overlap, for sure. But I wanted to give people a clear path to the type of content they really want or need, so they can choose their own path.

The Wordslinger Podcast will stick around here for now, but eventually I want it to have its own unique presence on the web as well. I'll always have a link to it here on the site, as well as on the TumThack site. So you'll always be able to find it and be inspired, informed, and entertained. 

And if you happen to love my fiction, you are so in luck. Because as a direct result of the 2015 Colony Summit, I am pulling out all the stops on that passion, and the results will be amazing.

Coming up—

Here are just a few things you can expect to see over the next three to five months:

Optimized book covers—Every cover in my library is getting an overhaul.  The aim is to make them more attractive, noticeable, and magnetic when they appear on the various book sites. I also want all of my books to have the same feel. You should know at a glance that you're reading a Kevin Tumlinson book.Optimized pitches—With the new covers, I want to make sure I have the pitches perfect. So I'm taking a page from Libbie Hawker's book Gotta Read It! and approaching all of my book pitches with an eye toward story structure. More fiction—I took a bit of a hiatus on writing fiction since January, and I regret it. But I'm making up for lost time by committing to churning out a daily word count for fiction again. Evergreen is ready for an edit, and I've started a new serialized story that I'll fully announce later. And, of course, there will be more Sawyer Jackson. All of these new books will benefit from the optimization strategies I'm putting in place.TumThack—I mentioned this already, but Nick Thacker and I are putting wheels on the road for this in a big way. Look for the first stirrings of it within a week or so. The website is in progress, the autoresponders are mostly written, and a list of other must-dos has already been generated. For those of you who want to write—either for a living or as part of your career building—you are going to want to tune in for this. You won't believe the stuff that's coming.Watch this Space

Those are the basics. And they all mean big commitments from me to you. 

Look for this space to become more dynamic as I grow into this. The site will become more focused on my fiction and storytelling. The podcast will stay the same format but will grow into its own brand. And TumThack will forge a new path for the entrepreneur and create all kinds of goodness. 

I'm excited about this, and I hope you are too. It's going to mean a lot more value for you, in the end. It's going to open a way for both of us to explore our passions and fuel each other to success. I can't freaking wait.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and David Wright (in absentia) for what they pulled together. Thanks also to their team at Sterling & Stone, including Amy Schubert, Monica Leonelle, and Garrett Robinson.

All of you—amazing. I'm incredibly grateful for the minor existential crisis you triggered in me, and I can't thank you enough. 

I'd also like to thank someone who wasn't actually at the summit, but still helped me out by talking me off the ledge! Francesca Hogi, one of my all-time favorite people, listened to me work through all of this and helped me breathe again. Thanks Franny. You're amazing. 

Now ... let's get started. Go. Write. Now. 

The Authority Formula (Questioning Authority Pt 10)

NOTE: This post is Part 10 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

I was busy with something else when the alert popped up. Twitter was letting me know that someone had tagged me in a post.

This happens. Not as much as I might like, but frequently enough that I no longer get excited enough that there's any wet-the-pants danger. I have grown as a human.

Still, I like getting Twitter love, so I switched over to see who had said what. What I saw was this message:

@kevintumlinson Chck out Where There's Smoke @ http://t.co/eDOoWKI3zH Influences #ThisAmericanLife #Radiolab #TheDailyShow Try 10 mins & see

— Brett Milan Gajda (@BrettGajda) March 15, 2015

Not unusual. I get people sending me links like these all the time. The references to This American Life, Radiolab, and the Daily Show were interesting, but ... meh. Anyone can say anything online. Personally, since I own a rare zebra unicorn with the power to travel through time, I take everything with a grain of salt. 

But then Brett Gajda—the purveyor of this tweet as well as the writer and host of the Where There's Smoke podcast—posted this:

@kevintumlinson I can neither confirm nor deny if I was wearing pants during the recording of these shows

— Brett Milan Gajda (@BrettGajda) March 15, 2015

And that got my attention. 

For non-pants-related reasons. 

Credibility Takes the Win

The first tweet might have gotten caught in my "mental spam filter," never to be paid attention to and never to be acted upon. But the second tweet did something completely unexpected—it connected with me on a personal level.

Because Brett hadn't just flung some self promotion my way, hoping it would stick and have an impact. He actually took some time—30 seconds, maybe—to look at my profile and find something to actually connect to. He found my little quip about pantslessness—the mightiest of -neses—and took the time to acknowledge it. He got through my mental spam filter by establishing some personal credibility with me.

Credibility is a crucial component of authority and expertise. It's "the quality of being trusted or believed in. The quality of being convincing or believable." Without credibility, an expert can't establish attributed authority. 

They might have autonomous authority—intrinsic expertise that doesn't require any outside validation. But good luck convincing anyone that you know what you're talking about if your credibility has gone through a food processor. Just ask Sir Roy Meadow.

In the case of Brett Gajda, he and his partner Nick Jaworksi have worked hard and used their expertise to create a podcast that is absolutely fantastic. I know, because I've listened to every single episode. I gave it that 10-minute shot that Brett asked for because he demonstrated his willingness to give me a shot, too—he spent at least a small bit of time finding some tiny, personal bit of information about me. Essentially, he established himself as an authority by being authentic and actually taking some initiative.

I was so impressed and so thrilled I had Brett and Nick on my podcast a week later. 

How to Build Authority in 3 Easy Steps

We've talked a lot about what authority is, but we haven't said much about how to build it. But my tweeting and podcasting love fest with Brett Gajda provides the first clue. 

Authority builds off of expertise, but it's credibility that stands as the difference between autonomous and attributed authority. If you want someone other than your university to think of you as knowledgable on a topic, you're going to need someone to give you the nod.

Building authority has three primary steps—

ESTABLISH YOUR EXPERTISE

“It’s not rocket surgery.”

— Someone Brilliant

To be considered an authority in a given field,  you need to establish your expertise in that field. That seems simple enough, right?

It is, actually. Because becoming an expert on any subject is a task of focus. You determine something that you're interested in enough that you want to know everything about it. And in the pursuit of that everything, you eventually surpass common knowledge, which puts you firmly in "expert" territory. You know more about a subject relative to others. You have a deeper knowledge than the average person. That's the very definition of "expert."

Spend time digging in deep in your field of expertise. Take courses, read books, talk to other experts and ask lots of questions. Remember, you don't have to know everything about a subject to be an expert—you only have to know more than your audience.

But expertise is a spectrum, and you want to continuously move along that spectrum. Your goal, as a growing expert, is to continuously expand your expertise. Commit to a regimen of continued education and learning, even if it's self-guided. Investigate, research, and study everything you can about your subject, so that you have lots of insight and information to share with your audience.

BUILD YOUR CREDIBILITY

“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”

— Peter Bergman

Credibility is a funny thing. It's absolutely essential to establishing authority with an audience. But it may not take much effort to build.

Remember those Vick's commercials from the 80s? 

Peter Bergman played Dr. Cliff Warner on "All My Children." He was a good looking guy who wore a white lab coat every day, and had a stethoscope around his neck most of the time. He was not a doctor. He was an actor. But to millions of Americans, he had enough credibility to convince them to buy Vick's Adult Formula cough medicine when they had a cold. 

Bergman even announced up front—within the first five seconds of the commercial—that he was not a doctor. And yet, everything he said from that point forward was considered sage advice by the audience. If anything, being upfront about the fact that he wasn't a doctor—just an actor who played one on TV—actually gave him more credibility with his audience. Who, in turn, granted him more authority on the topic.

In this case, Bergman's "expertise" could have been considered questionable. He was not an expert on colds or cough medication. But he was an expert on playing a doctor on TV, and that was all it took.

Build your credibility starts with being honest with people. 

You could easily build credibility around a series of lies. It happens all the time. But one slip—one inadvertent admission or one discovered truth—and your credibility goes away forever. So does your authority. So building the sort of relationship with your audience that leads to increased authority starts with establishing a proper baseline. Build your credibility early by admitting what you don't know, or what credentials you don't have, as much as promoting the knowledge and expertise you do possess.

In other words, establish an honest and open relationship with your audience. Relationships are the key to success.

ADD VALUE TO SOMEONE'S LIFE

“For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

— Steve Jobs

The thing about being an authority is that it doesn't happen in a vacuum. Without recognition and trust from others, you can be the foremost expert in a field, but your impact is severely limited. 

Your aim, as an authority, should always be to add value to someone's life. The work you do needs to have a purpose in order to keep it moving, and there's no better purpose than helping others to succeed and grow and be healthy, happy, and wise.

Authorities stay authorities by adding value in the form of producing something.

Carpenters build furniture. Authors write books. Filmmakers make films. Coaches create programs that help their clients. Without the audience, authority is non-existent. Without adding value, the authority isn't actually an authority. So keep producing.

My favorite means of producing authority is writing (obviously). I coach clients to be better writers—to develop a daily writing habit, to blog more, to write a book. Writing is the most powerful tool we have for establishing and nurturing authority because it is tangible proof of our expertise. It can be parsed and analyzed and shared. Writing stands as evidence that we know what we're talking about.

My recommendation to anyone attempting to establish authority in their given expertise is to develop a daily writing habit. If you're having trouble with that, or feeling anxiety over it, I'd be happy to help. I even offer a free 15-minute discovery session, during which we can figure out whether I can help you, or if you'd be better off trying something else. Set up a time to chat with me, and we'll run from there. 

The Authority Formula: A = E + C

Authority (A) is the result we're after, and it's built from Expertise (E)  and—possibly more important—Credibility (C). That's a formula that's simple enough for anyone to follow.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the only way to be an authority is to have a PhD on a topic, or to have the recognition of millions. Authority is bestowed by the audience, and they do so as a result of your credibility. Focus on establishing relationships and providing as much value as possible, and the mechanism of authority will be self-correcting. Your expertise will grow as you realize that "providing value" has "increasing expertise" as its cost. Your credibility will increase as you deliver that value to your audience. 

Everybody wins.

Ignorance On a Sliding Scale (Questioning Authority Pt. 9)

NOTE: This post is Part 9 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

We've spent a lot of time looking at experts, but it might help to look in the other direction for a while. What does it mean to be a novice? 

Actually, that's the wrong question, because it immediately sets up a novice as being the opposite of an expert—as if the two are diametrically opposed. But the truth is, the term "novice" is just as subjective and relative as the term "expert." These two terms aren't the extreme left and right of the spectrum of knowledge, but are instead gradients along that spectrum, relative to each other.

For example, if I have played chess for 30 years and you started this morning, you would certainly be considered a novice, compared to me. But if you've been playing for a month when your friend starts, they'll be more of a novice than you are. You're still new to the game, relative to me, but your friend is green relative to you.

And because you've played longer, you have things you can teach your friend that he or she might not know. At which point, relative to your friend, you cease to be a novice and instead become an expert. You would still be a novice compared to me, and I would be a novice compared to a chess grand master who has played all of his live. 

Expertise is a spectrum, not a scale. 

Beginner's Mind

There are advantages to being new to a subject. In Zen Buddhism, there's a principle known as Shoshin—"beginner's mind." In short, the concept is that you approach experiences with an open and clear mind, the way a beginner would. Doing so makes it possible for even an advanced thinker in a subject to learn something new each time they study it. 

Shoshin is a handy tool for gaining new perspective on persistent problems. In business, sometimes it can be very helpful to bring a "fresh pair of eyes" (FPOE) into a conversation, to get a new perspective on dealing with a persistent problem, or to apply outside expertise in a new way, thus making all new creative leaps.

In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization, author Tom Kelley talks about "cross pollinators," who function essentially in this role of "beginner's mind" for an organization. 

"The Cross-Pollinator draws associations and connections between seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts to break new ground. Armed with a wide set of interests, an avid curiosity, and an aptitude for learning and teaching, the Cross-Pollinator brings in big ideas from the outside world to enliven their organization. People in this role can often be identified by their open mindedness, diligent note-taking, tendency to think in metaphors, and ability to reap inspiration from constraints."

SOURCE: http://www.tenfacesofinnovation.com/tenfaces/

In a sense, the Cross-Pollinator that Kelley describes is the quintessential novice. They are bringing all of their experience and knowledge from an outside discipline and applying it to a new problem, making connections and intuitive leaps as they go. They are weaving connective tissue between disparate ideas, like neural pathways in the brain. And these pathways often yield something unexpected and kind of cool: A new idea. 

But the trick here (if you can call it a trick) is that the Cross-Pollinator is leveraging existing experience. They are exposing themselves to as many different ideas and methods and concepts as they can, and then connecting those ideas to existing knowledge, and repeating that process with every new problem or idea they encounter. 

How Problem Solving (and Learning) Works

In the case of our chess players, if you come into the game knowing nothing about chess but a ridiculous amount about repairing automobiles, you may find yourself connecting what you learn with what you already know. Maybe you can create connections between repairing a carburetor and running a playing strategy. 

The way you approach the problem of playing chess will be influenced by the connections you make between what you are learning and what you already know. Your perspective on chess will be filtered through your existing expertise, and the more connections you make the faster you can master this new skill.

That's how problem solving works. It's how learning works. We are hard wired to make hard-wired connections, between what we already know and whatever knew skill we are learning.

This is where being a novice is actually an advantage. 

Mental Tug-of-War

Earlier we talked about how experts (such as math majors) aren't always the best teachers of a subject, because they already have a strong competency in the subject. It becomes difficult to "dumb it down," because the concepts seem so simple to them. We call this the "expert blindspot." There can be a disadvantage to being an expert in a subject, when it comes to learning something new or transferring knowledge to developing a new skill.

As we learn, we form neural patterns in brain. We literally make connections between new stuff and old stuff. And the better we know something, the thicker and stronger these neural pathways become. 

Think of them as threads versus ropes.

If you have a single thread held by two people playing tug-of-war, that thread can snap under the right amount of tension, because a thread alone isn't very strong. This is where you reach the limit of your knowledge and skill, and can't make any intuitive leaps. You have a harder time solving a problem because you have fewer resources and connections to draw upon.

But if you keep adding threads—keep reenforcing the line with new experiences and new learning—eventually the thread becomes a string, and then a rope. There could be thousands, millions, even billions of threads woven and wrapped up together in that line now. The tug-of-war guys can pull against each other all day, and there's little chance that the line will snap.

Knowledge gets stronger with new connections. 

But what if you're using those ropes to make a bridge? You want to cross a chasm (aka "solve a problem"), but to do that you'll need more than just one rope. So you weave the rope into a larger network. You connect additional ropes. You tie these off at different connecting points, making a latticework of ideas and experiences. Some ropes are thinner than others, but they add their strength to the whole. Eventually you have a bridge you can cross with confidence. 

Problem solved.

We do this all the time, usually without even thinking about it. We take on a new task, like writing a blog post, and we apply what we already know—such as how to write an essay. We transfer knowledge and solve a problem using the tools we already have.

Sometimes we get it wrong. We try using our hammer to get that screw in, and end up doing some damage. Not every problem is a nail. And that's fine. It's a mistake. Mistakes, despite their reputation, are good. 

As a novice, we make a lot more mistakes than an expert. But those mistakes serve an important purpose. They are a means of learning as we we go. They let us twine more threads into our growing rope.

Ignorance On a Sliding Scale

The interesting thing about being a novice is the implication that we are working toward expertise. We enter into something with a "beginner's mind" in order to master the concept. Sometimes we give up. But if we persist, we grow in that area of expertise. We move a bit further to the right on the spectrum. Relative to someone just coming into the field, we're now an expert. Relative to what we knew when we started, our expertise has increased. And yet, relative to the person who has practiced this for 30 years, we are still a newbie. 

That's how this works. That's why it's impossible to give a measured and quantified definition of expertise that can be considered universal. Even our ignorance is on a sliding scale. 

Quantifiable (Questioning Authority Pt 8)

NOTE: This post is Part 8 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

"Expert: Someone with a deep knowledge of a subject."

This was the response I got when I asked for a definition from someone who believes every word I've written on this topic so far—my deep dive into expertise and authority—is "illogical on its face." I replied that it would help if he gave his own definition. His response was meant to be a course correction for my apparent detour into illogic and abstraction and subjectivism. 

But his definition baffled me.

It still baffles me, because I can't get my head around his objection. As I've explored this topic, I've repeatedly turned to the only experts available on the topic—PhDs, attorneys, even ancient scholars—to get to a useable definition for "expert." I've not only read and studied their work, but contacted many of them directly (emails are still out to Socrates and Plato). And as I explore the nature of expertise and authority, I come to the same conclusion again and again:

Expertise is relative. 

Autonomous and Attributed

We've now discovered that there are two types of expertise: Autonomous expertise and attributed expertise. 

The first is the type that my friend considers most legitimate. In his view, expertise is something internalized—you're an expert if you have a "deep knowledge" of a subject. He abhors the idea of "attributed" expertise—the notion that you can be an expert simply because others recognize you as such is disgusting to him. His words.

But if you're paying close enough attention, you've already seen the problem for my friend's argument. Because in his effort to give me a definition for "expert," he was forced to use a subjective term.

"Define 'deep knowledge,'" I replied. "How is that quantified?" 

"Does it have to be quantifiable to be valid? No."

Wait ... what?

This is what really confuses me about his objection to the conclusions drawn by not only me but by the experts I'm using for sources in this deep dive. He seems to be turned off by the very notion that expertise can be attributed—making it somehow arbitrary and subjective. But he can't avoid using subjective terms to describe what expertise really is.

Even his question about validity is subjective. Consider the definition of the term via Merriam-Webster:

Valid - adj.
a :  well-grounded or justifiable :  being at once relevant and meaningful
b :  logically correct

SOURCE:  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/valid
Emphasis mine.

"Justifiable." "Relevant." "Meaningful." 

To whom?

Because without that "to whom," you're missing the most vital component for establishing actual validity. There is always, at the heart of expertise, some recognition by an outside entity. You can't have a degree if you aren't recognized for your academic accomplishments by a university. You can't publish in a scientific journal if your research doesn't pass a peer review, validating your conclusions based on their own expertise. You can't be a successful thought leader if no one agrees with what you're saying.

Mr. Spock would be proud

Ah, but there's that other term, buried in the Merriam-Webster definition of validity—"logically correct."

This is where the point of contention really lies, because logic is a science—a disciplined and structured approach to determining validity. It provides set rules for exploring abstracts, to determine if an argument is cogent. But in order for logic to work, you have to start from some pre-determined "knowns and givens." You need facts. And those facts have to be agreed upon by all parties before any given party can or will accept the conclusions. 

This is why the polarized arguments surrounding politics, science, and religion are so frustrating. Because as we discuss these topics, we begin to rely more and more on relative and subjective terminology, open to interpretation and therefore open to fallibility.

The disparity between the various viewpoints and positions on polarizing topics is unavoidable, because the deeper you get into the meaning of a term, the more abstract it must become. Eventually, everything we know comes from inference and observation, and we already know that observation is entirely subjective. Just look at that blue and black dress. Or is it gold and white? 

So the question from my friend was, "Does it have to be quantifiable to be valid?"

His position comes down to one word: "No."

But he's wrong.

Because validity has two primary definitions, according to what we learned above. It's either "relevant and meaningful" (subjective) or "logically correct" (quantifiable). My friend's position is that it can't be subjective, so the burden falls squarely on logical proof—which requires that we measure something, or at the very least that we have established benchmarks for our determination. Logic is a science of quantification and determination.

Pursing Deep Knowledge

In order for "deep knowledge" to have any validity, we need to be able to agree upon the quantifiable amount of knowledge that defines "deep." 

That's going to be a tough undertaking. Because as I dig deeper into the meaning of expertise, it's becoming absolutely clear that there is no way to quantify knowledge in a non-subjective, non-relative way. 

If I argue that "Only someone with a university degree and 10,000 hours of practice in a field can be an expert," that gives us a quantifiable definition. But we would need to agree, universally, that this definition is correct.

And that's going to be a hard sell, because for starters there are some fields that do not have a degree associated with them. There's no degree in "setting up a storefront in Etsy and creating an online craft business," for example. But there are people who understand that process completely, and are sought out by others who want that knowledge as well. Unfortunately, by our current definition, these Etsy folks aren't expert—they just don't have the degree, and probably lack the 10K hours. 

In addition, "10,000 hours of practice" would have to be defined to a granular level as well, or it, too, is subjective and relative. Are those 10,000 hours spent repeating one set of tasks, and studying a pre-determined amount of collected knowledge and data? Or are they spent researching new aspects of the subject?

Frankly, the first example would be the death of innovation, while the second would preclude "expertise" altogether because the researcher would always be encountering something "new," and would never develop the "deep knowledge" required by our working definition. Under this definition of expertise, they would be an expert in the study of a subject, but not in the subject itself. 

So what constitutes "deep knowledge," if it isn't the degree or the number of hours spent on the subject? What are the benchmarks?

Actually, if "deep knowledge" isn't something quantifiable, then where the heck does the line start? Because if it isn't quantifiable, that means it's relative. 

A snake eating its own tail

You have deeper knowledge than me in speaking Spanish, therefore you are more of an expert on this subject than I am. Even if you only speak two words of Spanish compared to my zero words of Spanish, you're practically a Spanish dictionary relative to me. 

Would you be able to teach a Spanish language class? No. You're not that kind of expert. Your knowledge isn't deep enough, relative to the environment and circumstances. You lack the autonomous authority to a degree relevant to that task.

Could you teach me how to ask where the bathrooms are in Spanish? Yes. Because you have that depth of knowledge relative to me. You have attributed authority, because I have acknowledged you as an expert.

This has become something of an ouroboros—the proverbial snake eating its own tail. We can't create a definition of expertise that doesn't involve subjectivity and relativism, because in the end all knowledge is relative.

We only know more in contrast to someone who knows less.

Even autonomous expertise is subjective, in the end. We have cultivated a deep knowledge in environmental science, and know everything there is to know on the subject of climate and weather patterns. We are experts. But that expertise is still relative, at the very least, to a time when we were not experts. We know more now than we did when we started. We have a quantifiable level of knowledge based on our own assessment and personal benchmarks. We have a degree (which is actually attributed expertise) from a recognized university (attributed), and we have written a number of published, peer-reviewed papers (attributed). We use our expertise every day (autonomous) to study and learn more, to create new systems for tracking and validating date, to write more papers and studies to explain what we're discovering. 

We can't have autonomous expertise without attributed expertise. 

A self correcting system

So, if we're following the thread of logic, all expertise comes back to attribution—we have to be recognized as an expert by someone or by some quantifiable standard before we actually are an expert.

And that's what makes this frustrating for those who disagree, or who would demand otherwise.

The truth is, I understand the objection here. Because from the point of view of my friend, this is tantamount to saying that just because someone says you're an expert, you are. And so intellect and knowledge and understanding play no part in it, except relative to the observer. That's abhorrent to some people—opening the door to expertise being the prize in some sort of popularity contest. If you can "please enough other people," you're an expert.

But that sets aside a crucial component of expertise that can't be ignored: Credibility.

If you've somehow "won" the title of "expert" based on popularity or opinion, and you lack the knowledge or wisdom to back that up, then eventually you'll be ousted from the role as you lose credibility. It's a self correcting system. 

A minister who preaches abstinence and sexual purity to his congregation, but is later arrested for soliciting a prostitute, loses is credibility as an expert on morality. 

An financial advisor who is discovered mismanaging funds loses credibility as an expert in finance.

A journalist who is discovered in faking his or her sources is discredited and loses the public trust, and no longer has credibility as a source of information. 

Is it tragic that it sometimes takes this sort of downfall to test the expertise of an individual? Sure. Tragic, and unnecessary, if we lived in a world where expertise was intrinsic and had no need of quantification, where it could be measured objectively and subjectivity and relativism were no part of it. But that isn't reality. 

The very question my friend asked, "Does it have to be quantifiable to be valid?" is at the very heart of this problem. Because he is arguing that expertise isn't relative—it has to be an objective reality. But he also argues that "deep knowledge" can be subjective and still valid. It's a logical fallacy.

I'm picking on my friend here because he's the most recent example of something I have seen before, and I'm positive I will see again. People do not know how to trust an expert, and so they doubt all experts. Unless, of course, they don't.

They don't see that they are being far more subjective in their assessment than everyone else. They are looking for validity, but refusing to establish objective standards. No wonder they're so distrustful—by that definition, every expert is a fraud, and no one can be trusted.

So maybe the key is to be an autonomous expert on your own. If you can't trust the experts, if you can't validate them, if you can't determine a metric for them, then you have to rely on your own expertise to fill in the gaps. And as we discussed earlier, that's something most people will never do, because of time constraints alone.

We look to experts so we can outsource our decision making. We look to them so we can shortcut our learning about a subject. We look to them so we can skip ahead a bit and not have to wade through the minutia of a topic to know more about it, so we can use it in our lives. Doing that takes a measure of faith—because unless we, ourselves, become experts on a topic, we'll never know for certain that our trusted experts are worth trusting.

So really, it all comes down to trust. 

 

Out of Context - Autonomous vs Attributed Expertise (Questioning Authority Pt. 7)

NOTE: This post is Part 7 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

Finding a pure definition for expertise has been a challenge, and there may be a good reason for that.

I'm not the first to explore this topic by a long shot. People have been trying to pin down what it means to be an authority on a subject for thousands of years. In The Crito, Socrates argued that experts should rule society, which was a reflection of Plato's philosophy on the topic. Socrates doesn't give a pure definition of an "expert" either, but he does describe them as people with "genuine knowledge." 

Again, not exactly a strict and unambiguous definition.

But the dialogues of Socrates and Plato are part of the rhetoric of expertise—the effective, persuasive communication that attempts to define what expertise really is, and its place in the world. Our discussion during this deep dive would also be considered part of this rhetoric. Hopefully a meaningful part. 

Talking and writing about what it means to be an expert is historically a common practice, and I think I know why. As we learned earlier, it's sometimes easier for us to outsource our decision making and our assessment of the world around us to someone who knows better than we do. It makes it easier, if we can hand off the hard thinking to someone who has already done it. 

But we also learned how dangerous that can be. If we pick the wrong expert, if they aren't as knowledgable about the topic as we need them to be or, worse, they aren't really an expert at all, bad things can happen. Jobs can be lost. Opportunities can be missed. People can go to prison, or even die. 

So it becomes vital—super, stupidly, ridiculously important—that we have a means of discerning good experts from bad. 

Imagine if Socrates and Plato had gotten their way, and experts ruled. Only an expert could be elected President of the United States, or crowned King or Queen of England. Only someone who was a bonafide authority could be in office and make policy decisions that have an effect on the world. How would we determine if someone were actually qualified to be in that position of power?

The best tool we have for that qualification is rhetoric—our ongoing discussion of what an expert is, and what responsibilities he or she may have.

Out of context

In her 2008 publication, The Rhetoric of Expertise, E. Johanna Hartelius, PhD, writes—

"All definitions of expertise are the function of particular motives and have
different implications. Anyone who offers a definition shapes that definition to serve
his/her interests. For example, academics may define expertise as synonymous with
knowledge and accreditation. Notably, theoretical knowledge and accreditation are
precisely the qualities that characterize academic expertise. In contrast, an artist may
place more emphasis on lived experience as constitutive of expertise. This might
deemphasize the importance of a certain degree or title. To her colleagues and followers,
a body of works attesting to the life of an artist may be more compelling. Additionally,
this may work in the artist’s favor. She may be compensating with experience what she
lacks in official certification. Whatever the case, any definition of expertise has social,
political, and material consequences. It does rhetorical work for the person creating the
definition."

SOURCE: "The Rhetoric of Expertise," Hartelius, E. Johanna, 2008-05. http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/3857/harteliuse22571.pdf?sequence=2 

This idea—that the definition of expertise is dependent upon not only the "audience" but on the one creating the definition—is exactly the sort of "thorny problem" we've dealt with since the beginning. It's clear that there can't be a definition of expertise that doesn't consider context.

In fact, context is the key to all of it. We have to know that our expert is an expert in all the ways that matter for our problem, our question, our exploration of a topic. We have to verify, somehow, that the expert we're outsourcing our decisions and analytical thinking to is qualified within the context of our needs.

Autonomous vs Attributed Expertise

But, as it turns out, context isn't necessary in all cases of expertise. In fact, there may be two different types of expertise—autonomous and attributed.

As Hartelius puts it—

"One of the most frequently recurring themes in expertise research is that there
exists a tension between autonomy and attribution. ... For some, expertise is entirely comprised of a person’s relationship to her subject matter. ... Expertise is the term for superior competence. For others, expertise exists entirely in the signs and symbols of a person’s relationship to her environment and audience. It is an attributed state of being-with-others where one’s performance is evaluated irrespective of so-called 'real knowledge.' When expertise is autonomous, other people’s recognition is irrelevant. A person can possess expert knowledge without the others’ acknowledgment. ... However, when expertise is attributed, it exists only as a symbolic relationship. One can be an expert only in so far as one is recognized as such."

Hartelius uses a proverbial astrophysicist to illustrate her point. If the astrophysicist has accreditations and certifications, and a body of work developed from her knowledge, she's an autonomous expert. She can continue using her expertise more or less "in the background," independent of anyone's opinions or perspectives. She doesn't need anyone to recognize her expertise in order to use that expertise in her work.

As knowledgable and good at her work as she may be, however, she may not be trusted for her opinion on the workings the universe. If she tells a layman, "We can determine that there is water on a planet a hundred thousand lightyears from Earth by observing it through the Hubble telescope," the layman may actually distrust that information. It may seem impossible. It may seem ridiculous. 

And that's where "attributed expertise" steps in. As Hartelius puts it, "The astrophysicist may know her stuff, but it does not matter if she fails to persuade others. As long as she is symbolically persuasive, it may be of no consequence whether or not the expert possesses superior knowledge. "

In other words, we may have our symbols of expertise—degrees, published papers, a body of work— and we may really, really know our stuff, but we may not be considered experts until someone says we're an expert.

Social Proof

When we're looking for experts to trust with our outsourced decisions and analysis, we depend on criteria and qualifications that have meaning to us, and that we see as proof. Sometimes, that will be social proof rather than academic or professional proof.

In light of any other evidence, or the lack of any prior knowledge on our part, we will often fall back on a time-honored method of determining someone's expertise: Do they look like an expert?

Social proof sounds like it might be entirely superficial, but it actually goes deeper than we think. Ultimately, it's building on certain cues and signs we've learned to recognize as we grant authority to someone. We look at someone's website to see if it looks "professional" (another subjective term). We look for typos, or bad photos, or a gaudy color scheme—signs of an amateur. We look to see what they've written about in their blog, to determine if it agrees with our expectations for an expert in their field. We look to see if anyone else has given this person a testimonial—the holy grail of social proof. 

If other people respect their expertise, that's a sign that we can too.

At that point, we are giving this person attributed authority. When we decide to trust them, to value their opinion and their advice, to take what they say at face value, we are attributing expertise to them.

Viral Expertise

Social proof is a powerful influencer in our decisions. It has to be, because it's hard wired into us from conception. We are born with a dependency on others—we trust the fuzzy-looking giant blobs to feed us, keep us warm, and provide love and a comforting touch. And that need for others to provide what we need continues on into our adulthood. We are constantly seeking aid and support from our community.

So if your brother says Joe is a good plumber, you'll likely choose Joe. If your buddy tells you that Mark knows how to build a website, you'll likely turn to Mark. If your respected and wealthy colleague tells you that a particular book can help you get a grip on investing, you'll probably start reading. 

In that way, attributed expertise is sort of viral. It moves from one person to the next. And, like a virus, it's subjected to the "immune system" of each new body it encounters. At any time, it may well be overcome by the antibodies of doubt and skepticism, and its vector will weaken or cease altogether. But if it's strong, if each of the "infected" tends toward strengthening it rather than dampening it, your attributed expertise can spread farther and overcome antibodies easily.

For the expert, that's good. But also challenging. Because it means "starting over" with each new exposure. However, that restart can be refined as you go. You can keep tuning your expertise—your specialized knowledge as well as your ability and resources to convey and communicate that knowledge—until your autonomous expertise is almost instantly converted into attributed expertise. It takes a commitment to being persuasive. It takes the development of good communication skills.

But what about those of us on the receiving side? How do we determine which autonomous expert deserves attributed expertise?

Social proof is one method, but is that the best we have? If so, it puts us right back at the ambiguous and subjective definition of expertise we've used since the start. We can only define expertise based on criteria that we, ourselves, choose to believe is credible. We can analyze what we see and hear from the expert and from our peers and social groups, but the authority is still, ultimately, granted by us. Degrees, certifications, publications, accolades—those things can be sufficient for autonomous expertise, but only attributed expertise matters to us in the end.

Still no Unified Theory

So, no closer to a "unified theory" on expertise and authority. It's as subjective and ambiguous as ever.

And maybe that's a good thing. Because if Socrates and Plato had their way, and we lived by rule of the experts, it would mean that the component of "choice" has been removed from the equation.

Socrates himself was no fan of majority rule, but what other method could we possibly have for defining criteria for expertise? By its very nature, a single, pure definition of expertise would place an unbearable burden on the experts themselves. They, alone, would be responsible for every thought, every decision, and every action taken by every individual who turned to them for guidance. Their supreme rule would mean turning off the expert in all of us—the one that analyzes an autonomous expert to determine if we should attribute authority. 

At that point, we're no longer autonomous ourselves. 

Chunk Superiority - How experts learn faster than novices (Questioning Authority Pt. 6)

NOTE: This post is Part 6 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

I learned to play chess on a small cedar travel board that used tiny little pieces with pegs to hold them in place between moves. That came in handy, because my "classroom" was the back seat of a 1983 Ford LTD that belonged to my Granny. And my instructor was my friend Jason, who had tagged along with us on a trip to New Braunfels, Texas. It was a three-hour drive to and from the Schlitterbahn Water Park where we would spend a week in the water and sun. Learning to play chess seemed a good way to pass the time.

I liked the game well enough. I knew, even then, that it was the game "smart people" played. I'd seen movies and TV shows where geniuses hovered over boards, moving pieces, calling out cryptic plays that sounded like the kind of code you'd use to initiate a missile launch. I wanted to be a genius, so chess had to factor in at some point. 

After that, I can't say that I was "obsessed" with chess, but I did enjoy it. I bought an electronic chess board so that I could play on my own, and I got very good at beating the digital pants off of it. I also continued to play friends and family, and I was pretty good at beating them, too. So I had a high level of confidence about my skills.

Which led me to enter the tournament. 

It was being hosted at bookstore that I frequented, usually as a stopover on my way home from class. i was getting my undergrad at Houston Baptist University at that point, but I had moved back to my old stomping grounds in Wild Peach to cut down on expenses. This was when gas prices were still low enough that driving 150 miles round trip every day was still cheaper than paying rent on an apartment. Oh those beloved days.

I had seen the signs for this tournament taped to surfaces all over the book store, and had decided I wanted to test my mettle. So I signed up, and on that Saturday morning I made the 75-mile drive one more time that week. I was excited. I was pumped. I was ready for the challenge!

I was out after the first game. 

The guy I played in that first match actually went on to win the entire tournament. So I don't feel all that bad about losing to him. It's just ... the first game? Couldn't I have taken out a few folks myself before retiring to the sidelines to play pick-up games with other match losers? Did I really have to be the very first person out?

Someone had to be.

The thing is, the guy who beat me wasn't just good at chess. He was an expert. At least, more of an expert than I was. He knew all the terminology. He kept a little notebook for each game, and jotted down the moves he and his opponent had made from memory. He talked to others about the strategies he used, calling out this defense or that maneuver by name. 

I didn't stand a chance.

My chess prowess was considerable,  if I was playing against my cousins or my buddies. We were hacks, muddling through the board with no idea that there were patterns that had special names. To us, it was just this game we liked to play—like Poker or Monopoly or Risk. 

But to chess experts, this is more than a game. It's strategy and three-dimensional thinking. It's history. It's combat. It's a complex and living organism that the chess master alone can tame.

And that, I think, is a key difference between amateurs and experts. The amateur may have some level of knowledge about their subject—they may even be more of an authority than other people, the same way I was better at chess than my family and friends—but an expert is moving toward mastery. They have a larger vocabulary.

In 1989, chess and expertise were the subjects explored by authors K. Anders Ericsson, University of Colorado at Boulder, and James J. Staszewski, University of South Carolina. In their paper tilted Skilled memory and expertise: Mechanisms of exceptional performance, Ericsson and Staszewski looked at how chess experts encode their huge vocabulary of chess moves and strategies and terminology so that it can be instantly retrieved.

What they found was that the experts were encoding information in chunks, and these chunks contained interconnected bits and pieces that formed the web of overall knowledge the expert could tap into.

Experts aren't the only ones who process information this way, of course. The study revealed that everyone—even chess novices who are overconfident in their abilities—essentially encodes and stores information the same way. On average, all human beings can store approximately the same number of chunks on a topic, and can retrieve information from those chunks just as rapidly as the experts. But where things begin to diverge between novice and expert is in the volume of information grouped into the chunks.

The size of the chunk—that quantity of stored information—varies with the amount of previous knowledge and experience of the individual. The study found that experts had chunks that were jammed with more individual pieces of data than the chunks of novices. Chunk superiority. 

And that's key to understanding not only expertise, but the very nature of memory and learning. 

Brain symphonies 

Whenever we are learning something new, there's a veritable symphony of activity going on in our brains. Each new bit of information we encode into memory forms new neurons and pathways in our brains, and those tendrils reach outward in fractal patterns, trying their best to grow big and bright. But they don't form spontaneously in random, unused parts of the brain. They're branches, not trees. Everything we learn starts from what we already know.

We connect new information to old information—the stuff we've already encoded and which has well-worn neural paths in our brains. We create understanding by using the framework of what we already know. Memory is an additive process.

Experts, then, are people who have created more pathways and connections on a given topic than someone else. They have connected a bunch of dots, and a picture is emerging for them.

The process experts use, as they both encode and retrieve their wealth of chess moves (or whatever else their expertise includes) is referred to by Ericsson and Staszewski as "Skilled memory." It enables the experts to quickly encode and retrieve new information in their field of expertise, which gives them a greater capacity for making intuitive leaps and strategic decisions than an amateur in that field. Even better, experts can encode and retrieve new information faster than the amateurs. Which, in the grand scheme of learning, seems a bit unfair. It would be nice if we, the lowly amateur, could encode quickly, so that we could reach expertise as fast as possible.

But there is hope, albeit from a somewhat mundane source. 

Practice makes expert

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Fly to Manhattan and get an Uber ride to 881 7th Ave. 

But if you want to be an expert pianist who has been asked to perform at Carnegie Hall, that's all about the practice, practice, practice. 

Aside from completely dismantling and over-analyzing a classic joke, the point here is that practice and exposure and intentional growth are the keys to improving your skilled memory. The more you do something, the more proficient you become at making connections between new and existing knowledge. You make better connections, and you make them faster. 

So experts have a leg up when it comes to learning something new within their domain of expertise. The amateur or novice has to struggle harder to encode the new information, because their chunks contain less of the framework needed for making intuitive leaps.

Interestingly, and not all that surprising, experts in a specific field aren't quite so capable of this rapid learning outside of that silo of expertise. A chess master can learn new strategies and maneuvers quickly on the chess board, and can remember play-by-play every move in a match without aid, but they may completely lack the ability to remember what they're supposed to buy at the grocery store, or to rapidly learn how to play Bridge. They possess tremendous skill in high-speed learning within their own field, but it isn't necessarily transferrable.

Unless, of course, they can learn to encode that information in terms of their expertise.

Experts in becoming experts

Diagnosticians and forensic experts are good at transferring their encoded knowledge to solve problems. This is largely due to the nature of their expertise. These fields, by their nature, involve an expertise in making connections. Each uses a specific expertise, such as medical diagnostics or forensic science, as the framework for making connections intuitive leaps using available evidence. In other words, these are experts in the field of observing and evaluating data and identifying patterns within.

This can happen in other fields of expertise, of course. A chess player, for example, may have a fantastic memory for lists and processes, if he or she can encode that information as chess moves—or, in some way, connect the information in the same way he or she connects their chess knowledge. They may have fantastic pattern memory, because they think in terms of patterns frequently.

In the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, author Joshua Foer explores a concept known as the "memory palace," or sometimes called the "memory house." This is "place memory." It was referred to as early as 55 BC by Cicero in his work De Oratore.

The basics of this technique are that we can remember complex lists of information if we are able to encode them within a mental landscape, such as the layout of a house. 

The quickest, easiest way to test this is to do the following experiment:

Imagine your house, or maybe the house you grew up in. It needs to be a layout that is so familiar you can picture it without effort.Make list of 20 random objects. It can be a grocery list, for example.Starting from the front door of your house, mentally place items in the front entryway, in the hall, in the living room, the kitchen, your bedroom, etc. Tour your house from room to room, and place the objects as you go.This works best if you picture the most absurd things you can think of. If milk is on your list, picture your bathtub filled with milk. If bread is on the list, maybe picture little sailboats made from bread slices. In your bedroom, maybe you place a giant egg, and the shell has cracked, allowing the yolk to ooze out and ruin your carpet. The more graphic (and, frankly, the more disgusting) the images, the more readily you'll remember them.Go grocery shopping, and as you push your cart along, take the mental tour of your house, and recall the items within. See if you can do the whole list without referencing anything in writing.

Our place memory is one of those quirks of evolution that served a specific purpose in the wild, but now amounts to sort of party trick in the modern world. A useful party trick, to be sure. But what it tells us about memory and expertise is more valuable than the way it helps us remember to get milk, bread, and eggs.

In essence, our ability to create and innovate is a function of our ability to connect ideas. Experts become renown as thought leaders when they can present information in new ways, and they become masters of their field when they can create something entirely new from the webwork of their expertise. 

As Foer put it:

“If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.” 

Experts will be better at making high-level connections between new ideas and disparate facts because they already have a vast framework to draw upon. Likewise, novices may make all sorts of intuitive leaps as they explore a new area of study if they are able to encode the information in terms of what they already know.

So the secret to learning something fast? Figure out how to connect it to your existing area of expertise. Connect quantum physics to chess, or auto mechanics to music. Find a way to integrate the new patterns with your existing patterns, and your learning and comprehension will increase exponentially.

Of all the topics we've explored so far, this one, to me, says more about the nature of expertise and authority than the others. It adds a dimension of quantity to the siloed knowledge of the expert, though that quantity is still vague and subjective. 

We can say that experts have more information. That's a given. We can also say that experts make quicker connections, which is something new. It indicates that a potential measure of expertise could be "how fast can you encode new information?" The more existing connections you have, the faster you can encode new data, and so the highest level expert is going to be he or she who encodes the fastest.

Still looking for that definition

But we haven't been looking for the means of quantifying the levels of expertise. We've been on the hunt for a pure definition—a binary 1 or 0 that will tell us when someone is and expert and when they are not. And to that point, so far, we are still at our original premise.

An expert is still someone who has demonstrated authority and proficient knowledge of a subject, relative to his or her audience. It's still subjective. It's still in the eye of the beholder. Expertise is still that "know it when we see it" quality that refuses to be quantified. 

But we're going to keep trying.

Too much expertise (Questioning Authority Pt. 5)

NOTE: This post is Part 4 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

Sally Clark had a life that many people would think of as ideal. The daughter of a police officer and a hair dresser in the UK, Sally grew up, went to University, and eventually became a Solicitor in the UK justice system—the equivalent of being a lawyer in the US. She also married another Solicitor, Steve Clark, and together they joined a prestigious law firm in Manchester. But beyond her career, the big accomplishment in her life was her son, Christopher. 

Which was why it was such a blow to Sally and her husband when young Christopher died as a result of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), sometimes called "crib death" in the US, or "cot death" in the UK. Sally and her husband had rushed young Christopher to the hospital upon discovering that he wasn't breathing, but it was too late. Their precious boy was gone.

A year later, however, Sally and Steve were blessed with another son, Harry Clark, who was born prematurely but seemed to be doing well. Their grief was still fresh from the loss of Christopher, but they could take joy in the birth of Harry.

And then, against all odds, Harry also died from SIDS, and the grief started all over. 

Worse—not only had they now lost their two precious children, but they were both arrested under suspicion of murder, and eventually Sally herself was convicted of murdering both of her sons in their crib.

She was convicted and sent to prison based largely on the testimony of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a former Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Leeds.

Painting by numbers

Meadow testified that the chances of two children from an affluent home, with two non-smoking parents,  both dying from SIDS just a year apart were "1 in 73 million."

To put that in perspective, the chances of dying in a terrorist-related airplane crash are 1 in 25 million. The chances of any given American becoming President of the United States are 1 in 10 million. And the chances of dying in the bathtub are 1 in 840,000. All of these are, according to Meadow, more likely than two kids dying suddenly of crib death, just a year apart.

To get to this number, Meadow did something perfectly logical. He took the odds of it happening to one child (1 in 8,543, according to his own calucations) and squared it (8,543 x 8,543 = 75 million). And the jury, aware of Meadow's prestige, his royal title, and his years of expertise, logically accepted those astronomical odds. They rendered a verdict of guilty after a 10-2 majority vote. Case closed.

The problem is, Meadow got the math wrong.

There are a lot of reasons why this number wasn't accurate, but to simplify things let's look at just one major contributor. Meadow had calculated that the odds of one child dying of SIDS under the care of affluent parents was 1 in 8,543—a number that Professor of Mathematics Ray Hill of Salford University says is inaccurate because it fails to account for factors such as the sex of the children. Male children are statistically at greater risk of dying from crib death than girls. This would have influenced the probability by at least half.

In addition, some of the contributing factors that Meadow considered in his calculation—the affluence of the parents, whether or not they were smokers, their general health—would also have to be considered in calculating the statistical likelihood of murder. Those same factors made murder less likely, not more.

But that wasn't how the data was framed to the jury.

When Meadow made his proclamation—that the chances of two children dying of SIDS one year apart while living in an affluent home with non-smoker parents was 1 in 75 million—the jury and the public heard this as, "There is a 1 in 75 million chance that Sally Clark is innocent."

In other words, it seemed that Sally had a better chance of dying in a terrorist attack on an airplane than of being innocent of this crime. 

The problem is, that wasn't what the data was saying.

Meadow's number wasn't a calculation of the odds of Sally's guilt. He had calculated the odds of two children dying from SIDS a year apart. Set aside for a moment that the calculation itself was faulty—even if it had been accurate it was being flat-out misused. 

Sir Meadow, by the way, was immortalized by having a legalistic philosophy named in his honor. Meadow's Law is based on a statement by Meadow, who said,"One is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder unless there is proof to the contrary."

Meadow was one of the leading pediatric doctors in the UK. He was knighted. He had a law named for him. And he was dead wrong.

Sally Clark did not kill either of her children, which was determined by the court only after she'd served three years in prison for the crime. During her time in prison, she had a very rough go of it. Child killers aren't treated well inside. And so, for three years, she had to endure not only the loss of her children and the ruin of her former life, she also endured the constant verbal and physical abuse of fellow prisoners. 

When she was released in 2003, the damage to her psyche was already done. Her husband told the press that she would never be well. She was suffering from numerous psychological issues, including a complete personality change brought on my trauma. She eventually drank herself to death—dying from alcohol poisoning in her home at the age of 42.

The power of expert testimony

So what happened here? How was it that Meadow, renowned in his field and truly an expert in pediatrics and identifying abuse, could get this so completely wrong? And why did the jury trust him so completely?

That is the danger that accompanies any expert testimony in court, and it lends a great deal of weight to the argument that our current trend toward expert and authority businesses could be destructive. When events such as these happen, we can't help but question the whole system, and the lack of accountability that comes with certain forms of expertise.

We've learned through this deep dive, so far, that expertise is about credibility as much as it is about knowledge and know-how. When we are unsure of what we should do or think or decide, we look for someone we can outsource those decisions to. We trust people who have credentials we don't have, or who demonstrate knowledge on topics we don't understand.

Just as with our trust of financial experts, we are constantly looking for signs of credibility in others, so we can hand over the responsibility of a decision without worry. We trust the CPA to be good with numbers. We trust the dietician to give us good advice about food. We trust the knighted Professor of Pediatrics with a law name for him to know what he's talking about when he quotes a statistic. 

But it's that tendency that creates the biggest danger. We are concerned about our own lack of insight, and so we trust the insight of anyone who seems to know more than we do, which effectively causes us to shut off our analytical brains and just go with what we're told. It's easier. It feels safer. It can put an innocent woman in prison for three years, and ruin countless lives. 

Blue cars at night

"There are three things that make someone an expert," says Jim Moriarty, a prominent attorney in Houston, Texas. "Data, information and wisdom."

"Data is is the facts—the basic building material. It's like atoms. It isn't the castle, simply the building materials. Information is the facts combined with context. 'Blue' is data. It's nothing by itself, but 'the blue car runs a light at night' is information.

"Wisdom is the foundation for being an authority. It's the correct data with the correct insight. 'The blue car always runs that light at night, so the pedestrian should avoid that intersection at night when the blue car is around.' When you know the facts and you put them in context, and you draw your conclusions from that, you're an expert."

Jim has made a study of experts, because they can often be vital to building his cases. He tends to take cases that have large social benefit, and  to help people or solve problems that are being ignored by the rest of society.

His latest case is an attempt to change the laws and regulations surrounding corporate-owned-and-operated dental clinics. The practice is already illegal, but loopholes allow these facilities to keep operating. Worse, because they are able to charge Medicaid, the services often mask their operations as being part of a service to the community. Abuse runs rampant as these practices perform countless medically unnecessary dental procedures on children living at the poverty level, rushing them through an assembly-line-style process that causes far more harm than good, and collecting millions of dollars each year in government reimbursements. 

Jim's philosophy for finding experts differs greatly from that used by most attorneys. He doesn't pay for them, for starters.

As it turns out, it's legal to pay experts for their testimony, and the rates can be extremely high. 

"I've paid as much as $2 million for expert testimony, and it was a big scam. They try stretched things out to keep the money coming, and didn't produce anything worthwhile."

So to avoid this, Jim uses a technique straight out of "the Art of War." He gets the other guy's experts to do his work for him.

"I figure out the truth, and then I present it to their experts. I ask them, 'Is this how it works? Is this true?' And they're experts. They can't deny what they know while on the stand. So they say, 'Yes, that's how it works. That's true.'" 

In other words, Jim use the experts to verify the information—the data in context—that he already knows. He relies on their wisdom, under oath, and effectively lets the other side foot the bill for the expert testimony that wins his case.

That tactic works, but only if we keep to some simple rules:

We have to look for the facts ourselves, and find their relevant contextWe have to ask the right questions to verify the information we haveBlinded by expertise

That was the real failure in the case of Sally Clark. Her attorneys, in the face of the overwhelming credibility of Sir Meadow, failed to look for the facts or ask the right questions. They failed to raise a flag on the dubious calculations. Above all, they failed to differentiate for the jury the concepts of the odds of two children dying from SIDS under those conditions versus the odds of Sally Clark's innocence. 

We've already learned that with expertise and authority comes great responsibility. As experts ourselves, we have to remember to be humble in our reach. We can't just assume that because we are considered an expert, we know everything we ever need to know on a subject.

Likewise, as we seek out the counsel of experts, we have to assume responsibility there as well. Trusting an expert has to come after we've vetted what we can of the facts and the information at hand. Basically, responsible use of an expert is to verify or elaborate on the facts you discover for yourself. An expert can be a source of new information, but it's up to us to investigate and verify that information as much as possible before acting on it. 

Sally Clark's life was ruined because of the testimony of a very credible source. He was considered wise by all. He was the unquestionable authority in his field. But he was wrong. And the price of that was the life of a woman who had already lost so much. 

As tragic as this outcome may be, however, it doesn't change our definition of expertise. In fact, it reinforces it—albeit with a cautionary tale attached. We are experts when we are recognized as such. But the credibility and prestige that come with that title also come with the weight of responsibility.

And, as it turns out, that responsibility is on the shoulders of the those seeking the expert's wisdom, as much as on the expert himself. 

Meat eaters are selfish (Questioning Authority Pt. 4)

NOTE: This post is Part 4 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

"Meat eaters are more selfish than vegetarians." 

This announcement really struck a note with me—a keen lover of meat. Actually, "love" isn't quite strong enough to describe the passion I have for a good steak. I have been known to weep openly and joyfully in a restaurant, fork and knife in hand and napkin tucked into my shirt collar.

The phrase wasn't just rhetoric, either. It was ultimately coming from a bonafide and trusted source—a paper written by Professor Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University.

Stapel's study hadn't actually been printed in a scientific journal. It had crept into cultural knowledge and reference after the release of a press bulletin. But numerous other studies bearing Stapel's name were published over the course of his career, all backed by his credentials and position at Tilburg University. Stapel was a respected expert in social psychology.

But in 2011, despite accolades, honors, and the prestige of being a published and respected authority, Stapel's work was called into question. A committee was formed to investigate the integrity of his scientific research, alleging and later proving that Stapel had faked his data.

The aftermath of the committee's investigation was swift and destructive. Numerous papers were retracted. Journals published public statements denouncing him and his work. Stapel himself even surrendered his PhD on the grounds that his career and his work had been "inconsistent with the duties associated with the doctorate." Stapel's career as a renown researcher was finished.

So ... was eating meat still a selfish act?

Still selfish after all these years

Apparently, because despite the fact that the paper was never actually published, and that in 2011 the author of the paper was completely discredited and much of his work retracted, I was learning about how selfish I was as a meat eater a full year later—in 2012.

And in 2013. And in 2014. And in 2015. 

The study, despite never having been published in any official capacity, and instead having been completely discredited due to fraudulent data, is often cited to this day as proof that being a vegetarian is not only a healthy lifestyle choice, it's the correct moral choice as well.

And while that's not really much of a problem—people are always looking for justification for or affirmation of their own philosophy—it's a really good example of  both the power and responsibility of expertise. 

The fact is, facts change

This isn't the only "blunder of expertise" in history, of course. There was a time when the greatest authorities of humanity knew that the Earth was flat, that the atom was the smallest particle in existence, that eating eggs was bad for you/good for you/bad for you ... where are we again on the eggs?

The fact is, facts change.

What we know now is just what we're able to observe now, and what we're able to make of what we already know (or think we know) about the past. We can build on past knowledge, and we can make some fairly well educated guesses about the future. But we can never know anything for absolute certain, because there will always be some undiscovered factor we haven't accounted for.

And that's one of the reasons experts are so highly valued. Because they, unlike we lowly laymen, know their stuff. They've taken the time to study something so thoroughly that they know it and understand it better than the rest of us. We know, from personal experience, that there's a whole lot we don't know. So we look to experts to either fill in those gaps, or tell us it's ok to ignore them. We trust them, sometimes even if what they tell us makes no real sense, or if their advice forces us to change our own viewpoint of the world. 

And that's weird. 

Because we humans all have at least one trait in common: We tend to distrust things that we don't understand.

We keep away from complex machinery if we don't have any knowledge of how it works. We avoid animals we can't identify. We refuse to eat food we don't recognize. it's our nature and our habit. We may overcome it, through choice and will, but our first instinct isn't to trust it.

But with experts, that tendency to distrust goes right out the window. If we recognize someone as an authority on a topic, our natural inclination is to roll with what they say.

That isn't universal, of course. If an expert is saying something completely counter to what we know (or think we know) of reality, then we'll likely have some doubt. We'll maybe do a little digging ourselves, Google a few things, ask a few other experts. But if we already trust this expert, or if another expert we do trust can somehow vouch for them or agree with what they say, then we may just shrug, adjust our worldview accordingly, and move on. No need to dig further. The experts say it is so.

That's interesting (and maybe even a little alarming).  We're turning over some of our decision making to someone, even if what they're telling us is counter to what we already knew or believed. But even more interesting, we apparently have a tendency to trust an expert by default if they're advising us about something we don't fully understand.

In a 2009 paper titled Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk, the authors studied the effects of the statements of experts on the decisions made by laymen investors. 

"Our behavioral results indicated that the expert's advice significantly influenced behavior," the study reported. "We obtained behavioral evidence demonstrating that the presence of the expert's advice led to a significant increase in [probability weight] in the direction of the advice, such that participants overweighted low probabilities and underweighted high probabilities more after receiving the advice." [SOURCE: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0004957#s2]

In other words, the subjects gave more consideration to the expert's advice than to their own estimate and knowledge of the probabilities. They considered the expert's advice to have more weight, more validity, if the advice was about something they didn't fully understand themselves. 

On our own, we might not buy a stock that seemed to have a low probability, especially if we didn't understand the industry or business that stock represents. But there's a great likelihood that you would buy that stock if you were told to by someone you recognized as an expert.

Granted authority

The key is "granted authority"—a term I just made up, but is probably pretty accurate. Trust me, I'm an authority on words.

We're the ones who grant authority, after all. We choose to recognize someone as an expert or authority, or we choose not to. We choose to heed advice, even in spite of our own knowledge or convictions, based entirely on our assessment of the expertise of the individual giving the advice. Our choice. Sometimes our blunder. But more times than not, trusting the expert pays off, so we keep doing it. We really like being told what to do by someone who knows more than we do.

The reason for this is that humans really aren't that keen on owning responsibility for our decisions. Because if we know anything at all in this great big universe, it's that we are seriously flawed and prone to mistakes.

We know ourselves better than we know anyone else, after all. We are experts in "us." We know how many times we've flubbed it when the chips were down, and how many times we've fudged it when the facts weren't in. So we try to outsource our decision making any way we can. We don't have time for extensive research outside of our own personal field of expertise, even if we really need that information. So we look for shortcuts, to offset our ignorance. We look to outsiders who, by all accounts, know more than we do.

That gives experts a lot of power. And as my boyhood hero and role model, Spider-man, is famous for saying, "With great power comes great responsibility." 

So what can we learn from Diederik Stapel and his data downfall? 

Here was a certified and verified expert in his field who was telling us things about ourselves that we didn't know, but might have suspected (or, in some cases, wanted to be true). A lot of what he was reporting seemed wrong to us meat eaters, maybe. Or maybe it supported some personal believe we were holding about the right and wrong of eating meat. Either way, many of us gave greater weight to his findings despite the probability of those findings, because he had a PhD and a research staff and the backing of a university. He had all the right boxes checked. He should have been trustworthy. But he failed to be responsible.

A lot of the people I work with are experts and authorities in their own fields. They have reputations, upon which they've built their careers and their lives. They work with their own clients, or write their own books and papers, or produce their own podcasts and video blogs, and all of it is predicated on the idea that they are, in fact, experts—that they are relaying what they know. But more important than their knowledge, our trust in them is built on the belief that they are, above all, honest. 

People respect experts. They honor them. Doctors and scientists. Lawyers and judges. Consultants and personal coaches. Each of these is only able to do their work as long as their audience trusts them and their methods. It's a social contract, in which the layman trusts the expert to actually be an expert, and to provide honest and reliable information to the best of their ability.

Break that social contract, and the whole system of trust and credibility crumbles.

Not only do careers go down in flames, sometimes the people we're trying to reach get hurt, too. Bad advice from a financial expert can cause a client to go into bankruptcy. Bad advice from a personal coach can cause a client to make decisions that aren't in keeping with their own principals and needs. A bad diagnosis from a doctor can cause a patient to get worse instead of better—maybe even die.

Things can get pretty bad, when an expert isn't being responsible for his or her power.

Does this change what it means to be an expert?

No, not really. Not at all, actually.

This doesn't change our working definitions of expertise and authority. It's still as subjective and relative as it always was. But what this does tell us is that the titles come with more than just prestige and power—they come with a burden of responsibility. It's on us, as experts, to be responsible for what we are and what we know and what we do with our knowledge. We have an obligation to be honest and thorough.

As I keep digging into these two terms and their deeper meaning, I'm finding that expertise is a little like the game of Othello. "A moment to learn. A lifetime to master." We can become experts and authorities quickly and easily—it isn't hard. We just have to know more than the person we're talking to, and we have to be able to demonstrate that knowledge in a way that is recognized as valid and socially valuable.

That's the easy part. 

The hard part is what happens after. Because as my friend Paul Campbell, host of the Real United States video blog, told me, "Expertise is not a binary state, but one that is gradient, some experts being more expert than others." 

We aren't "finished" when we become an expert. The work isn't done. If we want to continue in that recognition, we have to keep working for it.

The responsibility of expertise isn't just honesty—it's diligence. If we want to keep holding the title, we have to keep stepping back in the ring, keep throwing the right punches and dodging any incoming blows, and keep working our sweet, sweet science until the current match is one, then move on to training and preparing for the next.

That's what power looks like. That's what it means to be an expert and an authority. It means taking ownership of our expertise, and treating it with respect, and a commitment to being responsible for what we produce in the world.

The Expert Blindspot (Questioning Authority Pt 3)

NOTE: This post is Part 3 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority."  Get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

"I don't think people who majored in math should be math teachers." 

I nodded along when I heard this, for two reasons: The girl saying it happened to be my girlfriend at the time, and I had just bombed the same math test she had.

So you could call it a bit of sour grapes, or blaming the clouds for the rain. But the idea itself did stick with me. Because she had a deeper point to make, which came up as we talked more. 

"They spent years learning all of this, and they know it all by heart, and all the tricks and ways to remember it. So they think of it as easy, and they don't realize that we're all just trying to figure it out for the first time."

Have you ever talked to someone who knew, intimately, how to do something you're just trying to learn? Maybe you're not so tech savvy, but you have a cousin who is a computer programmer. Or you don't know how to change the oil (or replace the CV joints) in your car, but your brother-in-law is a mechanic. Or you're just starting out on guitar, but your college buddy is a maestro. There can be a bit of intimidation and discomfort in humbling ourselves before a true expert in a skill. And that can be exacerbated if the expert assumes that "this stuff is easy."

In the previous article I wrote about my deep dive into expertise and authority (Read How to rob a bank with a lemon), I looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect. Essentially, Dunning and Kruger did a study that reveals we are all terrible at assessing our own level of competence in a subject. Most of us grossly overestimate our competence in any given area, even if we test poorly in it. But even more intriguing, those of us who really are knowledgable about a subject or skilled a task tend to underestimate our level of competence and overestimate the competency of others. We mistakenly believe that because it's easy for us, it must be easy for everyone, and therefore we're merely average. 

That's interesting. But at first blush it feels inherently opposite to what's been labeled as "the expert blindspot."

According to a 2003 article in American Educational Research Journal, Expert Blindspot Among Preservice Teachers, authors Mitchell J. Nathan and Anthony Petrosino put it this way:

“In this article, we investigate the ‘expert blind spot’ hypothesis—the claim that educators with advanced subject-matter knowledge of a scholarly discipline tend to use the powerful organizing principles, formalisms, and methods of analysis that serve as the foundation of that discipline as guiding principles for the students’ conceptual development and instruction, rather than being guided by knowledge of the learning needs and developmental profiles of novices.”

Phew. But in other words, subject matter experts (SMEs) tend to create a curriculum built on the way their field of study and discipline is organized and constructed, rather than building around the actual learning needs of the students. It's a hazard of being an expert: You tend to underestimate your competency, and overestimate the competency of others. The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again.

Essentially, this paper is looking at the very concept my girlfriend and I were discussing in our post-math-apocalypse chat. Sometimes, experts aren't that great at teaching what they know.

How teaching works

This isn't really something to become panicky or up-at-arms over. By no means are Professors Nathan and Petrosino suggesting that experts shouldn't be teachers, and neither am I. In fact, expertise in a subject is pretty much essential to being able to teach that subject. At issue here is the way the curriculum is organized. 

The problem that my girlfriend and I perceived with math majors becoming math teachers was, essentially, that these guys are complete experts in the field of math, but not necessarily in the field of teaching math. They knew everything they needed to know about quadratic equations and expressions of dividing rational expressions (which I just had to look up), but the framework in which they understand that material isn't established for the novice—the student. And rather than first creating that framework, building the foundation for understanding math, some math majors (or majors in any subjects—not to pick on math majors) assume competency and teach the concepts without preamble. 

But education doesn't work that way.

I think it's time for just a smidge of background—

I have a Masters in Education, as well as undergraduate degrees in English Literature and Communication. I also written professionally since I was twelve years old.

I taught both public and private school for a few years, and taught as an Adjunct Professor of Writing for a few more. My expertise is in writing and literature and communication, but also in education itself. I know the "tricks of the trade" for coaxing students into learning. I am, essentially, an authority on pedagogy, as well as on my specific fields of subject-matter expertise.

In other words, I know how to teach, and I know the subject I'm teaching. So I can tell you, from personal experience, that "teaching" and "subject matter expertise" are two very different disciplines and skill sets.  

When I taught Developmental Writing in a college environment, I went in knowing—knowing—that I had this. To that point I'd been both an educator and a writer for years. I knew my field, and I knew how to teach. But I wasn't prepared for the challenges of teaching everything I know about writing to a group of bright but untrained and undisciplined students who lacked even basic knowledge of grammar or mechanics. 

My first few classes went right over their heads.

In other words, now it was me, the expert in writing and pedagogy, who wasn't teaching according to the learning needs of the students. I was the math major teaching math. Metaphorically. I stink at math. 

But I had a job to do, students to reach, and writing to teach! So I regrouped. I looked at where the students were, what basics they were missing, and I started from there. And so I found myself, at the college level, teaching the same basic grammar skills as would be taught to students in a 1st grade classroom. "A noun is a person, place or thing." "Capitalize the first letter of your first and last name, always." "A sentence contains a subject and a verb." 

No kidding.

I was hired to teach these kids to write better essays at the college level, but their learning needs required me to step back and start from something far more foundational. So in addition to addressing their individual learning styles and modalities, I had to get them thinking in terms of what writing is at it's most primary level.

My expertise could have gotten in the way. It did, actually, when I first started. And so I had to change my thinking and come at this with a "beginner's mind." I had to re-examine my own expertise and start from the beginning. And that's challenging for an expert. It can be as difficult as being a complete novice in something yourself. 

Which, at that point, you are. 

Experts may be novices at sharing their expertise

I brought up "beginner's mind" a couple of sentences ago. In Zen Buddhism, this is the core concept known as "shoshin." Wikipedia defines it this way:

It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin 

I'm no Buddhist, but I recognize wisdom when I see it. The ability to come at a problem with the mind of a beginner can give you a lot of advantages. You bring enthusiasm, curiosity, and intuition into the mix. Stepping away from your expertise for a moment can give you a new perspective on something that you may not have noticed before.

That, in a nutshell, is how I understand the "expert blindspot." 

In a way, experts are a bit jaded. We know our subject so well, it's all completely mundane to us. It's an instinct. A habit. It's automatic. 

Think about your drive to work, or doing a routine chore around the house. You often go on autopilot, and let your subconscious do the heavy mental lifting. You don't think about what it takes to climb into a car, start the engine, engage the transmission, apply just the right pressure first to the brake, then to the accelerator. You don't think about the nuances of using the steering wheel or the blinker or the horn ("Get outta the way, I'm trying to get to work!"). 

But slow down and teach that to someone else, and what happens?

Sometimes, we get irritated. We know this so well, why don't you? This is easy! Why can't you get it? The left pedal is the brake, and the right pedal is the gas! Sheesh!

Special note: I literally had to act out using the brake and accelerator pedals to write the previous sentence. 

And that's the point. The knowledge is so automatic to us, it becomes difficult to have to slow down and teach it as a process to someone else. We might know this by heart, to the point that our knowledge and skill come automatically, but when it comes time to articulate it to someone else we become novices ourselves. We're slower. We're frustrated. Our brains are running on sludge, and it makes our inner monkey mad.

Working around your expert blindspot

Working around this blindspot means taking a breath and calmly approaching the topic from the ground up. It means learning and mastering a new skill. Sometimes the only way to do that is to spend a lot of time on it, trying again and again. Another method is to seek out experts on that skill and have them teach it to you. It is, after all, learnable. 

The upside of the expertise blindspot is that, in addressing it, we become better authorities. Once we're able to better convey and articulate what we know about our field of discipline, we will be more readily recognized by others as an authority in that field. We teach, therefore we are teachers.

And that, I think, is at the heart of this month-long exploration into expertise and authority. It's emerging, slowly, that there is a difference. 

Being an authority means knowing your stuff, having the practical knowledge and experience to quickly analyze data and assess whether it fits into the paradigm of your expertise.

Being an expert, on the other hand, means that you are capable of clearly conveying that knowledge and experience to others, and you are recognized and acknowledged and even sought out for doing so. 

You know a problem and you can offer a solution. 

Does this negate my pervious definition? I don't believe it does, actually. Because again, this is still a conversation about relative concepts. We're still lacking a definitive criteria for measuring or judging or determining expertise and authority. We lack a criteria that doesn't depend entirely on the perceptions and/or assertions of both you and others. You're still an expert if someone says you're an expert. You're still an authority if you know more about a subject than everyone else.

Now the trick seems to be, "Know your competency, and know your blindspot." You can be a better expert and a better authority, if you're more self aware, and if you can think more like a novice.

The deep dive continues 

I'm continuing to dig in on this topic, and I'm still very interested in hearing what you have to say on it. So feel free to comment on this post, or visit my website at kevintumlinson.com to send me an email. Or even better, call me at 281-809-WORD (9673) and leave me a voicemail. I may even play it on the Wordslinger Podcast, and answer any questions you may have. 

Because we, my friend, are exploring this topic together. 

How to rob a bank with a lemon (Questioning Authority Pt. 2)

NOTE: This post is Part 2 in my month-long deep dive into exploring "expertise and authority." Go here to read the first post.

And get the whole series (as it progresses) here.

How to rob a bank with a lemon:First, choose the right lemon. It should probably be a big one. You might need multiple lemons, actually. Let's say three. Squeeze the lemon(s) into a receptacle. Maybe a big bowl. Something you can really get your hands into. Also your face.Using your hands, scoop the lemon juice out of the receptacle and spread it liberally over your face. It's recommended that you keep your eyes closed during this step. Your face is now completely invisible to cameras! This is due to a scientific principle we read once in an article about "things to do with your kids on a rainy day." Lemon juice can be used as invisible ink, only readable if you expose it to heat. So science. Stay away from heat sources.Walk into any bank, confident in your invisibility, and collect your loot! 

That's the plan McArthur Wheeler executed flawlessly in 1995, when he deduced that lemon juice was the key to walking away with all the money he'd ever need. He faithfully executed these steps (or similar ... I pretty much just made up the actual steps), and for good measure took a selfie with a Polaroid camera to verify his hypothesis. Somehow, through some hysterical quirk in 1990s-era technology, the photo proved him out. HIs face was obscured. His confidence was assured. 

McArthur Wheeler was now an expert of facial invisibility. 

Of course, his expertise led to folly (a phrase I've been dying to write). Because, honestly, lemon juice is not going to make your face invisible to security cameras. It might make you one of the most pleasant smelling bank robbers around, though. And it will give you a nice, zesty flavor when you go to prison. Mull that over. 

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

— Charles Darwin

 

 

 

This quote from Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, is kind of profound. It explains a lot, actually, about why Mr. Wheeler strode with confidence into not one but two banks that day, face dripping with lemon juice, assured of his iil-gotten wealth.

People tend to be a lot more confident about their own abilities if they're ignorant of their own limitations. 

We see this all the time in less larcenous circumstances. The guy who insists he can fix the clogged kitchen sink, only to make a huge mess because he knows nothing about plumbing. Or the woman who ruins a skirt while adjusting the hem because sewing doesn't seem all that hard. Or the kid who finds himself in over his head because he convinced his friends that he knew how drive a car.

We do this stuff. We overestimate our own knowledge and skill, or we underestimate the difficulty or complexity or even the improbability of what we're doing. We get confident, even when that confidence isn't justified.

A friend recently pointed me to an article on Wikipedia about the Dunning-Kruger effect (where, incidentally, I first encountered McArthur Wheeler's story). This is a "cognitive bias," or "a pattern in deviation of judgment" that was explored in a 1999 study conducted by David Dunning and Justin Kruger at Cornell University. As their report put it:

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. "

SOURCE: Pulled from the abstract for Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
APA PsychNET, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134.

Basically, it was a study of incompetence.

I know nothing about CV joints

People sometimes believe that they know more than they think they do about a given subject. They may have some experience with or exposure to the subject that was overtly positive and affirming, even if that experience or exposure wasn't complete. And this, unfortunately, gives some people the sense that "I got this. I'm naturally an expert at this."

I'm not going to lie, I have done this. I'm not going to say you have (but you have) because I'm no expert on you (but you have). But in general, humans can be a bit overconfident about what they actually know, and their own level of expertise, and that confidence can lead to disaster.

When I was in my 20s I owned a Mazda Protege. I bought it new, but got it at a discount because it had quite a bit of hail damage. To this day I'm not sure why I as ok with that. The discount wasn't that much. But a discount is a discount, and I've been a bargain hunter from day one.

This wasn't my first car, but it was the first one I bought with my own money. And so I was determined to take care of it, keeping it maintained and running like a Swiss timepiece.

Thing is, I'm not much of a mechanic. In fact, for a large part of my adult life I was what can only be described as "completely irresponsible" when it came to cars. This baffled my grandfather—the consummate shade tree mechanic who could (and would) fix anything himself. No matter how patiently he explained things to me, how lovingly he showed me the work in progress, it didn't quite click with me at the time. I just didn't have much interest. And this meant that I drove my cars until pieces started falling off of them.

After a few years of driving my hail-beaten Protege hundreds of miles a day between college, work, and home, the CV joints started to go out. So I turned to a good friend of mine—whom we will call "Joe" for everyone's protection and the sake of our friendship. He confidently told me how simple and easy it was to replace those joints. We could do it ourselves, save me thousands of dollars, and I'd be on the road again in a hour or two.

I paid for the parts, the fluids, and even dinner, and the two of us commandeered his father's driveway and tools (and a couple of his cigars) and got to work. 

Twelve hours later we finally figured out how to get everything back together. Sort of.

Over the course of those twelve hours, we ran into one problem after another. We neglected to put down a pan to catch the fluid as it leaked out, after pulling the CV joints free. We realized partway through that we had something installed wrong or backwards, and had to start over. We had trouble getting the brakes off and then on again. And, about three hours in, Joe says, "I have no idea what I'm doing." And a part of me died that day. 

We did rally. We got it together. We found a manual for the car, puzzled over the pieces, consulted mechanics at the local shop, and eventually we figured out how to do the work. Again, sort of.

From that day forward, the Protege had all kinds of weird issues and problems and quirks that never existed before. About nine months later I traded it in and got something else.

What went wrong here? Joe wasn't completely ignorant of mechanics. I knew from personal experience that he worked on his own cars, that he and his father even had a race car and a small "get around the ranch" vehicle they'd built from spare parts. He regularly told me about his mechanical prowess, about the work he'd just done on the race car, about the parts he just got in and was installing himself, his hands covered in motor oil that also, surely, ran in his own veins. 

The bad assumptions here started with my friend, obviously. He had worked on a couple of cars, mostly with assistance from his very knowledgable and confident father, and so he felt he had this. He knew what he was doing. He'd done it before. At least, he'd been present when it was done before, so he knew.

I made assumptions, too. I assumed that because he was doing work I wasn't competent in, he had to be an expert. I overestimated his level of competence because it was greater than my own. I assumed I knew the expert, that I had vetted him thoroughly. My confidence in my ability to asses the skills of Joe the mechanic was very high, and very misplaced.

The Dunning-Kruger effect was at work on both of us as we crawled around under that car, cursing about the most recent obstacle, and me getting more and more anxious as the hours went by. I was practically sobbing with worry and frustration as I drove home in my car the next day, brakes making odd noises and everything feeling slightly "off." 

The danger of claiming expertise and authority is that it may be built on assumptions like these. We may be fooling ourselves into thinking we know a lot more about something than we actually do, just because it seemed easy to us at some point. 

We're terrible at assessing our own competency

In the Dunning-Kruger study, the researchers determined that people scoring in the 12th percentile on tests of humor, grammar and logic tended to overestimate their ability in each, and estimated that they were actually in the 62nd percentile. In other words, though they scored very poorly, they were confident they had done much better than anyone else. If they bombed, it was because the information was highly specialized, so only an expert like them could even hope to get as far as they did.  

Inversely, the people who scored highest tended to underestimate their abilities. And here's where things get really interesting. Because the reason for the underestimation was the conclusion that if the task seemed easy to them, it must be easy for everyone. So they assumed they were merely average, rather than above average.

When people refer to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency is to focus on the aspect of incompetence, pointing out that most of us think we're more competent than we actually are. We think we're funny. We think we're technically skilled. We think we're compassionate. But according to Dunning-Kruger, we're a terrible judge of our own competence in all of these things. Because either we are actually incompetent and think we're not, or we're completely competent but think we're average. 

But wait ... there's hope! Because Dunning and Kruger also noted that with education, we can become better at assessing our own level of competency even if we do not improve in the skill we're trying to master.

In other words, once we know how ignorant we really are, we're better at estimating our level of ignorance.

That's not a new concept at all. In fact, embedded in the Wikipedia article that sparked this post are several quotes from some of the most respected figures in history:

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”

— Confucius

“I know that I know nothing.”

— Socrates

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

— Bertrand Russel

“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole.”

— Shakespeare

Four geniuses of history, one theme: We're smarter when we know that we don't know everything. 

So what does the Dunning-Kruger effect mean for expertise and authority? 

It doesn't change the intrinsic and essential definitions we already have. But it does caution us to pause and re-examine what we actually know versus what we think we know. 

If you are being approached for your expertise, then you are at least recognized for you competency by someone other than yourself. That's good. But it doesn't automatically mean you are the most competent expert. It means you are trusted as a source by that audience, that you do have some special knowledge and experience, and that you are capable of relaying that competency in a way that people value. 

The danger comes in assuming we know everything about our subject. When we decide that, because we are experts, all we know is all there is to know, we can end up in prison with lemon juice on our face.

Likewise, don't assume that just because something comes easy for you, it means that it is easy. Your knowledge and experience are different than that of anyone else, always. Your perspective is different. So you may have inside information that is missing from those around you, even if they happen to be experts in the same field. 

That's why you can read three books written by the biggest experts in a field and potentially know more about a subject than those experts themselves. Possible? Yes. Likely? Maybe not. But the possibility is the point, after all, and you can at least be confident that you are much more of an authority on the subject than the person who has read no books or spent no time in research.

The takeaway from this is that we are often poor judges of our own competency in a subject. So the safest bet is to assume that we don't know everything, to accept that ignorance as a challenge to improve, and to accept that challenge as part of our daily work. We can still be experts and authorities—and maybe even better experts and authorities—if we acknowledge our own shortcomings and work hard to overcome them.