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January 3 - February 25, 2024
When students become valued clients instead of learners, they gain a great deal of self-esteem, but precious little knowledge; worse, they do not develop the habits of critical thinking that would allow them to continue to learn and to evaluate the kinds of complex issues on which they will have to deliberate and vote as citizens.
No matter what our aspirations, we are bound by the reality of time and the undeniable limits of our talent. We prosper because we specialize, and because we develop both formal and informal mechanisms and practices that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.
Hofstadter warned. “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.”
Put another way, experts are the people who know considerably more on a subject than the rest of us, and are those to whom we turn when we need advice, education, or solutions in a particular area of human knowledge. Note that this does not mean that experts know all there is to know about something. Rather, it means that experts in any given subject are, by their nature, a minority whose views are more likely to be “authoritative”—that is, correct or accurate—than anyone else’s.
True expertise, the kind of knowledge on which others rely, is an intangible but recognizable combination of education, talent, experience, and peer affirmation.
But the scholar who has a real talent for the study of medieval literature not only knows more, but can explain it coherently and perhaps even generate new knowledge on the subject.
Talent separates those who have gained a credential from people who have a deeper feel or understanding of their area of expertise.
markets themselves winnow out untalented or unskilled would-be experts.
Experts stay engaged in their field, continually improve their skills, learn from their mistakes, and have visible track records.
There was no quick means to develop it as a skill: it took time, practice, and advice from more experienced experts in the same field.
Another mark of true experts is their acceptance of evaluation and correction by other experts.
wisdom in the old Chinese warning to beware a craftsman who claims twenty years of experience when in reality he’s only had one year of experience twenty times.
“is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.” (His fellow physicist Niels Bohr had a different take: “An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”)
Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.
And while there are self-trained experts, they are rare exceptions. More common are the people seeking quick entry into complicated fields but who have no idea how poor their efforts are.
Doing something well is not the same thing as becoming a trusted source of advice or learning about a subject.
No one’s knowledge is complete, and experts realize this better than anyone. But education, training, practice, experience, and acknowledgment by others in the same field should provide us with at least a rough guide to dividing experts from the rest of society.
We all have an inherent and natural tendency to search for evidence that already meshes with our beliefs.
the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.
key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong.
The ability to serve as a referee is often the role of a senior expert, since the ability to find and to recognize evidence that challenges or even disconfirms a hypothesis is something that takes quite a while to learn.
when facts conflict with our values, “almost everyone finds a way to stick with their values and reject the evidence.”15
Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise.
college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens.
students are taught to be picky consumers rather than critical thinkers.
Emotion is an unassailable defense against expertise, a moat of anger and resentment in which reason and knowledge quickly drown.
I expect them to learn how to formulate their views and to argue them, calmly and logically. I grade them on their responses to the questions I ask on their exams and on the quality of their written work, not on their political views. I demand that they treat other students with respect and that they engage the ideas and beliefs of others in the classroom without emotionalism or personal attacks.
if college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we’re indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix.
“counterknowledge,” in that it all flies in the face of science and is completely impervious to contrary evidence.
Unfortunately, people thinking they’re smart because they searched the Internet is like thinking they’re good swimmers because they got wet walking through a rainstorm.
Experts can’t respond to questions if most people already think they know the answers, nor does it help them to bring forward messages when so many people are already prone to shoot—or, at best, to ignore—the messengers.
To experts, I will say, know when to say no.
A professional whose expertise is deep but narrow might not be any better informed than anyone else on matters outside his or her own field. Education and credentials in one area do not guarantee expertise in all areas.
This is why scientists and scholars use footnotes: not as insurance against plagiarism—although there’s that, too—but so that their peers can follow in their footsteps to see if they would reach the same conclusions.
Here, we move from work that is fraudulent to work that might merely be slipshod.
experts overextend themselves because their trespass is into an area of expertise close enough to their own that a stretch of professional judgment seems reasonable.
Laypeople often feel at a disadvantage challenging traditional science or socially dominant ideas, and they will rally to outspoken figures whose views carry a patina of expert assurance.
If they remain passive recipients of information on a television screen, or if they actively search only for information they want to believe, nothing else will matter very much.
José Ortega y Gasset gave when he wrote Revolt of the Masses in 1930: “The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”24
