The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

There is now a whole area known as expert systems. The idea is you talk with some experts in a field, extract their rules, put these rules into a program, and then you have an expert! Among other troubles with this idea is that in many fields, especially in medicine, the world-famous experts are in fact not much better than the beginners! It has been measured in many different studies! Another trouble is experts seem to use their subconscious, and they can only report their conscious experience in making a diagnosis. It has been estimated it takes about ten years of intensive work in a field to become an expert, and in this time many, many patterns are apparently laid down in the mind, from which the expert then makes a subconscious initial choice of how to approach the problem, as well as the subsequent steps to be used.