04.19.07

Expertitis

Posted in Software Development, Buddha at 3:40 pm by BestFriendChris

ex·pert (ĕk’spûrt’)

I’ve been thinking a lot about experts lately. This came about, as most things do, from several areas in my life.

First of all, I recently read a book called Freakonomics. While I did enjoy the book (heartily recommend it in fact), I was really surprised by the disdain the authors had for “experts”. The bulk of the issues they had seemed to be focused on two things. Not only are some of these experts making unverifiable (or sometimes flat out wrong) statements about how things are, but everyday people are taking these statements as reality. For example: A parent hears on CNN (from an expert, of course) that a teenager killed his classmates because of a game. So, of course they do the sensible thing and not allow their kids to play violent games. While whether this is a good decision is debatable, but my point here is they are basing a decision of how to raise their child on the statements of a person that CNN has labeled an “Expert”. Statements that seem to make “common sense” are rarely even questioned.

The other area this line of thought came from was actually from the other end of the spectrum. At my job, we are actually hired by clients to be experts. On my first client, since I had the most experience with fit and subversion, I was labeled the “fit expert” and the “svn expert”. One thing to keep in mind is the extent of my fit experience was a two hour class a month before.

Now, I’ve never considered myself as an expert in anything. I was good, but expert? Anyway… One of the things I learned from this experience is that when you are the expert, people came to you when they have problems. Now, starting out I really only knew a little more than everybody else. As the project moved on with everybody asking me questions that I dutifully looked up, I really did become an expert on fit. An interesting thing started to happen, though. By being steeped in the domain, I started to be able to make educated guesses about what the problem they were experiencing without know for sure. Most of the time I was either right, or right enough that it got them to a solution.

I think that this is the point where problems can start to happen.

ex·pert·i·tis (ĕk’spûrt’-ī’tĭs)

When you, as some sort of expert, get to the level where you understand your domain fundamentally, it becomes really easy to believe that you are the domain. What I mean by this is you feel that you are effectively infallible when it comes to your expertise. Effectively infallible because, while you know that you very well could be wrong, you know you are able to recover from any mistakes you make. It’s a powerful thing having the kind of confidence like that.

Unfortunately, this kind of confidence doesn’t translate well. Laypeople (by this I mean non-experts) rely on experts to help them get thru or understand situations they are not able to handle themselves. What they want is a 100% correct, actionable answer, right now. The reality is that usually they will only 2 of the 3¹. Either it is correct right now, but so general as to be not useful, or it is correct and actionable… after 5 years of research. The most common case, however, is an actionable answer right now that is more or less correct… -ish. Some experts will never give an answer like that. They, of course, don’t end up on CNN. I believe that most of those who do aren’t bad people, however. They aren’t just trying to get famous. They just don’t see anything wrong with giving an answer that they personally think has a 70% chance of being correct. The problem is laypeople don’t have the experience to be able to recover from those mistakes, so they either go to another expert, or swear off experts entirely (not easy to do nowadays…).

Another example of this situation is when you take a car in to the shop. The mechanic is an expert in automobiles. So, when you hear a clicking sound when you are driving, he can make some informed opinions about what the issue is. He might take those opinions and decide on a course of action. Say, replace a belt. He doesn’t think about warning you that he’s only 70% sure because most of the time, in that situation, he is right. So, if you find out later that you still have the problem, you get mad at him and take it to a competitor.

ex·per·tec·to·my (ĕk’spûr-t’ĕk’tə-mē)

I think the important thing to take away from this is that Experts are people too (some of them at least). Rely on them when you need to, but keep in mind that they could be wrong.

Expert /= Infallible.

1. This is what I believe differentiates experts from other people. Experts usually get 2/3, non-experts get 1/3. Nobody get 3/3 consistently.

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