Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.
I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.
There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he:
- did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem
- did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)
- had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through given that
- his final answer was very, very wrong
- in fact, it was wrong by 26 orders of magnitude
- and he didn't have the skill to notice something was wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix it up)
- also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that he's complaining about this "indignity") who was
- somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st century despite being under 30 (seriously??)
So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll choose who I trust.
It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.
> Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that there is high variance between domains as to the variance within the distribution of knowledge. Your last sentence is where I really disagree. There is a big difference.
But I think for the general person, there's 2 things of note: 1) just because you should be wary of an expert talking outside their niche (but inside their broader domain), doesn't mean that their opinion is equal to that of a layman. I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh. Look for nuance and you'll increase the likelihood of finding the expert. 2) It is easy to confuse expert talk with arrogance or pretentiousness. It is also easy to be that way when talking to a layman as the nature of those conversations will never be between peers, but more akin to a teacher and student. The two parties are not equal, but we're primed to treat any non-academic setting conversation as if we are. The experts often have serious doubts and are far more self-conscious than they appear. You just won't see that unless you're a peer and can speak the language, because experts are also specifically taught to defend their work and speak with confidence. Your hint is how they respond to critiques from other experts (but that's not easy to do accurately as there's probably a lot of nuance you aren't seeing and they are speaking a different language even if you understand all the words).
Everyone should always be skeptical though. That's for certain. But I just want to make sure we don't turn knowledge into a binary setting: expert vs idiot. There's a lot in-between and that matters a lot.
Right, you can always find somebody more expert than someone else. The level of specificity that some people expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen or so people in the world who can call themselves experts.
This is also why experts can often sniff one another out on online forums like this. There's a subtly to the language that is used which conveys an understanding of many deeper nuances than were a novice or even someone with a undergraduate would use to discuss a topic. There's a common misnomer that you don't understand something unless you can explain it to a layman (probably invented by a layman to justify their lack of understanding), but accuracy and complexity are tightly coupled. A concept with x% accuracy has a minimum of y complexity. But also knowing this can help you sniff out experts in fields you aren't also an expert in, but of course your classification accuracy drops since you are introducing more noise. Still, a useful guide if you're trying to figure out who to listen to. Obviously much easier said than done.
e.g. you might be a C++ expert, but also proficient in Python, and currently working professionally in Rust?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&hl=en...
A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very.
At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with Nasa’s use of aluminium lithium. In many ways a better alloy too. And, obviously, there were possible uses in rockets and so on (rather more in something like a Shuttle than in simple rockets though).
OK, so I get this email and it asks me whether this aluminium scandium is worth it, will it make my rockets lighter, asks Musk. No, not really, it’ll make them easier to weld but not lighter particularly. Which was pretty much the end of the exchange.
So, when people ask me whether Musk does tech stuff I would have to say yes. Because he tracked down a one man company that knew the straight answer to the question he needed answering. OK, you might not think that is engineering, preferring to think of it as people using a slide rule to work it all out themselves. But finding the bloke who knows the answer and asking them is engineering to me - it’s still getting to the right answer, isn’t it?
That's called management, not engineering.
I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.