How to find dragons, gargoyles and sometimes even experts
A real expert with expert expertise is a misnomer.
Give him too much knowledge and he starts finding irrelevant patterns everywhere. He starts struggling to discriminate signal and noise. He should be having wealth of wisdom on the right things and yet shun dismissing noise right away without allowing it to enter his head. And how could that be even humanly possible? Information is becoming more and more abundant, the demarcations between signal and noise are blurring.
Even that knowledge of the expert is not derived from first principles. There are more books on birds written by ornithologists rather than books on birds written by birds or books on ornithologists written by birds and so on, and so forth.
Give him too less knowledge, and hey, how do you even call him an expert then?
With the designated titles, The expert slowly moves up the organizational ladder, faster than the suffixes which keep getting added up to his name. Now that important suffixes are in position, and having attended a list of conferences on 'expertise’, he now gets the confidence to take the centre stage.
This is where the expert starts getting dangerous, until now all the papers he published where just read by other similar ‘experts’, but now the public is listening. Television prime time, Op-eds, you name it.
The host just has to mention the expert’s awards and acclaim, the degrees. Just about enough to woo the audience into a pattern of subconscious following, making them listen to whatever he or she says. Similar to how infusion of IIT, IIM or any such tags makes the investors sell their kidneys to support the ventures by the freshly-grad newbies.
'Coffee is good for health. Increases your life expectancy by x%’— Leading column in New Yorker mentions the statement by a so called coffee expert.
After a couple of months.
'Coffee is bad for health. Decreases your life expectancy by x%’ (Really, this could be anything)— Another expert from another expert-friendly paper like Washington Post.
After few months again, it could be coffee is good for health. Green tea causes impotency.
To cause, or to not cause impotency is not the question. The expert to have an opinion about everything ranging from impotency to cancer is the question, and is to be, in question.
This cycle could go on and on.
This pattern is quite similar to all those bankers who defaulted during the 2008 crisis, still not in custody. Even the Lebanese master chef, who hires a cook for his own meals. When there is no skin-in-the-game (Personal accountability for your actions i.e Eat your own food if you are a chef!), you can utter any nonsense to any audience and still come up clean. Any major goofup could then be stated as a 'small calculation error in the generally accepted formulae under these circumstances'.
Experts overestimate themselves, and underestimate the world surrounding them.
Add to that, the list of cognitive biases that could make the genuine expert less of an expert:
- Planning fallacy: Tending to underestimate the date of completion of any project, always leading to a loss of the exchequer.
- Statistics bias: Terrible in predicting events and outcomes even if the statistics say otherwise.
- Framing biases. (Eg. For the same match, ‘Italy won’ and ‘France lost' trigger different responses)
- Availability bias: Biases due to the ease of retrievability of instances.
The list could go on and on. There are tons of such fallacies which we naturally tend to fall a victim of. Daniel Kahnemann in his legendary book — 'Thinking fast and slow' talks about such heuristics and biases.
What’s even more confusing are the terms they use to define themselves. Let’s say, If they introduce themselves as the expert in the field of alien agriculture etc, we might immediately term it haughty and boastful. If he doesn’t call himself an expert, and use acoustically appealing terms like 'still a learner…’ or 'I am nothing’, we start seeing reverse psychology tricks in these gestures. As La Rouchefoucald beautifully puts it, A refusal to praise is a desire to be praised twice. Pretended modesty could be either a tool for indirectly reinforcing her/his ego with good qualities, or so the third person thinks.
Maybe that’s why it’s easier to spot gargoyles and dragons, atleast in the form of hallucinations rather than find an expert.
With expert expertise!
