The Difference Between Expertise and Experts |
Currently, there seems to be a “war” on expertise. In an earlier essay, I described my collaboration with my colleagues Robert Hoffman, Ben Shneiderman, and Bob Wears, in which we identified five different communities that are actively questioning whether expertise matters or whether it even exists. These five communities are: evidence-based practice, heuristics and biases, judgment and decision researchers, social psychologists, and information technology. This last group has become the most vigorous as it positions generative AI and large language models such as ChatGPT as sufficient for handling complex tasks, more efficient than most humans, and in many cases more competent than even skilled humans.
I do not agree with these views. I think they ignore some key strengths that people, especially skilled decision-makers, bring to their work. In another essay, Ben Shneiderman and I identified some of these important strengths: frontier thinking and speculative thinking, acceptance of personal responsibility, and networking and coordination especially when it depends on perspective-taking.
One argument I have heard from expertise skeptics is that there are no definitive criteria for who is an expert. Therefore, how can we talk about expertise when we don’t know who has it?
I agree that there aren’t clear criteria for identifying experts. In yet another essay, I counted seven criteria: successful performance, peer respect, years of experience, quality of tacit knowledge, reliability of judgments and recommendations, credentials, and awareness of recent errors. I concluded that each of the seven had limitations. I don’t think there is any gold standard for determining who is “really” an expert. Determining who is an expert can be very important when we have to decide whether or not to trust the judgments and recommendations of a so-called expert.
However, I think that expertise is different than identifying experts. In all domains, people succeed by increasing their expertise. It doesn’t matter if we call them experts. What matters is that they become more skilled and more effective. Expertise underlies accurate intuitions. Danny Kahneman and I wrote (2009) that “a psychology of judgment and decision making that ignores intuitive skill is seriously blinkered.” (p. 525).
Therefore, we should not get sidetracked by questions about who is really an expert. Almost all of the people I might consider to be an expert typically reject that title, they are painfully aware of their own limitations. Even if we remove the term “expert” from our lexicon, I think we still have to value expertise and find ways to promote it. We have to find ways to help people acquire more expertise and acquire it more quickly.
We have to be on guard against those critiquing the concept of expertise. We especially need to be on guard against the systems promulgated by the artificial Intelligence community that compromise the expertise of their users. If we fail to appreciate expertise within a job or domain, particularly the tacit knowledge that underlies expertise, we may miss the ways AI systems degrade our expertise.
The Naturalistic Decision Making community is at the forefront of advocating for expertise, developing tools and training methods to promote expertise, and countering the various groups and traditions that seek to disregard and downgrade expertise.
References
Kahneman D, & Klein, G. (2009). Conditions for intuitive expertise: A failure to disagree. American Psychologist, 64, 515-526.
Naturalistic Decision Making Community.