Credentials in the field of study, such as advanced degrees do not correlate with expertise. Expertise is practiced skill and firsthand knowledge by doing not reading and memorizing about the skill or practice.
I can't really say for other subjects but I would say that for physics (my field) there is a decent correlation between the credential and actual expertise - particularly so for advanced degrees.
Of course, there are degrees of 'expertise' within that also. It's not too difficult to find people with degrees who have only the barest minimum of acceptable expertise alongside those who are really quite spectacular. Same credential, quite a difference in expertise.
I have a non-scientific method for detecting the expert whom I might trust.
A trustworthy expert is humble, for he is well aware of the soundness, or lack thereof, of each and every one of the assumptions upon which his work is based. And he goes to great lengths to communicate the uncertainties in his conclusions.
The real expert will give clear instruction on what could be done to contradict his conclusions. And that’s not just some high-minded sentiment, but a practical tool. Part of what I do to put food on the table involves troubleshooting complex systems, and over the years I have time and again seen the practical wisdom of doing just that.
Empirically, the more certain the expert, the more likely they are to be wrong (notice the appearance here of the word “likely”).
This was the very effective canary in the coal mine for “Covid”: the omnipresent, absolute certainty on display in the pop media. Observing this, I had strong feelings that something was amiss. Same with “climate change”. And “Ukraine”. And…
Oily, hyper-certain “experts” are harbingers of your wallet being emptied.
I don't think humility is really a defining characteristic. I'd say that in my experience super-ego was more dominant with quite a few cosplaying like they were the reincarnation of Einstein.
With true experts there's often a great deal of confidence. They are quite likely to be right, after all. An expert is usually never *trivially* wrong about their own subject. When they do get things wrong (and they do) it's usually for some interesting or subtle reason that isn't immediately apparent.
This is probably more true in a subject area like physics where 'right' and 'wrong' can be easier to determine. In something like medicine, though, things are much more complex and less bound by 'laws' that are amenable to calculation. The scope for error, whilst still appearing to be 'right', is therefore much greater. There's definitely scope for a bit more humility (or just plain honesty) in a field like medicine.
When you do meet an expert at the very top of the pile it can be quite humbling.
I was lucky enough to meet Adi Shamir at a conference and spend a fair bit of time talking to him. He's the "S" in the RSA crypto algorithm. He's super scarily smart. I've met lots of smart people, people very far above my own capabilities, but Shamir is in another league. He's also amazingly generous and even when he was basically telling someone they were wrong he never came across as puffing himself up or trying to knock someone down. He made an insightful comment at the end of *every* talk - despite the wide range of topics covered.
It was so very obvious that he significantly increased the IQ of a room just by walking into it. I'm sure he knew that himself (he is not dumb, after all) but he never *behaved* like some prima donna - something he would be entirely justified in doing.
I was talking to another cryptographer, himself widely respected and super smart, and he told me of the time when he'd talked to Shamir one night and explained his current research. Shamir just listened and asked questions. The next night Shamir came back to him and carried on the discussion only this time talking about all sorts of new ideas and ways to take things further. As this prof said - Shamir has assimilated everything and then taken it further than he himself had. In a single day.
Shamir was just passionately interested in stuff and he never made me feel stupid even though I am ridiculously far beneath his capabilities. There was no false modesty about him though - he didn't try to pretend he wasn't super smart, he just took everyone at the level they were at and didn't try to make them feel small - which is a regrettable trend amongst scientists.
“There was no false modesty about him though - he didn't try to pretend he wasn't super smart, he just took everyone at the level they were at and didn't try to make them feel small “
I think you pretty much described what I conceive might be the behavior of a humble man.
To my understanding, humility isn’t a matter of affect, it’s a matter of attitude — awareness of one’s own limitations. A humble man needn’t pretend he is something he’s not. False humility is passive-aggressive arrogance.
I didn't know that Shermer had fallen for the vax propaganda. Interesting.
Mind you, until covid, I would have been very dismissive of "anti-vaxxers". I was very firmly in the 'medical miracle' brigade. But the covid data that we could actually access (not the record level data we needed) pointed to something quite a long, long way from 'miracle' and so my position changed rather radically.
It's all about epistemic humility, isn't it? We human beings are (wonderfully) contradictory, and we live in a world that is diffifult to understand. If Shermer is sticking it to both the maskers and the unvaxxed, he might be very right in one case and very arong in the other, but he is overconfident in both. Let people wear masks (I still see masked people...), let them queue up for the latest intravenous refreshment, but leave me alone. It would be interesting to know how Quillette, which was quite an interesting publication in the late 2010s, got on this pro-vaccination track.
"Ethel round the corner..." That sentence did not go where I thought it was headed. Which was "deeper into the alley", nudge-nudge wink-wink.
There was an expert who said masks were bogus and worse than useless against air-borne viruses since the masks would induce a false sense of security (much the same as bicycle-helmets*). Dr Anders Tegnell, with his 15-20 years of actual work in the field of epidemics and pandemics, and his seat on the Swedish Armed Forces' scientific council.
Immediately, corporate and then state media found an absolute harridan of a histrionic woman (a professor of microbiology to boot) who'd alternate between fawning endorsement of dr Tegnell (when his statements was in line with The Narrative**) and screeching verbal bastinado when they weren't.
It was rather obvious that only Experts saying the Right Thing were allowed. However, most Swedes of my age are quite used to that stupidity, that only the media may decide who is correct and who is an EvilWrongBad-person (just as our German cousins, we have the word "feltänkare"/"Queerdenker", which really tells how prevalent the notion of media being the Ex Cathedra-arbiter of truth is in our cultures), and so we simply ignored "the experts"***.
Enough back-patting. Re-member**** Witzbold and I remarked on the "path of least resistance the other day? It holds true for politics and information as well as science: until it becomes a greater bother to protect lives than to risk them, the lives will be risked.
Or to use an old hobby-horse from my class: What came first - the car, traffic rules, traffic lights, zebra crossing, safety features, driving licenses, and why did things come into existence in the order they did?
Because all technology is always pushed to its technical limitations before artificial limits are imposed upon its usage, and the reason for that is a) you can't create limits in advance without hard data and b) it is always easier to do nothing than something until doing nothing becomes more unpleasant than doing something. Other good examples are sanitation in New York, or living conditions in 19th century East End of London. Or where to bury Cholera-victims in Stockholm in the late 19th century: the mass-grave is where it's always been, and underneath all the soil and quicklime, the bodies have turned into the same kind of mass of meat as in Flanders, and the Cholera-strain is still thriving down there, despite the lobbying of realtors and property-developers to be allowed to build apartment blocks on top of it.
Where was I? Ah, yes - asterisks.
*Generally, when helmet-laws come into effect the no. of accidents rise, while the severity of head injuries among cyclists drops. This is then confused as "less accidents happen due to helmets".
**Should be heard in the voice of The Critical Drinker, a scotsman doing movie critiques on Youtube; the drunker he gets, the thicker the accent. Often accompanied by MooLer of EFAP (Every Frame A Pause), a Welshman in the same field.
***It's a common joke that in Sweden we have (1) expert for everything, and only (1), since the media always go to the one person in any field who answer them "correctly".
****Re-member: to recollect something, and not the act of attaching a perviously lopped-off member.
Thanks again Rikard. I definitely think you should consider writing some of these contributions out in a longer format with your own Stack. You've got a much rounder and deeper knowledge base than I have particularly with regard to 'social' stuff. And it's also a case of "I'm dangerous. I have the knowledge and I know how to use it".
There's got to be some kind of happy medium between letting technology run rampant and damn the risks, and legislating the crap out of something to render it almost useless. We're definitely far too much focused on 'safety' these days.
When my eldest was pregnant (Granddaughter is just over 1 now) the list of foods she was 'allowed' to eat was shorter than the list she was - or so it seemed. I suspect much of this advice was based on some 'study' somewhere that had found a 1% increase in X if an expectant mother ate Y, or some such thing.
Hey, thanks for the endorsement! The reason I don't have a Stack is mainly:
If I did, there'd be more competition for readers and since there's a greater step to pop in on yet another Stack than read comments, I think fewer would read my ramblings.
As it is, I can piggy-back a ride here and there and get a word in edgewise then and now.
Also, there's a darker reason: Sweden does not have freedom of speech, at all. It is far worse here than in UK or Germany. Think DDR without the Wall and you're more right than wrong.
"Buyer beware". Pretty much the chief utility and application of the scientific method itself. You'd think most of those schooled and experienced in science (especially the applied sciences) would embody this skeptical and careful attitude constantly. Not so evidently. For many, it might just be an attitude only carted out for use on special holidays.
Given that non-scientists also have frequent, if not constant, occasions to be suspicious of the motivations and abilities of others (people being what they are), I bet you the scientific method came into use at least partially because of human deception, not to mention the chronic presence of adolescent-like, unjustified self-confidence in us hominids.
Also, don't know about your side of the Atlantic, but over here footnote numbers are placed after punctuation marks when occurring at the end of a sentence. (https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0020.html) I suspect this practice minimizes interference with punctuation-related decoding of sentence meaning.
The first person (I know of) to correctly state the 'scientific method' was a Persian guy back in the 11th century - Ibn Al Haytham. He used to tell people not to believe everything they read in books, or thought about themselves, but to *test* these ideas against reality. He didn't just talk the talk, but used it to great effect in his own optical studies. I think of al Haytham as the world's frist 'true' scientist.
Perhaps this arose from a suspicion of motivations, particularly with the books he read.
As for the footnote thing - I have no idea. I never really learned the rules. My mum said I taught myself to read and by the time I went to school I was already reading (kids) books for myself. By the time I was 11 I was devouring Agatha Christie's books for some reason (not literally, of course) and so I never bothered to learn the 'rules' in class - I just had hundreds of examples of what 'worked' on the page and so I drew on that.
To me, it 'looks' better to have the footnote before the punctuation. And that's basically it.
From one of the pieces of "absolute fuckwittery" that you cited...
"...we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction."
First of all, there is such a thing as "critical whiteness studies"? Said it once, I might as well say it again. THIS is why the Vulcans won't land! Words almost fail me but thank goodness you were here to provide them!
Credentials in the field of study, such as advanced degrees do not correlate with expertise. Expertise is practiced skill and firsthand knowledge by doing not reading and memorizing about the skill or practice.
I can't really say for other subjects but I would say that for physics (my field) there is a decent correlation between the credential and actual expertise - particularly so for advanced degrees.
Of course, there are degrees of 'expertise' within that also. It's not too difficult to find people with degrees who have only the barest minimum of acceptable expertise alongside those who are really quite spectacular. Same credential, quite a difference in expertise.
I have a non-scientific method for detecting the expert whom I might trust.
A trustworthy expert is humble, for he is well aware of the soundness, or lack thereof, of each and every one of the assumptions upon which his work is based. And he goes to great lengths to communicate the uncertainties in his conclusions.
The real expert will give clear instruction on what could be done to contradict his conclusions. And that’s not just some high-minded sentiment, but a practical tool. Part of what I do to put food on the table involves troubleshooting complex systems, and over the years I have time and again seen the practical wisdom of doing just that.
Empirically, the more certain the expert, the more likely they are to be wrong (notice the appearance here of the word “likely”).
This was the very effective canary in the coal mine for “Covid”: the omnipresent, absolute certainty on display in the pop media. Observing this, I had strong feelings that something was amiss. Same with “climate change”. And “Ukraine”. And…
Oily, hyper-certain “experts” are harbingers of your wallet being emptied.
I don't think humility is really a defining characteristic. I'd say that in my experience super-ego was more dominant with quite a few cosplaying like they were the reincarnation of Einstein.
With true experts there's often a great deal of confidence. They are quite likely to be right, after all. An expert is usually never *trivially* wrong about their own subject. When they do get things wrong (and they do) it's usually for some interesting or subtle reason that isn't immediately apparent.
This is probably more true in a subject area like physics where 'right' and 'wrong' can be easier to determine. In something like medicine, though, things are much more complex and less bound by 'laws' that are amenable to calculation. The scope for error, whilst still appearing to be 'right', is therefore much greater. There's definitely scope for a bit more humility (or just plain honesty) in a field like medicine.
When you do meet an expert at the very top of the pile it can be quite humbling.
I was lucky enough to meet Adi Shamir at a conference and spend a fair bit of time talking to him. He's the "S" in the RSA crypto algorithm. He's super scarily smart. I've met lots of smart people, people very far above my own capabilities, but Shamir is in another league. He's also amazingly generous and even when he was basically telling someone they were wrong he never came across as puffing himself up or trying to knock someone down. He made an insightful comment at the end of *every* talk - despite the wide range of topics covered.
It was so very obvious that he significantly increased the IQ of a room just by walking into it. I'm sure he knew that himself (he is not dumb, after all) but he never *behaved* like some prima donna - something he would be entirely justified in doing.
I was talking to another cryptographer, himself widely respected and super smart, and he told me of the time when he'd talked to Shamir one night and explained his current research. Shamir just listened and asked questions. The next night Shamir came back to him and carried on the discussion only this time talking about all sorts of new ideas and ways to take things further. As this prof said - Shamir has assimilated everything and then taken it further than he himself had. In a single day.
Shamir was just passionately interested in stuff and he never made me feel stupid even though I am ridiculously far beneath his capabilities. There was no false modesty about him though - he didn't try to pretend he wasn't super smart, he just took everyone at the level they were at and didn't try to make them feel small - which is a regrettable trend amongst scientists.
“There was no false modesty about him though - he didn't try to pretend he wasn't super smart, he just took everyone at the level they were at and didn't try to make them feel small “
I think you pretty much described what I conceive might be the behavior of a humble man.
To my understanding, humility isn’t a matter of affect, it’s a matter of attitude — awareness of one’s own limitations. A humble man needn’t pretend he is something he’s not. False humility is passive-aggressive arrogance.
"The word expert, like an autogynephile’s skirt, covers a multitude of sins."
Absolutely well put. I may have to use this quote in the future.
Thanks James
Please feel free to use it - no attribution needed, either.
Bravo
Thanks Antipodes
I am wondering if Michael Shermer is still vexed by the unvaxxed...
https://quillette.com/2021/08/14/vexed-by-the-un-vaxxed/
I didn't know that Shermer had fallen for the vax propaganda. Interesting.
Mind you, until covid, I would have been very dismissive of "anti-vaxxers". I was very firmly in the 'medical miracle' brigade. But the covid data that we could actually access (not the record level data we needed) pointed to something quite a long, long way from 'miracle' and so my position changed rather radically.
It's all about epistemic humility, isn't it? We human beings are (wonderfully) contradictory, and we live in a world that is diffifult to understand. If Shermer is sticking it to both the maskers and the unvaxxed, he might be very right in one case and very arong in the other, but he is overconfident in both. Let people wear masks (I still see masked people...), let them queue up for the latest intravenous refreshment, but leave me alone. It would be interesting to know how Quillette, which was quite an interesting publication in the late 2010s, got on this pro-vaccination track.
"Ethel round the corner..." That sentence did not go where I thought it was headed. Which was "deeper into the alley", nudge-nudge wink-wink.
There was an expert who said masks were bogus and worse than useless against air-borne viruses since the masks would induce a false sense of security (much the same as bicycle-helmets*). Dr Anders Tegnell, with his 15-20 years of actual work in the field of epidemics and pandemics, and his seat on the Swedish Armed Forces' scientific council.
Immediately, corporate and then state media found an absolute harridan of a histrionic woman (a professor of microbiology to boot) who'd alternate between fawning endorsement of dr Tegnell (when his statements was in line with The Narrative**) and screeching verbal bastinado when they weren't.
It was rather obvious that only Experts saying the Right Thing were allowed. However, most Swedes of my age are quite used to that stupidity, that only the media may decide who is correct and who is an EvilWrongBad-person (just as our German cousins, we have the word "feltänkare"/"Queerdenker", which really tells how prevalent the notion of media being the Ex Cathedra-arbiter of truth is in our cultures), and so we simply ignored "the experts"***.
Enough back-patting. Re-member**** Witzbold and I remarked on the "path of least resistance the other day? It holds true for politics and information as well as science: until it becomes a greater bother to protect lives than to risk them, the lives will be risked.
Or to use an old hobby-horse from my class: What came first - the car, traffic rules, traffic lights, zebra crossing, safety features, driving licenses, and why did things come into existence in the order they did?
Because all technology is always pushed to its technical limitations before artificial limits are imposed upon its usage, and the reason for that is a) you can't create limits in advance without hard data and b) it is always easier to do nothing than something until doing nothing becomes more unpleasant than doing something. Other good examples are sanitation in New York, or living conditions in 19th century East End of London. Or where to bury Cholera-victims in Stockholm in the late 19th century: the mass-grave is where it's always been, and underneath all the soil and quicklime, the bodies have turned into the same kind of mass of meat as in Flanders, and the Cholera-strain is still thriving down there, despite the lobbying of realtors and property-developers to be allowed to build apartment blocks on top of it.
Where was I? Ah, yes - asterisks.
*Generally, when helmet-laws come into effect the no. of accidents rise, while the severity of head injuries among cyclists drops. This is then confused as "less accidents happen due to helmets".
**Should be heard in the voice of The Critical Drinker, a scotsman doing movie critiques on Youtube; the drunker he gets, the thicker the accent. Often accompanied by MooLer of EFAP (Every Frame A Pause), a Welshman in the same field.
***It's a common joke that in Sweden we have (1) expert for everything, and only (1), since the media always go to the one person in any field who answer them "correctly".
****Re-member: to recollect something, and not the act of attaching a perviously lopped-off member.
Chin-chin!
Thanks again Rikard. I definitely think you should consider writing some of these contributions out in a longer format with your own Stack. You've got a much rounder and deeper knowledge base than I have particularly with regard to 'social' stuff. And it's also a case of "I'm dangerous. I have the knowledge and I know how to use it".
There's got to be some kind of happy medium between letting technology run rampant and damn the risks, and legislating the crap out of something to render it almost useless. We're definitely far too much focused on 'safety' these days.
When my eldest was pregnant (Granddaughter is just over 1 now) the list of foods she was 'allowed' to eat was shorter than the list she was - or so it seemed. I suspect much of this advice was based on some 'study' somewhere that had found a 1% increase in X if an expectant mother ate Y, or some such thing.
Hey, thanks for the endorsement! The reason I don't have a Stack is mainly:
If I did, there'd be more competition for readers and since there's a greater step to pop in on yet another Stack than read comments, I think fewer would read my ramblings.
As it is, I can piggy-back a ride here and there and get a word in edgewise then and now.
Also, there's a darker reason: Sweden does not have freedom of speech, at all. It is far worse here than in UK or Germany. Think DDR without the Wall and you're more right than wrong.
"Buyer beware". Pretty much the chief utility and application of the scientific method itself. You'd think most of those schooled and experienced in science (especially the applied sciences) would embody this skeptical and careful attitude constantly. Not so evidently. For many, it might just be an attitude only carted out for use on special holidays.
Given that non-scientists also have frequent, if not constant, occasions to be suspicious of the motivations and abilities of others (people being what they are), I bet you the scientific method came into use at least partially because of human deception, not to mention the chronic presence of adolescent-like, unjustified self-confidence in us hominids.
Also, don't know about your side of the Atlantic, but over here footnote numbers are placed after punctuation marks when occurring at the end of a sentence. (https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0020.html) I suspect this practice minimizes interference with punctuation-related decoding of sentence meaning.
The first person (I know of) to correctly state the 'scientific method' was a Persian guy back in the 11th century - Ibn Al Haytham. He used to tell people not to believe everything they read in books, or thought about themselves, but to *test* these ideas against reality. He didn't just talk the talk, but used it to great effect in his own optical studies. I think of al Haytham as the world's frist 'true' scientist.
Perhaps this arose from a suspicion of motivations, particularly with the books he read.
As for the footnote thing - I have no idea. I never really learned the rules. My mum said I taught myself to read and by the time I went to school I was already reading (kids) books for myself. By the time I was 11 I was devouring Agatha Christie's books for some reason (not literally, of course) and so I never bothered to learn the 'rules' in class - I just had hundreds of examples of what 'worked' on the page and so I drew on that.
To me, it 'looks' better to have the footnote before the punctuation. And that's basically it.
From one of the pieces of "absolute fuckwittery" that you cited...
"...we synthesize literature from Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory to articulate analytic markers for whiteness, and use the markers to identify and analyze whiteness as it shows up in an introductory physics classroom interaction."
First of all, there is such a thing as "critical whiteness studies"? Said it once, I might as well say it again. THIS is why the Vulcans won't land! Words almost fail me but thank goodness you were here to provide them!