What Makes You an Expert?
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.…[It is] nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Isaac Asimov
Of course, no one would label their ideas as ignorance. We often hear this recast this as “my opinion is just as valid as yours.” Everyone has an opinion and nothing more. Expertise deserves no special respect or deference. Experts are elitist and Americans are egalitarian. No matter that that distorts the objective meaning of egalitarianism. Don’t hector me about trivial details.
Foundational to this shift is a sea change in the average person’s perception of reality. For several thousand years “the world [was] regarded as having a given order and a given meaning” and learning required a submission to these. For the past several hundred years we have been moving to a view that “sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.” [Trueman, p. 39]
This individualistic view of reality is the potential death knell for objectivity and for transformational learning—more on that a bit later.
Let’s explore what expertise is and why we should (and sometimes do) respect it.
Tom Nichols in his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, helpfully lists some attributes of experts.
Education accompanied by credentialing
Talent
Successful experience
Peer affirmation
Acceptance of correction by other experts
From the standpoint of deep and durable learning, I would make one major addition. Experts demonstrate a command of a clear framework of logically-connected concepts which are the basis for their reasoning. Experts have moved far beyond the fact (information) stage into a deep form of knowledge as justifiable true belief. They manifest understanding of powerful ideas and, often, wisdom in applying them in the near term and in the long game.
Experts demonstrate a command of a clear framework of logically-connected concepts which are the basis for their reasoning.
It is precisely this attribute of deep logical cognition that is profoundly absent in the arm-chair quarterbacks who take pot shots at experts in public health (to cite one currently favorite target). Most who claim to “do their own research” are in fact shopping for prepackaged opinions authored by mavericks who echo the confirmation bias of the critics, but with greater sophistication than most critics can muster.
Mavericks generally have pseudo-credentials. One of the most prolific critics of everything from GMOs to COVID vaccines is Joseph Mercola who holds a D.O. degree. No offense but a D.O. is not a qualified expert to critique mRNA vaccines developed over decades by Ph.D. molecular biologists. One thing that the current pandemic has highlighted is the halo effect granted to physicians and scientists who are speaking outside of their actual expertise—when they articulate non-mainstream views.
Experts regularly critique expertise, contrary to popular disparagement of expert group think and epistemic stagnation.
An example, looking back over our shoulder, is the shift in medical perspective about the nature of disease. In the time of George Washington, the dominant view was that disease was due to an imbalance of the “humors” of the body—the fluids like blood and bile and sweat. Because of this erroneous view, the best physicians decided to bleed the president multiple times and at least accelerated, if not outright caused his death.
The multiplied failures of the misguided humoral view caused it to be replaced in the minds of many by the miasma view. This view tabbed poisonous vapors as major causes of disease. The disease malaria (literally “bad air”) was believed to be caused by the moist air in swamps and the summer evening haze in humid coastal climates. Of course, mosquitoes found “bad air” to be very attractive and they were the vectors of the protozoan parasitic disease we still call malaria.
The transition to the view we hold today occurred from 1850 to the early 1900’s. The work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch established the basis of the “germ theory” of infectious disease. This amply verified model holds that specific microorganisms are responsible for causing specific diseases. While this disease etiology was a powerful insight and this period is often called The Golden Age of Microbiology, the practical impact on individual cases of disease was limited because there were no antibiotics. There were major outbreaks in the world’s great cities of cholera and typhoid fever and these (and other infectious diseases) were responsible for a lifespan that was roughly half that of today in the U.S. Both diseases were eventually found to be the result of sewage compromise of water supplies. Chlorination of water and sewage treatment rapidly became the mainstays of what it meant to be a civilized city. By 1910 this sanitation infrastructure had begun to make a major impact on public health and life expectancy in New York City.
Experts changed their minds in substantial ways over about 150 years. They did so because their explanatory schemes collided with reality and didn’t allow them to explain, control, or predict disease outbreaks. Thinking must be accountable to reality. All opinions can’t be correct and weeding out error moves us toward a better explanation. We must get over feeling disrespected when we are merely wrong. Adult learning is primarily about conceptual change. We change our concepts when they are based on faulty assumptions or are misconceptions—at least we should.
We must get over feeling disrespected when we are merely wrong.
Transformational learning captures the spirit of growth that we must embrace.
“Overcoming limited, distorted, and arbitrarily selective modes of perception and cognition through reflection on assumptions that formerly have been accepted uncritically is central to development in adulthood.” Mezirow
This is not to say that everything we have learned is wrong and we must start back at square one, but we must be willing to examine what we think we know. This examination includes assumptions, concepts, logic, and evidence. The result may be confirmation, but with a higher degree of understanding of why our thinking is valid. On the other hand, it is certain that not all of what we “know” will pass the test. When our cognition is distorted by wrong assumptions or confused concepts, we must be willing to jettison those and know why they cannot be justified.
“Beyond the challenge of just getting students to pay attention, teachers find that students resist transformation--it necessarily threatens the student's current identity and worldview.”
AACU.org
I assume if you have read this blog post this far that you want to learn to discern. You don’t want to be manipulated by journalism that isn’t grounded in actual expertise. You don’t want to spout nonsense and infect others with it. Intellectual humility is all you need to take the next exit to sanity and justifiable true belief.
P.S. This is the last post for the first season. I will be taking off the month of December to get a jump on season two. I plan to resume blogging and podcasting in early January of 2022. I’ll start with an episode on how the brain learns and I hope you’ll join me then!
Isaac Asimov quoted in Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise, (2017), p. 1.
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, (2020), p. 39.
Joseph Mercola: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/technology/joseph-mercola-coronavirus-misinformation-online.html
Jack Mezirow, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning, (1991), p. 5.
AACU: https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/engaged-learning-are-we-all-same-page