The Burden of Expertise

I imagine the idea of being an expert is a rather cool prospect. You’re the one person in the room who can interpret a phenomenon incomprehensible to others; you advance the corpus of human knowledge; you're acknowledged by a broader public, peers, and even people you yourself look up to.

Somewhere between gathering rudimentary knowledge on a subject and becoming a professor or chief executive, you become regarded as an expert on that subject. I feel like we are all on a path towards being an expert at some level in some very specific thing, though it may not be obvious whether we’re an expert, nearly there, or somewhere in between. 

Some would point to the 10,000-hour rule (which holds that one must devote 10,000 hours to a particular subject to become an expert). Others might say that general recognition by other experts suffices. For those of us who regard ourselves as being “somewhere in between”, it can be quite a conundrum to reconcile meeting people who can riff a lecturer's worth of an answer off to a question on one end, and having to break introductory, perhaps obvious-to-you concepts down to the uninvolved people at the other end.

It seems somewhat inherent to possess the confidence that your knowledge and skills surpass a certain benchmark. It's rather hard to be perceived as an expert if you don't possess an “I know what I'm doing” attitude. With growing knowledge of what you do not (or cannot) know and the amount of new information being added, such an attitude strikes me as increasingly uneasy to maintain over time. Especially when it comes to broader public perception, a bit of optics, and perhaps theatrics, might sell your expertise better than the amount of citations you can throw behind a claim. 

Now let's say you've achieved expertise, by whichever metric. What exactly is expected of you now? What does the acknowledgement of yourself as an expert, be it by a broader public, or your friend group, entail about the assumptions such groups have made about you? I'd argue it's not all prestige and praise.

An expert is not an omniscient deity. Be it an economist predicting the future state of the labour market, or a scientist pondering over how their recent findings clash with established understandings, at least some expert statements are going to be wrong. If we act upon their prophecies only to suffer, we’re naturally bound to blame the experts. We can plead ignorance: “They’re meant to be the experts on this”. Even if we don’t expect gospel, there is a threshold where a certain mistake is condemnable: “The expert should have known better”. But then we are probably also insufficiently knowledgeable to determine this threshold.

Another potentially pressing issue is that the expert’s level of knowledge might be greatly irrelevant to their perception of expertise. If a layperson (relative to a specific subject) is unconvinced of someone’s expertise, then they cannot be convinced of said expertise by showcasing their knowledge and understanding, for the layperson does not have the knowledge and understanding to discern the expert’s incomprehensible babble from any other. We could perhaps circumvent this issue if we were entirely rational beings, allowing the experts to walk us through the facts, methods, validations, assumptions and so on. 

But we are not. The scientific method, or any other methodology, isn’t inherent to us, we have to be taught these things. Beliefs based on evidence or reproducibility are not the dominant forces by which knowledge has been spread throughout time. Factors like personal experience, things “making sense” and sociocultural norms have been, and still are, major factors in whether we believe something. If the expert or field clashes with our beliefs, the easier choice is to conclude that they are wrong. This conclusion is even easier to make through the interconnectability of the internet, where a fringe belief that would've usually been contained to oneself or a very few people (a sizeable cult if you're lucky) 50 odd years ago would now find a home on digital fora, with thousands of believers, and potentially tens of willing martyrs.

We implicitly ask experts not only to be apt in methodology and knowledge, but also to share our broader outlook on life. What I mean is that we want them to agree with what we perceive to be legitimate sources, be amenable to our preferences and desires, disbelieve what we disbelieve; they cannot clash with our perception of the world. Otherwise, they're corrupt, or they have nefarious interests, or they're unserious, or whatever else. I believe it takes active cognitive work not to reflexively disqualify experts whenever we feel averse to them (aside from the case of being blatantly wrong). With the amenities of the modern world, this work is exacerbated, and a growing distrust in experts is almost a natural outcome. 

With all of this in mind, being on a path towards becoming an expert in a field is a scary prospect. The burdens loom wearily; getting something wrong, or not being able to communicate your knowledge adequately, or being branded as a nefarious agent are all things that seem both very likely to happen at least once, and a disqualification of all the work, study, and practice you've done beforehand. Your work could be undone by someone far less competent, someone with an agenda, or someone who doesn't even really care. 

Enjoy your studies.

Hubert is a blogger for DUB. The opinions above are his own and do not necessarily represent those of DUB. If you would also like to have a blog on DUB, get in touch with us: dubredactie@uu.nl