Difference between expertise and expert

There seems to be a “war” going on for expertise right now. in previous essayI explained my collaboration Together with my colleagues Robert Hoffman, Ben Schneiderman, and Bob Wares, we have identified five distinct communities that are actively questioning whether expertise matters or even exists. These five communities are: evidence-based practice; heuristic Prejudice, judgment and decision making researchers, social psychologists, information technology. This last group believes that generative AI and large-scale language models such as ChatGPT are sufficient to handle complex tasks, are more efficient than most humans, and are often more capable than skilled humans. Because of its position, it is the most active.

I do not agree with these opinions. I think they ignore some important strengths that people, especially skilled decision makers, bring to the job. in another essayBen Schneiderman and I have identified some of the key strengths: frontier and speculative thinking, acceptance of personal responsibility, and networking and coordination, especially where it depends. take a perspective.

One argument I’ve heard from people who are skeptical of expertise is that there are no definitive criteria for who is an expert. So how can we talk about expertise if we don’t know who has the expertise?

I agree that there are no clear criteria for identifying experts. In yet another essay, I counted 7 criteria: Successful track record, respect of colleagues, years of experience, quality of tacit knowledge, reliability of judgments and recommendations, qualifications, recognition of recent mistakes. I have concluded that each of the seven has its limitations. I don’t think there is a gold standard for determining who is “really” an expert. When you have to decide whether to trust the judgments and recommendations of so-called experts, it is very important to determine who the experts are.

However, I think there is a difference between expertise and identifying an expert. In any field, people succeed by increasing their expertise. It doesn’t matter whether you call them experts or not. The important thing is that they become more skilled and more effective. The basis of accurate intuition is expertise. Danny Kahneman and I wrote in 2009: decision making Those that ignore intuitive skills are seriously conspicuous. ” (page 525).

So don’t get sidetracked by the question of who really is the expert. Almost all the people I consider experts usually reject that title, and they are acutely aware of their own limitations. I think even if we remove the word “expert” from the dictionary, we should still value it. expertise And find ways to promote it. We have to find ways to help people acquire more expertise faster.

We must be wary of those who criticize the concept of expertise. We especially need to be wary of systems promulgated by governments. artificial intelligence Communities that violate users’ expertise. If we fail to recognize expertise within a task or domain, especially the tacit knowledge that underlies expertise, we may miss how AI systems degrade our expertise.

The Naturalistic Decision Making community is at the forefront of defending and developing expertise. Tools and training methods It is about promoting expertise and countering the various groups and traditions that seek to ignore and downgrade it.