Quotes About Expertise

The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates whose annual votes tell the organization what to do but not how to do it.…The only substantial resource that WHO has cultivated is information and expertise.

When someone has come to you for your expertise and your expertise has failed, what do you have left? You have only your character to fall back upon—and sometimes it's only your pride that comes through.

New technology also creates new occupations and requires new expertise, which further undermines the value of long experience and seasoned judgment.

Human judgment, even expert human judgment, falls well short of certainty.

Could a computer outperform an experienced specialist?

Medical care is about our life and death, and we've always needed doctors to help us understand what is happening and why, and what is possible and what is not. In the increasingly tangled web of experts and expert systems, a doctor has an even greater obligation to serve as a knowledgeable guide and

Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability. *

When other doctors needed an orthopedist for family and friends, they called on him.

Doctors with high confidence in a judgment they made proved no more accurate than doctors with low confidence.

People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own—whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves.

But experience brings a new role: I am expected to teach the procedure instead.

But it's not only the breadth and quantity of knowledge that has made medicine complicated. It is also the execution—the practical matter of what knowledge requires clinicians to do.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

he relied on me for surgical expertise.

Medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity.

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians.

The front row is occupied by the most senior surgeons:

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And

but the best surgeons retain a deep recognition of the limitations of both science and human skill.

science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

I asked Byrnes Shouldice, a son of the clinic's founder and a hernia surgeon himself, whether he ever got bored doing hernias all day long. "No," he said in a Spock-like voice. "Perfection is the excitement.

Surgeons are so absurdly ultraspecialized that when we joke about right ear surgeons and left ear surgeons, we have to check to be sure they don't exist

practice, however, matters aren't so straightforward.

The neurosurgeon had already gone over them in detail.