Quotes About Expertise

central problem is that birds rarely write more than ornithologists—Combining

People with an engineering-oriented mind will tend to look at everything around as an engineering problem. This is a very good thing in engineering, but when dealing with cats, it is a much better idea to hire veterinarians than circuit engineers…

And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

in spite of having spent some time in libraries I feel that I am truly an amateur in the subject matter).

Furthermore, people who make forecasts professionally are often more affected by such impediments than those who don't.

Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.

with skills that do not transfer outside of the very machine that they trained on.

Does the book industry suffer from the classical "expert problem" with the buildup of rules of thumb that do not have empirical validity? More than half a million readers later I am discovering that books are not written for book editors.

Double a man's erudition; you will halve his citations.

it is hard to disentangle ethics on one hand, from knowledge and competence on the other ...

Their strength is extremely domain-specific

3) The regulator's incentive to make complicated regulations in order to subsequently sell his "expertise" to the private sector.

That was my best investment—risk turned out to be the topic I know the best.

People don't walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it's the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did.

Real mathematicians understand completeness, real philosophers understand incompleteness, the rest don't formally understand anything.

It has been difficult for people to understand that, historically, skepticism has been mostly skepticism of expert knowledge rather than skepticism about abstract entities like God, and that all the great skeptics have been largely either religious or, at least, pro-religion (that is, in favour of others being religious).

The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you satisfied with your knowledge.

Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating—or, worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

Regulators, you may recall, have an incentive to make rules as complex as possible so their expertise can later be hired at a higher price.)

Expert problems (in which the expert knows a lot but less than he thinks he does) often bring fragilities, and acceptance of ignorance the reverse.

they were of no use to anyone outside IBM.

for someone to be able to help me, he had to be both a practitioner and a researcher, with practice coming before research.

They only knew enough math to be blinded by it.