New Scientist - USA (2021-02-06)

42 | New Scientist | 6 February 2021

In the run-up to the UK’s 2016 EU referendum,

government minister Michael Gove infamously

said that the UK had had enough of experts.

Is expertise generally undervalued?

I think there’s been a very dangerous sense

growing that experts are sort of a needless

luxury. They’re telling us what to do, and

what do they know about it?

The coronavirus pandemic has brought

the value of expertise into sharp focus. In

medicine, there’s the mantra that a surgeon

knows how to operate, a good surgeon knows

when to operate and a really good surgeon

knows when not to operate. The same goes

for someone who comes to check your boiler,

or a whole host of other things.

Expertise isn’t just about knowing stuff and

being able to do stuff, but about having the

judgement to apply that knowledge in the

right way: to improvise, to bring accumulated

experience to bear on a new situation where

there may be no clear answers, but we need to

make decisions anyway. Governments and

tabloid newspapers have an instinctive dislike

of operating under conditions of uncertainty

because they want simple answers to

questions. If we dismiss the value of experts,

just pooh-pooh them and say we don’t need

them, we are depriving ourselves of something

crucially important.

Is part of the problem that we have developed

a very “them and us” idea of expertise?

There is that very unhelpful sense that an

expert is the same as an elitist. One of the

things that struck me working together with

and observing people in all different walks of

life is how universal the process of becoming

an expert is – and that, in fact, the same

process applies to us all, whatever we do or

are interested in. We don’t necessarily always

make it particularly far along the path, but

we all follow it, whether we’re learning a

language or to play a sport or a musical

instrument or whatever.

But there are also the experts we need

because they can do things that we can’t. It

might be flying planes or doing operations,

or advising us about pandemic lockdowns or

having sensible things to say about education RE

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“ Expertise isn’t

just about

knowing stuff;

it’s having the

judgement to

apply knowledge

in the right way”

during covid-19 – all these things are swirling

around at the moment, where we see

stupendous failures of judgement of various

kinds, which I think are very often because of

an unwillingness to accept the value of experts.

Part of it is because people haven’t made this

connection between other experts and what

we all do. An expert epidemiologist, say, may

have gone a long way along a particular path,

but they’re still on that same path we all are.

They’re not a completely different species – the

process itself is a universally human one.

In your book, you talk about the three stages

of becoming expert in something: apprentice,

journeyman and master. What’s the difference?

In the apprentice stage, generally somebody

else is taking responsibility for your cock-ups,

and also taking credit for your successes. You

have to spend a load of time doing stuff that

other people tell you, whether you like it or

not,  whether you think it’s useful or not and

whether you even understand it or not – and

you usually don’t. It can be boring, it can be

tedious, it can be frustrating, whether you’re

learning to take bloods in my case when

training to be a surgeon, making a stone

surface flat or smooth if you’re trying to

be a mason, learning tricks as a magician

or anything you can imagine.

But during that time, you find all sorts of

other things happen that you’re not aware of.

You come to understand the materials you’re

working with and what you have to do to work

with them. You understand how to occupy the

space you’re in, how to interact with other

people, how to work in a workshop or

community. And that takes a long time.

And as a journeyman and master?

As a journeyman, two very interesting things

happen. You change your focus of attention

from yourself and the things that you’ve

learned – the exams you’ve passed, the stuff

you want to show off – to whoever your work

is for: an audience, patient, customer or client.

Simultaneously, you’re moving to becoming

an independent person with your own

individuality and style, what jazz musicians

call “voice”.

Expertise is built on physical

experience - whether in

learning to interpret graphs

or play an instrument