On Experts and Expertise

I experienced this recently while looking for a mortgage on my new flat. With thousands of products available and a limited knowledge of the market, I turned to an independent financial advisor for help. The financial expert helped evaluate my needs and whittled the choice down to just two or three products. With the right tools, I probably could have done this myself. However relaying on the expertise of another person made my choice much easier and helped mitigate a certain amount of risk.

The crucial aspect of being an expert is experience. We can all open a book and learn about a topic, but that doesn’t make us an expert. Expertise comes from repetition–from doing something over and over again until it becomes second nature. Experience lets us develop patterns, hone our skills and learn from our mistakes. Experience counts.

To get the most out of an expert, you need to trust their experience and relinquish a certain amount of control. This doesn’t mean that you should follow their ideas blindly without any critical analysis of your own. However when faced with a decision about which you have little or no experience, it makes sense to weight the result in favour of the expert.

Unfortunately it’s actually quite difficult to relinquish this control, especially if you’ve not worked with the expert before and can’t vouch for their results. I found this to be the case when looking for a mortgage–constantly asking the expert questions to sound out their expertise and give me enough information to make a decision. Often the real benefit of hiring an expert is in the transmission of their expertise to you.

The use of experts can help increase the chances of success, but they are no means infallible. This is because experts are simply offering an expert opinion, and while their opinions may be more informed than most, they are still just opinions. In the world of the expert, it’s not uncommon to see two experts disagree quite vehemently on a subject. This could be down to the different experiences they have had, or simply because they have chosen to interpret those experiences differently.

Sadly it seems that being an expert these days has less to do with experience and more to do with the strength and simplicity of their message and how well it resonates with the listener. We like our experts to have simple, definitive answers to essentially complex questions. How else can we explain why people listen to the advice of quacks like “Dr Gillian McKeith over real doctors with years of medical training and experience?

If an expert pronounces something as fact, we tend to take them at face value. After all, they’re the experts right? If they turn out to be wrong, we’re safe in the knowledge that we trusted somebody better informed than us, and it was their mistake, not ours. Conversely, we mistrust experts who aren’t willing to give a definitive answer or one that fits with our own mental models. We dislike any form uncertainty and see this as a sign of weakness, rather than a true assessment of the situation.

This has lead to a dangerous form of rhetoric that values the singularity and strength of an expert’s opinion over the accuracy and validity of their assessment. People seem to admire sticking to a set of generic and intractable beliefs over the ability to critically analyze and understand a problem from numerous angles. As Albert Einstein once said, we should "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." Sadly a lot of experts focus on the first part of that statement, without fully understanding the important or significance of the second part. Our craving for simplicity over complexity seems to come at the detriment of proper understanding.