On the Inherent Fragility of Expertise

The things that help us gain expertise on a topic eventually become our liability. The world keeps changing so our expertise is continuously fleeting. It has an inherent fragility bound to underlying beliefs and assumptions. We risk becoming a bottleneck to ourselves and others. At worst, our beliefs can become outright wrong. Though expertise can be made robust if we keep questing and testing our own beliefs and assumptions repeatedly.

Expertise

Expertise is the discovery about the inner workings of a topic and a set of skills to operate with. Expertise is akin to navigating a domain of knowledge. The domain is a terrain of all its underlying concepts, component and their interplay and our expertise is the map. An expert navigates the map, lays down all known paths and recommends a particular pathway. Experts are navigators. They know the pathways and have walked these paths many times. Through a combination of training, relentless trial and error and accumulated experience they have mastered the map. Their expertise is validated each time they successfully navigate the terrain.

The Fragility of Expertise

Some experts have better maps than others. They fare better. however, the world is changing all the time and thus the terrains are continuously evolving. Sometimes, there are tectonic shifts and the terrains are no longer recognisable and our existing maps mislead us. We need a fail-proof to ensure we are able to detect changes in the terrain. We need maps for both navigating and wayfinding.

Navigating vs Wayfinding

Navigation is exploiting the known, wayfinding is exploring the unknown. Navigation is using Google Maps, wayfinding is being dropped in an uncharted forrest. Navigation rewards efficiency and productivity. Wayfinding requires resilience and sustainability. Drop a London cabbie in a random forrest and see them wiggle. Expertise requires both strategies.

Explorers love traversing new terrains. They are the way finders who chart the first maps. Explorers also learn from other explorers, incrementally improving these early maps till they become suitable for exploiters to navigate upon. Exploiters take these terrains for granted and master the maps. Though their specialty is in navigating the maps and not charting out terrains. They are optimisers and they value efficiency and productivity.

There is a place for both exploration and exploitation. For a known terrain, its better to start off from established maps and learn to navigate. We gain expertise by learning these maps from others. Though if we internalise the maps without questioning the terrain, our expertise becomes brittle and risk becoming irrelevant. We further lose our way when we rely on experts who are operating on outdated maps. Even worse, we are these experts who are not ready to accept that the terrains have changed.

Robust Expertise

Wayfinding is universal, it applies to all terrains. While we can start off by building expertise by learning from others, we need better and additional tools of thinking to ensure that our hard earned expertise remains relevant and useful.

We are the sum result of our beliefs, their underlying assumptions and an inherent ego that guards our identity for self-preservation. Our upbringing creates the initial maps for us to navigate the world. These are our priors and its hard to test these while simultaneously being equipped by them. They are like lenses or frames we use to observe the world. Why do we have to wait till a life changing calamity or an external disruption lead us astray?

Adopt a Beginner’s Mind

When creative destruction takes place, it is often too late to adapt. Even if there is no external disruption, there is inherent value in truth seeking and open mindedness. Clarity is charting the boundaries of our priors. This is in knowing which evidence, information or reasoning will change our beliefs? True expertise is being open to update our beliefs. This is akin to wayfinding.

There are many reasons why navigating comes easy while wayfinding is not everybody’s cup of tea. First of all there is arguably the emotional labour in confronting our own ego and letting go of the leverage that comes from status, power or reputation. Secondly, there is a sunk cost fallacy. Why question our priors when we spent all the blood and sweat to build expertise in the first place? We don’t have to become a beginner again though we can adopt a beginner’s mindset. By taking every belief as mere hypothesis, we reduce the burden of being right without the self-preserving ego being all riled up. We also open up the possibilities of looking beyond the map and into the terrain itself. Its a practice of mindfulness and self-awareness, of paying attention to the surroundings beyond our tunnel visioning.

“In the Beginner’s Mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are only few.” Suzuki Roshi.

Ask DUMB Questions

I have an hypothesis: Dumb questions are labelled dumb because they are taken for granted and are assumed to be so. For many, asking dumb questions provokes social anxiety. One may feel risking their reputation and their persona. I find that dumb questions as tools for seeking clarity. The answer to my dumb question may be obvious to others but now im better informed as well. Better yet, the answers may trigger a discussion that benefits shared understanding on the problem space. Nevertheless, not asking the dumb question upfront will almost always be exposed later down the road. The only downside is to appear as an idiot though its better to appear an idiot early on than later. I have an acronym for this:

DUMB: Deliberate unmasking of beliefs.

Psychologists talk about the bystander effect. When in trouble, asking a group for help doesn’t work. Each one in the group generally assumes the other will respond. In return no one steps forward. When starting projects, often people rush towards the solution space assuming the problem is well understood and someone in the group knows the map. We can assume that no one knows the full picture and we can assume that without asking DUMB questions, we won’t be able to test these assumptions. Asking DUMB questions require taking yourself not too seriously. It relates back to guarding our reputation and assuming that asking DUMB questions ruins it. I believe (held loosely) that collective intelligence excels under two assumptions: 1) You can be wrong 2) Simultaneously others can be wrong too . Asking DUMB questions is smart, group think is dumb.

Strong Beliefs Held Loosely

As we are growing up we inherit beliefs from others. When we start a new domain, we learn from the established body of knowledge. We learn to navigate with the given maps. As we gain expertise, we may also develop some idiosyncrasies. These are internalised by the combination of all the beliefs and assumptions we inherited from nature, nurture and neighbourhood. Either of the inherited or the self-internalised beliefs and assumptions can be wrong. We can’t start from an ideal position (unknown) though we can course correct.

In statistics, the concept of Bayesian learning is just that. We start off with aprioris. These are our priors and maps we inherited from the world. Then as new information comes in, we compare and then adjust our understanding in the moment. Incrementally, we morph our beliefs and assumptions towards our own. If the process remains consistent, we have established a good heuristic to navigate and way-find simultaneously. We can start off from anywhere and yet can find our way to the destination. It doesn’t matter if the terrain changes, we are relying more on the mechanism rather than the location.

A ‘strong belief’ is one you didn’t lazily inherited from others but rather you have clarity and conviction over it. You can articulate why you uphold a particular belief and you are aware which beliefs you delegate to social norms. ‘Holding loosely’ implies you update your beliefs as convincing new information emerges.

Consider the opposite, “weak beliefs, held tightly”. This in short, is tribalism. You do things because thats what your group adheres to or that is the way they were always done. You believe in how the world operates because that’s what your neighbourhood taught you. Your parents have the highest influence in forming these weak beliefs. You don’t test your weak beliefs under differing conditions, let alone under adversarial conditions. And when you hold them tightly, you are not willing to learn anything anymore. Your expertise becomes too specialised that you forget to look up! In statistics, your beliefs and assumptions are ‘over-fit’. They break at the slightest change of the terrain, the maps are fragile.

Such a navigator has traversed the map enough to dismiss any alternate routes they previously rejected. When the terrain changes, those dismissed routes may become viable options again. The navigator may not acknowledge this change. They may feel at a personal loss of authority. Hence they double down on it. Appeal to authority is a fallacy when we rely upon the narratives of people who hold only proxies like credentials, power or social status and not let their ideas be put to test. We all are prone to become such ‘experts’ or we can accept the fragility of expertise, seek clarity through curiosity and find new ways to walk the terrain.

On any topic, list down the assumptions and seek the experts to lay down theirs. The Wayfinders will reveal themselves!

Just Beyond Yourself

Must Enjoy: David Whyte’s Wonderful Poem