One of my online communities recently experienced a thread of emails complaining about ‘experts’ and the problems they cause.
I offered another perspective…
Part of the problem lies not with the experts, themselves, but with the role expected of them (or assigned to them) by others.
Too often they are asked to provide THE answer, because we want clarity and simplicity where it doesn’t exist.
When I think back about my medical training, I see a repeating and often fractal pattern. For almost every subject I studied, the more I learned and the more ‘expert’ I became, the more aware I became of the incongruous details, the exceptions, the adjacent variations, the nuances. This was perhaps not surprising for cutting edge areas of ongoing research but it was also true for simple and fairly static fields like gross anatomy.
The same has been true for my hobbies. The more I know about guitar, photography, and woodworking, the more I discover that every question is likely to have layers of answers and every best practice has alternatives. I have come to think of knowledge as contained within a circle where the circumference represents the interface between what I know and don’t know. As my circle of knowledge grows, the circumference grows. The more knowledge I gain, the more areas of ignorance appear in my field of vision.
Perhaps, instead of bemoaning the many issues attached to expertise and those who acquire it, we should direct our attention to when and why complexity and nuance make us so uncomfortable. We should revel in the opportunities for growth proffered by uncertainty and ignorance.