The Knowledge

I came across an article on expertise (and the lack thereof) in Aeon a while back. The URL is telling, it says that "Real experts know what they don’t know and we should value it." Okay. I'll sort of grant that. So how do I, as a layperson, tell the "real experts" from the "ersatz experts, or even outright charlatans?" After all, if I had the subject matter expertise to know if someone was a real expert or not, I likely wouldn't often need to go to them for advise. And even if I did have a level of expertise that informed me of what I don't know, that, in and of itself, is not enough to inform me of whether someone else genuinely knows it.

The authors of the piece advice dividing questions into three categories (helpfully named levels one, two and three): those that anyone can answer with some time spent researching, those that require genuine expertise in order to answer and those that are effectively unanswerable.

Okay, so how do I determine what level a question falls into?

Knowing which questions fall into which category requires expertise.

So I need an expert in order to tell me if I need an expert to answer a question?

The key difference between these kinds of questions is ‘Would a competent expert well-versed in the relevant scientific literature be reasonably confident in the answer?’

But if I'm a layperson, how do I know this? This is another question that requires expertise; if I don't know the relevant scientific literature I can't answer the question.

And this goes back to one of the fundamental problems between laypeople and experts. Outside of a track record of good and/or bad advice, there's no real way for a layperson to quickly and accurately evaluate someone else's expertise.

In the end, the authors suggest that people with a track record of admitting to ignorance are better picks than those who are not. And there's something to be said for going with humility, even if it leaves the underlying question intact.

Being willing to take "I don't know" for an answer is helpful, but doing that requires only asking questions that can reasonably go unanswered. And that's really the difficulty. If someone needs an answer, "I don't know" isn't useful to them, and it's that need to know that leads them astray.