[HN Gopher] The Dark Side of Expertise
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The Dark Side of Expertise
Author : signa11
Score : 120 points
Date : 2020-01-24 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| davidw wrote:
| Somewhat of a counterpoint - I didn't make it all the way through
| this book, but I think it has an interesting thesis:
|
| The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established
| Knowledge and Why it Matters: https://amzn.to/3aHdIBB
| cbanek wrote:
| Just another study about expertise and how it can maybe not be
| beneficial:
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j1797
|
| From "Physician age and outcomes in elderly patients in hospital
| in the US: observational study":
|
| > Physicians' skills, however, can also become outdated as
| scientific knowledge, technology, and clinical guidelines change.
| Incorporating these changes into clinical practice is time
| consuming and can at times be overwhelming. Interest in how
| quality of care evolves over a physician's career has revived in
| recent years, with debates over how best to structure programs
| for continuing medical education, including recent controversy in
| the US regarding maintenance of certification programs.
|
| > Within the same hospital, patients treated by older physicians
| had higher mortality than patients cared for by younger
| physicians, except those physicians treating high volumes of
| patients.
|
| Basically, expertise can change, and if you don't keep up, you
| may be following outdated advice (which might not useful or even
| possibly harmful). I feel like the "dropping your equipment" is a
| part of this. You need to know the right tool for the right job,
| and sometimes doing the same thing for years might lead you down
| the wrong path.
| grawprog wrote:
| >I feel like the "dropping your equipment" is a part of this.
| You need to know the right tool for the right job, and
| sometimes doing the same thing for years might lead you down
| the wrong path.
|
| This happened at my last job. The company I worked for hadn't
| really changed their methods for about 7 years. Jobs went slow,
| we worked ridiculous amounts of overtime and mistakes were a
| regular part of the job. Over the years I worked there, I went
| through everything, replaced a few processes, convinced the
| owner to get newer more efficent tools and in the end, cut down
| the amount of overtime we worked to almost nothing, reduced
| actual human operater times on our machines from about 2-3
| hours per run to 20 minutes, and reduced mistakes and error
| from once a week or so to once in a blue moon.
|
| The thing is, I didn't do anything amazing or groundbreaking,
| they could have been operating that way for longer, they'd just
| found something that had worked and never bothered to try and
| improve their system. I was left alone for a few years and
| given free reign to do pretty much whatever I wanted, I got
| sick of being overworked, so I started figuring out and
| changing whatever I could to make things quicker, easier and
| better and it really didn't take much in the end to make a
| drastic improvement.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| > They then told the students to go up the hallway to a different
| room where there would be another test. What the students didn't
| know was that the test was actually in the hallway; the time it
| took each participant to walk down the hall was measured. It
| turned out that the students who had been exposed to the "elderly
| words" walked more slowly down the hall. Attendees might be
| inclined to call that "absolute crap", Brady suggested, but it is
| not, it is repeatable and even has a name, "the Florida effect",
| because Florida was used as one of the words associated with the
| elderly.
|
| I haven't ready widely on this, but from what little I have, most
| attempts at reproducing this and other priming experiments have
| failed.
|
| (see, e.g.,
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...,
| https://replicationindex.com/category/priming/ and
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/reproducibility-crisis...)
| lonelappde wrote:
| This is a write-up of a pseudoscience gobbledygook just-so
| stories that don't do justice to the complexities of the
| catastrophes they draw trite morals from.
|
| Here's a more thoughtful write up of the Civic center collapse,
| attributed largely to a large project with diffusion of
| responsibility and no one empowered the fix the problems they
| were held responsible for. https://eng-
| resources.uncc.edu/failurecasestudies/building-f...
| 0xff00ffee wrote:
| Wow: I lived in CT in 1978 and it was a wicked snowstorm: 10 foot
| snow drifts shut the coast down. I remember reading about the
| collapse in the New Haven Register.
| aaron695 wrote:
| This illogical talk is because of "Thinking, Fast and Slow",
| Chapter 4, which Daniel Kahneman has since questioned.
|
| http://www.decisionsciencenews.com/2012/10/05/kahneman-on-th...
|
| USCSB has great work place accident round ups (CGI, no gore). Of
| course Expertise is what makes the workplace safer, it has no
| dark side.
|
| Here's Murphy's law (If it's possible for it to happen, given
| enough time it will, so don't allow it to physically happen
| wherever possible over processes)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tflm9mttAAI
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| I don't buy this headline at all, the author does not prove there
| are actual experts behind this story at all...
|
| The primary story used here is that a sagging arena roof was
| consistently deemed safe by "engineers" (no proof of expertise
| provided) based upon their calculations...and this is somehow a
| "dark side" of expertise? It reads much more like ineptitude;
| that'd be like any coder here constantly ignoring terrible
| performance and numerous bugs and claiming their architecture is
| just fine.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| There's also an unexplained leap from "the calculations are
| correct" to "we should proceed as planned even though it's
| sagging when it shouldn't".
|
| Even if the engineers were infinitely arrogant and assumed
| nothing could possibly be wrong with the design, you'd expect
| them to react by saying "you must be building it wrong or using
| substandard materials", or something.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| This is the same annoying problem I found with Malcolm
| Gladwell's _Blink_. He draws this conclusion that we can
| trust our first impressions, but it 's really unclear how he
| comes to that conclusion: some of his evidence comes to no
| conclusion, and some of it directly contradicts that
| conclusion.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm starting to think someone was misled by their expertise
| into thinking this article was any good.
| dsego wrote:
| A eerily similar case of an eruptive fire killing firefighters
| happened not so long ago (in 2007) in Croatia.[1]
|
| In this case it was most likely that the group of fire fighters
| did not have time to reach a safety zone and escape. [2]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Croatian_coast_fires#Korn...
|
| [2]
| https://www.witpress.com/Secure/elibrary/papers/FIVA08/FIVA0...
| gapo wrote:
| I am super surprised to see this on LWN. But it was a fascinating
| read.
| JackFr wrote:
| Priming with respect to the Florida effect is a famously not
| replicable result. It's not a real effect. I'm more sympathetic
| to the word game example, yet it's not obvious how that
| translates to anything beyond.
|
| With respect to the Hartford Civic Center, as always, it's a
| little more complicated than that. Yes the architects stood by
| their calculations, but this was more of a process issue than
| hubris. Despite the new techniques used, the plans were subject
| to peer review. Additionally the construction was not fully
| according to plan. Weaker struts were actually used than called
| for in the design, and that's on the construction manager rather
| than the architect.
| The_mboga_real wrote:
| No mention of 10,000 hours of research and practice. Now that's
| the real dark side!
| kerkeslager wrote:
| This was pretty ramble-y and pulled in some pretty unrelated
| examples.
|
| * We never get a clear answer for why the Civic Center Engineers
| got the inputs wrong, so we can't conclude that it was because of
| their expertise.
|
| * With the firefighters, there's a pretty easy proximal
| explanation, which again is not their expertise misleading them:
| panic. If anything, the solution to the problem shows that
| expertise was the solution to the problem, not the cause of it:
| by adding running without packs to their expertise in a concrete
| way, they were able to override panic.
|
| * With the priming examples, I can see how this might be related,
| but the only example which actually involves expertise leading
| them astray is the baseball example. But this priming research,
| contrary to what's claimed in the article, _isn 't_ reproduce-
| able. And even if it were, these sorts of lateral thinking
| exercises have pretty limited applicability: detectives or
| theoretical physicists use a high degree of lateral thinking, but
| many careers don't, and I didn't get those examples from the
| article, I had to come up with them myself: that hardly speaks to
| this being an insightful article. And ultimately, it's unclear
| whether expertise leads detectives or theoretical physicists
| astray: surely part of gaining expertise in a field that requires
| a lot of lateral thinking involves building the skill of putting
| aside preconceptions. Again, I don't think we can conclude that
| expertise is the problem: it may be the solution.
|
| Overall, this topic could be interesting, but this isn't an
| insightful article on it.
| svnpenn wrote:
| > With the firefighters, there's a pretty easy proximal
| explanation, which again is not their expertise misleading
| them: panic.
|
| Exactly, plus while his idea was fascinating, its
| understandable that the others didnt follow suit; he
| essentially invented the idea:
|
| > Similar types of escape fires had been used by the plains
| Indians to escape the fast-moving, brief duration grass fires
| of the plains, and the method had been written about by James
| Fenimore Cooper (1827) in The Prairie, but in this case Foreman
| Dodge appears to have invented it on the spot, as the only
| means available to him to save his crew.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Gulch_fire
| quindecagon wrote:
| Re point 1:
|
| > This was the early 1970s, he said, why were these engineers
| so confident in their calculations? As guessed by many in the
| audience, the reason for that was "computers". In fact, when
| they won the bid, they told the city of Hartford that they
| could save half a million dollars in construction costs "if you
| buy us this new, whiz-bang thing called a computer". It turned
| out that the computer worked fine, but it was given the wrong
| inputs. There was an emotional investment that the engineers
| had made in the new technology, so it was inconceivable to them
| that it could be giving them the wrong answers.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Yes but we don't ever find out why they got the inputs wrong.
|
| Does this sound like expertise to you?
| phkahler wrote:
| They ignored the actual fact that it was sagging more than
| predicted and insisted the calculations were right. That
| might be ok, but someone allowed the project to proceed
| without explaining the contradiction. Real observations
| were dismissed in favor of believing in the expertise.
| spaced-out wrote:
| >They ignored the actual fact that it was sagging more
| than predicted and insisted the calculations were right.
|
| Seems like they lack the expertise needed to properly
| evaluate their model.
| geggam wrote:
| or experience can create a bias where you know you are
| right even when the evidence says otherwise.
|
| Age usually humbles people by them experiencing this
| often enough they tend to check things... if they mature
| properly
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Hm. You're saying that inexpert decision-makers were
| misled by experts?
|
| That is true, but I'd argue that the article is making a
| different claim: the article is claiming that experts are
| misled by their own expertise.
| akamoonknight wrote:
| It seems like one difficulty is in knowing what expertise
| is important? Assumedly the contractors thought they had
| expertise, but were lacking. The firefighters assumedly
| thought they had expertise, but we're lacking. What
| expertise do I think I have, but am actually lacking?
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Yeah, that's difficult. The only answer I've found is
| experience. Gaining experience for yourself is painful
| because it's slow, and part of the experience is
| consequences of your mistakes: in fields like fire-
| fighting (or rock climbing, which I love) your mistakes
| can literally kill you. So hopefully you learn form other
| people's experience and mistakes as much as possible.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I think "wrong inputs" here is an odd way of saying that
| the model was bad (presumably to distinguish that problem
| from outright bugs in the design software or computer
| hardware failure).
|
| https://eng-
| resources.uncc.edu/failurecasestudies/building-f...
|
| says
|
| << The roof design was extremely susceptible to buckling
| which was a mode of failure not considered by in that
| particular computer analysis and, therefore, left
| undiscovered. >>
| kerkeslager wrote:
| Okay but again: was this failure because their expertise
| misled them?
| mjw1007 wrote:
| Not as far as I can see, no.
|
| That article contains the following claim: << Computers,
| however, are only as good as their programmer and tend to
| offer engineers a false sense of security. >>
|
| which matches the "dark side of expertise" talk's bit
| about << There was an emotional investment that the
| engineers had made in the new technology, so it was
| inconceivable to them that it could be giving them the
| wrong answers. >>
|
| That seems to me to be a different issue to being misled
| by one's own expertise, and in any case neither source
| bothers to give any evidence that it's true (that is,
| that the computer's involvement was the cause for the
| unreasonable trust in the model's results).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| No. In fact if they were misled by computers and they
| were not software engineers, which I had assumed they
| were not from them being called "Design Engineers" in the
| anecdote, it follows that they were not misled by their
| expertise but their assumptions of expertise from this
| unknown mysterious powerful new thing that a lot of money
| had been poured into.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I was glad to see that the comments on the webpage provided a
| link (https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-
| of-a-...) to a summary of how priming research has been cast into
| doubt in recent years. Any talk, article, or premise that uses
| priming experiments to explain something, is a red flag for me.
| I'm not saying none of it really works, but I am saying that it
| is clear that something more complex is going on than we think,
| and many of the priming experiments, at a minimum, have been
| misinterpreted (and in some cases are just totally unreplicable).
| nemo wrote:
| TBH, if you gave me the list "dark," "shot," and "sun" I'm not
| sure I'd ever think of "glasses" as a word that went with all
| three, since I still don't really know what dark glasses are. I
| guess like dark sunglasses? Or maybe they mean "through a glass
| darkly"? Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming
| seems like it was poorly selected.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > Priming is a real effect, but that example of priming seems
| like it was poorly selected.
|
| Except maybe it's not even a real effect:
| https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
| nemo wrote:
| Interesting! Thanks.
| pm215 wrote:
| Well, it depends whether you happen to have that idiom in your
| personal dialect or not. The most high-profile use of it I
| happen to know of is from the 80s hit "The Future's So Bright,
| I Gotta Wear Shades", which starts out "I study nuclear science
| / I love my classes / I got a crazy teacher, he wears dark
| glasses"...
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