What are 'experts' anyway?

by Flickr user Chris Pirillo (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

If you read TheAtlantic.com regularly, then you may have seen a recent article entitled “Wikipedia and the Shifting Definition of ‘Expert‘” by resident Wikipedia-booster Rebecca J. Rosen. According to Rosen, even though Wikipedia is deferential to expertise, changes are afoot:

a new study from researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo Research points to a complementary phenomenon: The definition of what makes someone an expert is changing…Expertise, to these researchers, isn’t who a writer is but what a writer knows, as measured by what they read online.

Actually, what she links to is a summary of a poster presentation from the 2012 World Wide Web conference in Lyon. The poster, entitled “A Data-Driven Sketch of Wikipedia Editors“, presents the findings of an as yet unpublished study by a couple of computer scientists from Yahoo! Research and a doctoral student from Stanford. The longer paper, entitled “Smart but Fun: A Data-Driven Portrait of Wikipedia Editors,” is still under review so I won’t pull any juicy citations from it, but it’s worth a read anyway. But, basically, the researchers pulled data from the Yahoo! Toolbar and compared the search behavior of Wikipedia editors to that of other Web users. They found that Wikipedia users tend to be “more sophisticated than usual Web users” and “deeply immersed in pop culture.” No big surprise. (Except for the “more sophisticated” bit. I don’t know any tech-savvy people who would willingly install the Yahoo! Toolbar.) Anyway, Rosen zeroes in on the researchers claim that “[i]ntuitively, someone is an expert in a topic if their interest is significantly above average.” She adds that “it’s a new and radically distilled understanding of expertise: An expert is someone who knows something.” All this supposedly lends credence to Maria Bustillos’s infamous claim that Wikipedia has meant “the death of the expert.” Or, at the very least, it’s signaled a new sense of expertise that is gradually usurping traditional notions of credibility.

The experts aren’t dead

If you’ve bothered to click on the links, you’ll see pretty quickly that Rosen’s article is ill-informed and that she probably hasn’t read the very study she cites. Likewise, you’ll see that the authors of the study have a weak grasp of what it means to be intuitive. “Intuitively, someone is an expert in a topic if their interest is significantly above average”? In what world is that intuitive? Apparently a world where correlation implies causation, I guess. A world where compulsive gamblers are experts on game theory, teenage boys are experts on the female reproductive system, and toddlers are experts on differential geometry. I think we all can agree that merely showing a great deal of interest in a subject does not make you an expert on said subject.

"Mama! Dada! Positive Gaussian curvature!"

I think there are more plausible and certainly more well-thought-out definitions of what an expert really is. In his widely anthologized article “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?”, Alvin Goldman proposes the following definition of what it means to be an expert:

 [W]e can say that an expert (in the strong sense) in domain D is someone who possesses an extensive fund of knowledge (true belief ) and a set of skills or methods for apt and successful deployment of this knowledge to new questions in the domain. Anyone purporting to be a (cognitive) expert in a given domain will claim to have such a fund and set of methods, and will claim to have true answers to the question(s) under dispute because he has applied his fund and his methods to the question(s). (p. 92)

So, you can be an expert so long as you satisfy two properties: you’ve got to know a lot about something and you have to be able to apply that knowledge to new situations. For example, a particle physicist is not an expert on subatomic particles merely because she knows a lot about them. She also has to be able to make predictions, solve problems, and be able to adapt to new discoveries. That is, the expert is the one who can reliably solve problems in particle physics. In contrast, the Wikipedia editors on the particle physics page are not experts because they are interested in the page. Neither are they experts if they’re read a lot and have a lot of domain knowledge. They’re only experts on particle physics if they can successfully apply their knowledge in new and challenging situations. Basically, if a given Wikipedia editor is capable of searching for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, I’d say she is probably an expert on particle physics.

And, if you think about it, this comports well with our standard distinction between expert and amateur. An amateur is very interested in a subject and knows a lot about it. An expert knows a lot about it and can put that knowledge to use as a tool for discovering new questions and finding new answers. This, of course, is not to say that amateurs can’t discover anything new–they certainly can and do all the time. But, experts do it consistently and reliably.

But, are we paying attention to the experts?

Here’s the thing: geeky postmodernists love Wikipedia because, to them, Wikipedia represents a destabilizing force. The success of the world’s largest encyclopedia has supposedly meant the end of the old, post-Enlightenment hegemony of ‘expertise’, ‘truth’, and ‘objectivity’. Now, we live in a world where the expert is dead, where individual genius and creativity are symptoms of “Romantic snobbery“, and where quaint notions of ‘fact’ are officially deceased. But, of course, this is all just so much sophism and intellectual mysticism. Truth, fact, objectivity, and expertise are safe, secure, and just as they have always been. In fact, as I argued a few weeks ago, Wikipedia is actually surprisingly deferential to traditional, scholarly expertise; Wikipedia is founded on a deep respect for authoritative knowledge. So, contra the postmodern geeks, the experts aren’t dead…we’re just not paying attention to them.

And it’s true! We are willfully ignoring expertise. Homeopathy is a billion dollar industry. Horoscopes appear in every “news”paper. People think gays and lesbians shouldn’t adopt, that Obama is a secret Muslim, that there’s no agreement on climate change, that intelligent design is legitimate science, and that vaccines cause autism, just to name a few pants-crappingly stupid beliefs that people would stop believing if they just listened to the damn experts. Actually, that last one about vaccines is a good example of just how dangerous it is to ignore genuine expertise. For a great overview of why and how non-experts should defer to experts, take a look at Stephen John’s “Expert Testimony and Epistemological Free-Riding: The MMR Controversy” in the July 2011 Philosophical Quarterly (you may be able to find a free copy if you poke around a little).

by Flickr user chrisheuer (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Are librarians experts?

Basically, an expert is someone with the requisite skills and knowledge to discover and answer new questions in a given domain. It’s not just about what we know, it’s about whether and how we can use what we know. As a librarian, this brings up an interesting couple of questions: are librarians experts and, if so, what is our area of expertise? Postmodern librarians like LeMoine (2012), Martin (2009), Stover (2004), argue that librarians are non-experts. Realists like Pressley and Gilbertson (2011), O’Kelly and Lyon (2011), and Crosby (2001) argue that librarians are experts on information and information seeking. There’s actually no consensus about whether librarians are experts or “generalists.” And though I do think that librarians are experts, I’m not so sure that calling us experts on “information” is accurate.

In my next post, I want to tackle the question of whether and, if so, how librarians are experts. It’s an especially interesting problem given that we reference librarians routinely assist patrons in researching subjects about which we know very little…so how and why are patrons justified in trusting our help? And in case you think this is just idle, armchair philosophy, remember that there is an active movement afoot to replace academic librarians (generalists) with subject-specialist post-docs (experts).  Figuring out whether librarians are experts is a crucial step in explaining our worth. And rather than claim that the definition of ‘expert’ has been radically altered, or that the expert is dead, or that expertise doesn’t matter, I’d like to argue that it most certainly does and now more so than ever.

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