Becoming an Expert
/Epistemology is the study of knowing what’s true. It’s not just a matter of filling your head with stuff, but of choosing which stuff to remember, which stuff to trust. Thomas Jefferson warns against the danger of believing the wrong stuff:
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
To be an expert, you must combine good epistemology with effort and energy. For most subjects, hours and hours of time are necessary. There’s a popular idea that 10,000 hours of practice or study is a sort of threshold. A person with sufficient natural ability and a great attitude and a supportive environment, who devotes 10,000 hours to serious effort, will often be near the top of the game. It is a controversial point, because some people appear to reach success much sooner.
If you want to be an expert on any subject, devote your life to it. Devoting your life can mean different things, of course. For some, it means quitting school and sacrificing everything to practice and performance. Athletes and musicians often do this. They have to, because they are working against time. Humans reach the peak of their physical performance in their 20s. Gaining wisdom from experience over time can’t help them succeed if the wisdom comes after their physical body is too old to run or jump or throw well.
Intellectual disciplines are easier. You can spread those necessary 10,000 hours over a lifetime. You can live an ordinary life with diverse interests, and still achieve expertise eventually just by filling free time with your special interest.
There is a difference between sophisticated, advanced learning and a college degree. They are completely separate standards of accomplishment. A college degree is evidence of survival and acquiescence — not of excellence. Students earn college degrees by following a set path and doing what is expected and required. American colleges today award more “A” grades than any other grade, and many of the students who earn “A” in their classes and eventually earn a degree have quite ordinary intellects.
College degrees fall short by the 10,000 hour standard. Most college degrees require 120 hours of course credits, of which not more than 2/3rds will be relevant to the student’s area of specialization. Supposing students study three hours a week for every credit earned, they’ve still devoted only around 1500 hours of study and class time in the subject. The bachelor of science is a rank beginner on the scale of true expertise.
Even college graduates with advanced degrees aren’t always fully learned about a subject. Doctoral students typically choose a very narrow topic and study the life out of that, but they don’t learn the whole subject. A PhD. geologist, for instance, might spend five years sifting gravel from a single creek bed in Arkansas, but would still know loess about the gneiss rocks you can find on a day hike around your home town.
There is good news and bad news on the “Being an expert” front. The bad news is, there’s no shortcut. The good news is, you have years to live and 168 hours of time every single week. Plus, public libraries and other free resources ensure that you can definitely afford the cost.
Nothing is stopping you from becoming an expert.
Real experts are rare because people tend not to put the work into the job. For almost any subject, there is a false plateau of knowledge that feels like expertise. Many people are content to reach that level and think they have attained expertise.
One example of false attainment is the level of knowledge attained by watching a documentary — especially Ken Burns’ The Civil War. That 1990 television program captivated millions and provoked a new interest in American history. As an introduction to the topic, The Civil War is excellent. The problem is that many of those millions of people felt that, after watching the whole series — all nine episodes — they had exhausted the topic and knew as much as anyone could reasonable ever learn.
The same is true of people who consider themselves experts about pop music because they have been listening to the radio (or, more recently, Spotify) their whole lives.
And again, the same is true of people who loiter in discussion boards like Reddit or Quora. They may feel they are deeply engaged in a topic when they are really just discussing the same wrong ideas over and over again with a steady flow of new novices.
Real expertise about the American Civil War doesn’t come from watching a documentary. it comes from a long process of reading books, visiting museums and battlefields, and eventually seeking original sources. It starts with reading books that survey the whole war — books that cover everything that happen in 200 pages or less. That leads on to books that go deeper and deeper. Eventually, you should be reading books that spend 500 pages or more on a single day-long battle, or on the career of a single general, or on a single topic like medicine during the war, or the importance of railroads.
At first, you will read a book and accept uncritically what it says. If it says, “Gettysburg was the key battle of the civil war” you will believe it. But eventually you will begin to think for yourself. You will notice that Gettysburg was (and still is) a small town in Central Pennsylvania, not near any important city and not the source of any important military resource. You will ask, “What was so important about Gettysburg?” And you will learn to judge whether the answers you get to your questions are good answers or not.
In your quest to be an expert, you will never find much of a welcome from other people. Most everyone else will be stuck at the Ken Burns / Spotify / Wikipedia level and will resent you for knowing more than they do. Often, the most congenial people to your way of thinking will have been dead for a century or longer. Some of them will have been murdered for saying what you now know is true.
Being more right than other people doesn’t give you power over them. But it does give you satisfaction. The English author T. H. White expressed the satisfaction of knowing and learning very well in this passage from “The Once and Future King,” where the wizard Merlin teaches the young boy who will grow to be King Arthur:
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing, which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn-pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics---why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.
Think:
Do you consider yourself an expert in any subject? How did you get there?
How do you know there isn’t a great deal more knowledge between you and true expertise?
