No, that’s a professional, which is different.
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I have this same back and forth internal dialog depending on my current context of the day.
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Based on first hand experience, this especially applies when the person in question has narcissistic personality disorder and always believes they are the most qualified person in the room regardless of topic.
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This feels like an era where the Dunning-Kruger effect is running amok, thanks to the illusion of expertise by being able to look things up on the internet, combined with a cultural dismissal of people who actually studied the subject in depth and are considered very knowledgeable by those in their field - you know, experts. Identifying experts seems particularly important right at this moment given all the people who aren’t infectious disease experts - or even biologists or doctors - making pronouncements about a pandemic that are wildly, dangerously wrong and having the media treat them seriously and repeat them because they’re “experts” (even if their subject of expertise is completely unrelated).
The idea that simply doing something for three years and then self-declaring makes you an expert leaves me… skeptical. Three (plus) years of intensive study and work generally makes you an beginner in my experience. (This feels like the “black belt” phenomenon - given the length of time it takes to get one, people assumed that it was the ultimate indicator of expertise - the reality was that it just indicated a basic competence.) A PhD takes twice as long, and I don’t know how many newly minted PhDs would be accepted as “experts” in their field, especially if that period of schooling represented the entirety of their study of the subject. Maybe it’s because I grew up in an academic environment, but my expectation is, if you want to claim any knowledge at all in an area outside your formal area of study, you better have brought some fucking receipts, yo.
I feel like “expert” is being conflated with having any “expertise” which is being equated with “competence,” because I could definitely see three years of practical experience, in something that didn’t actually really require any additional knowledge could make you competent in that area. In the business arena, I could see just being competent could make you an expert if you bring in knowledge from elsewhere, though. It’s not something that requires a lot of knowledge - there’s a reason business degrees can be done so quickly. So for a very narrow use case, I could see he has something of a point.
I feel like this guy’s narrative actually undermines his assertion, though, and I kept waiting for the reversal, for him to reveal he was being ironic. (Maybe I missed it by skipping around.) Someone thought he was funny, therefore he immediately thinks “stand-up comedian.” He looks up the term on the internet, and research complete, calls himself that. He’s decided he is one, so he is! Someone else agreed! It’s like describing the Dunning-Kruger effect in practice. Or a fraud. He alludes to how expertise is usually defined - about putting in the time (though it’s an arbitrary three years) and having people acknowledge you as being in that field (but in his anecdote aren’t people in the field), which seems like he’s undermining those traditional definitions. Since he doesn’t come up with new criteria, it seems like he’s kidding.
I kept waiting for him to say, “It says I’m a stand-up comedian on my CV, but that’s a joke!” Because obviously being a stand-up comedian requires more than just doing a talk where you were funnier than most people in that situation, and people just accepting what you write on your CV (because fraud also involves that). It requires you to actually go do stand-up comedy - i.e. going to a stand-up venue where people expect you to tell jokes and getting paid to do so. Not getting paid makes you an amateur, and it’s possible - though difficult - to be an expert amateur (which is why, in popular speech, “amateur” is often synonymous with “incompetent.”)
He makes a point about not claiming to be something that’s legally defined, but that leaves a vast spectrum of knowledge up for grabs, apparently. There are a whole lot of areas of expertise that are formally defined, and plenty that are defined more informally. And though there are exceptions to those definitions, all the paths to that expertise involve having done certain work; just claiming that knowledge without doing any of the work doesn’t hold water. He mentions impostor syndrome, but not Dunning-Kruger. The idea that declaring yourself an expert makes it so is downright sinister, really.
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The (true) experts are also better at winging, because they know their stuff.
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A real expert wears a three-piece suit and comes from more than 500 miles away.
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Picture me, sitting around a small fire by our shelter in the woods of Alabama after 24 hours of continuous simulated medical emergencies, with a police officer, a SWAT medic, and two Search and Rescue team members (all of them also my customers), explaining to them that yes I own a survival gear company, but I went to school to be an interior designer.
My two takeaways from this video:
- Just do something (as Bjartur of Summerhouses says). Stop thinking about it and making plans and wringing hands and just start. Pick a corner and start chewing.
- If you prefer to fake it til you make it, reciprocal nominations is one weird trick that might be helpful.
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“An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.”
“If it’s been on your desk for fifteen minutes, you’re the expert.”
I just detest the idea that somebody who does something completely different from something else they are also very qualified for that isn’t connected in any way is somehow faking one, or less genuine.
My combination of Japanese machining and watchmaking (along with blacksmith) just confuses the hell out of people- its mainly the Japanese degree.
To me anybody who does something in seriousness and can prove they know what they do does not need a piece of paper saying they are an expert.
I’m kind of forced to take this stance though because it is impossible to get journeyman’s papers in my case unless I work for some company that already sponsors a journeyman apprenticeship and those are far and few between.
I don’t believe in faking anything but I get why some people would given those circumstances. I’m making a handmade watch just so I have a “fuck you” piece to show any machinist or watchmaker that doubts me instantly my skill level. So in my case I’m making a physical object as a substitute for a formal cert.
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Like most people who are fortunate enough to reach a certain age, the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized how much I didn’t know back when I was a know-it-all; and how I now realize that I’ve only dimly glimpsed a very small fraction of how much there really is to know.
If you want to be truly humbled, attend a large university’s commencement (maybe not this year.) The most recent I attended featured over a hundred people being awarded their doctorates. As each crossed the stage, the announcer read (struggled through) the title of each of their theses. As the biochemistry and biomedical engineering doctors were crossing the stage, I tried to see how many of the titles I was able to fully grasp (not many.) And that was just one school’s annual crop of contributions to human knowledge: to think that there are entire realms of knowledge blossoming around the globe on the same scale is just mind-bogglingly cool! Meanwhile, my brain was saying remember how smart you thought you were? Eventually I remembered that they were as much out of my field as I was out of theirs, and balance was restored to the force. You can know a bunch, but you can’t know it all.
So take it from a genuine expert: look around at what you do, what you’ve done for the last 5, 10, or 20 years. Do you continually get better at doing it? If so, you’re also an expert. Bask in the glow of your accomplishments!
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In my job I often cringe at being called an expert on things. There is no technical field, no industry, where I would consider myself an expert. I understand why both coworkers and clients say it, but I don’t like it. They say it because either 1) they want to make me look good to someone else, or 2) they themselves aren’t qualified to measure expertise in a certain area.
I would agree that getting a Ph.D. makes you a beginner, but I don’t think it’s the technical stuff you get better at afterwards. It’s the squishy stuff that no one knows, yet, how to quantify and write down. The things you notice, years later, that your advisor was doing all along without even realizing they were doing them, or without realizing you weren’t doing them. And a lot of those things do transfer across many fields, especially outside the most highly technical jobs. But that’s only if the person involved has an unusually well developed sense of the limits of what they do and don’t know.
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I completely agree with you and am kind of horrified at the comments which seem to agree with the TEDx (note the x!!!) speaker.
What the speaker is talking about is doing something, entering a field, starting a profession. Which is FINE. But that does not confer ANY expertise! Expertise is hardwon through (often) years of doing. And even then many who do a thing for years do not have the skill, knowledge or aptitude to call themselves an expert due to an inability to integrate the experiences into foundational, teachable knowledge.
An expert is someone who is better than most at the actual doing of their field. A very few prodigies manage that in very little time, but most take years if not decades to uncover the broad strokes AND the minutia of the field.
Indicators of being an expert (these are not mandatory, but strong indicators) are thus being able to do their thing very well, often in a shorter time, maybe even under adverse conditions; the ability to teach others that knowledge; the ability to expand their field, to add to it.
Jerry Seinfeld (no matter if you enjoy his comedy or not) is an expert in stand-up comedy. This guy is by now merely a stand-up comic (or maybe at least a comic, if he hasn’t done actual stand-up comedy at stand-up comedy places, which are different from speaker engagements at conferences).
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Feels like we need a term, an equivalent to “expert” that actually just describes someone who is competent, as apparently that’s a term that a lot of people should be using. (Although we might also need a term for someone who is competent and self-promoting…)
Given the framework in which this guy works, even calling him a stand-up comedian is a category error. This is not a “stand-up comedy” context (with stand-up comedy expectations) - or even a comedy context - and apparently he’s never worked in that context. He’s someone who gives business presentations that tries to be funnier than the usual presenter. (And if this is an example of his work, he’s not terribly successful at it.) That makes him a “comedian” in the same way that being able to run up the stairs to his office faster than his colleagues would make him an “athlete.”
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