Judging someone's expertise when you lack it yourself

the skill of fairly reliably assessing expertise in someone, without having expertise in the subject yourself feels like a very important thing to develop for oneself, one's kids, and hopefully for every member of society

David R. MacIver @DRMacIver · Dec 13, 2022

I wonder if partly people distrust experts because for most people on most subjects, confidently making factual claims about that subject is actually a pretty reliable indicator that they have no idea what they're talking about.

Dec 13, 2022

as an individual, or in training kids or helping friends develop it... my sense is there are certain cues you can pay attention to in how someone is thinking, that can help you tell if eg they've considered alternate explanations for what they're observing

you can spot whether their confidence confabulates answers about everything, or whether they're aware of the limitations of their knowledge whether they can take in new questions and go "huh, lemme think" or whether they pattern-match everything to known Qs & give cached answers

you can learn to recognize signs of motivated reasoning etc signs of defensiveness vs curiosity, when presented with something that might contradict their model whether they trust themselves to figure things out or are actually deferring to someone else's orthodoxy

once we're talking about society-level training though, then if we train people to look for the sorts of signals I mention above, people will learn to fake them but at least some of these are hard to fake *well*

which means: as always with trust stuff, the thing to refine is your capacity to listen to your own sense of distrust the quiet voice that says "something's off here" if you can sense someone's intent—argue vs learn—that goes a LONG way, and you might not need specific cues

a caveat that sometimes the person arguing for a thing is arguing because they're afraid of losing face, not because they're uncurious in general they're arguing with someone who has failed to pass whatever threshold needed for them to feel open to engagement

but uhhh don't assess an expert by watching them talk with a journalist or critic watch them talk with someone else who's curious, or something