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When you become sufficiently expert in the state of the art, you stop picking ideas at random. You are thoughtful in how to select ideas and how to combine ideas. You are thoughtful about when you should be generating many ideas versus pruning down ideas.
-Andrew Ng
Who's to say who's an expert?
-Paul Newman
What makes someone an expert?
Cause nowadays there’s lots of experts.
Lot’s of “thought leaders in their space”.
I hear about them all the time.
I wonder how high the bar is.
Digression #1:
I’m a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. That’s considered near expert or, in obfuscated business speak, expert-adjacent. Brown is the belt before black.
I routinely receive beat downs from good black belts. At no point in the rolls are they in any danger of me submitting them. That’s the proof that I’m not yet an expert.
Jiu jitsu is very hard and has a high attrition rate. By some accounts only 1 out of every 100 people that starts jiu jitsu goes on to become a black belt. Brown is not much better- about 3 out of every 100 people who start.
Jiu jitsu is the Navy SEALs of martial arts.
Why do I mention this? Because expertise gets closer to empirical in jiu jitsu.
You can prove it from evidence.
Expertise is literally physically impossible to fake on the mats.
In lots of other places this proof remains a “trust me, I know what I’m doing”, or “I was good at that thing that one time”, or “Sure! I know the names of some of the things you’re talking about”.
Expertise in many areas remains, by and large, murky.
There is no empirical barrier to entry.
Digression #2:
A totally half-baked thought experiment.
Allow me some mathematical leeway and incorrect guesstimation to express a point.
I get invites to weekly events/dinners/breakfasts to spend time with “other experts” and “thought leaders” in my field.
I look at the guest lists.
They always seem to be different people.
These people meet at these real and virtual events and talk about “thought leadership” things.
I think what people consider to be “thought leadership” may be more conflated with the gamification of social media now than with actual substance, an interesting idea touched upon by Michael Easter in his Scarcity Brain (his Comfort Crisis is also very good ).
Social media has caused "expert inflation”.
But, whatever.
That’s a lot of experts and thought leaders, right?
How’s that work?
My brain clicks on, engages, and the lights in my house begin to flicker.
Google Interview Question time:
How many self-professed (or willing to accept an “expert” or “thought leader” invite) experts are there operating in any given field in the world?
There are around ~550 cities in the world with over 1 million residents. I’ll use that as a metric for what constitutes “big cities”. Each week, in each of those cities, let’s say there are a total of 5 events where 10 different experts from a given field are invited. This seems pretty conservative.
For a given field:
Each city has 5 x 10 x 50(2 weeks vacay) experts doing events a year.
2,500 experts a year for a city.
The world has 5 events x 10 experts x 50 weeks x 550 cities a year.
1,375,000 experts for a given field in the world having dinner each year.
That’s crazy. So let’s take 1/2 that number, 1/3rd that number, 1/4 that number.
1/4th is 343,750 experts.
Hmm, imagine the variance among those “experts” and “thought leaders”.
Again- this is a wonky thought experiment and these numbers are complete spaghetti.
Good news is, I just got hired by Google for working through this “how many piano tuners are there?” interview question. There must be some sort of alarm at Google HQ because someone literally just showed up and rang my doorbell. How did they know where to find me? (Google maps)
Anyway, it’s a lot of experts.
So what makes an expert?
I don’t know really.
A wholly unscientific, incomplete, and qualitative perusal.
Part of it is like Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” and part of it is being able to provide empirical proof.
An expert tinkers at the thing daily. “The thing” sits somewhere in the Venn Diagram intersection of “would do it for free” and “I can’t believe I get paid for this”.
How did I come up with this?
That’s the job I currently get to do.
An expert has people around them that can challenge their expertise.
If you’re the “AI expert” at your company and there’s no one else who can have an informed conversation with you, does the falling tree make a sound?
An expert has had failures in the thing they are experts at. You can’t understand the sweet if you haven’t experienced the sour.
For instance, question hiring anyone in trading that hasn’t blown up at least once. VC’s look to hire people who’s startups failed.
Failure teaches fast. An expert who hasn’t failed a lot in their field is keeping it safe.
Is there such a thing as a safe expert?
Digression #3
An advanced degree does not, in and of itself, make you an expert.
There is theoretical and idealized expertise and there is practical expertise.
I’ve traded with and alongside some absolute smoke show resumes. PhD’s from the best places. Postdocs from the best places. They actually taught the theoretical version of “the thing” at their schools.
Their shelf life turned out to be predictably shorter than the people with regular old practical experience.
Robot voice: “Why is this not working the way the books said it would at school?” (Robot stuck in the corner of the wall, arms gesticulating). “I am a robot, I’m in a maze.” (Thanks Andrew)
Just Build Cool Things
To borrow from the theoreticist Shawn Carter, “Far from a Harvard student, just had the [gumption] to do it.”
Experts: A Completely Made Up Taxonomy:
“Here we go now.” -DJ Kool:
Prodigy: bandwidth + beginner’s mind + potential
Up and Comers: beginner’s mind + grinding
Old Experts: Up and Comer - Bullshit Expert
Bullshit Experts: Old expert+no grinding+learned biases+safe and warm
Bullshitters: No substantive deliverables + lot’s of meetings + incorrect use of domain nomenclature + managing up
True Experts: True preternatural skill in something + always grinding + beginners mind + something else
There are:
Prodigies (nascent, baby experts.)
Now, how did they do that?
This is the beginning when they get a taste for what they will be great in.
Showing promise, easily outperforming their peers. The 10x performer.
Raw bandwidth and wattage.
They know what they do, but they know not what they do.
But still, from the french word, potential, meaning “haven’t done shit yet”
bandwidth + beginner’s mind + potential
There are up-and-coming experts.
This is a good sweet spot.
They are constantly building “the thing”, and if they are in management they are still one foot in, and one foot out, constantly tinkering.
Can you stay a forever up-and-comer?
beginner’s mind + grinding
There are old experts.
These experts were great at the practice of the thing- trading, programming, underwriting, selling cars, whatever.
It’s less common that an expert at something stays a solo practitioner when you’re at a company. Often times being an expert at something pushes you into management of other people doing the thing.
I know some people who are great at building things and the buzz of constructing a terrific product is enough for them.
I hope they don’t move into management.
An old, seasoned expert who doesn’t actively engage in the thing is, depending on the field, weeks or months away from being a bullshit expert.
Up and Comer - Bullshit Expert
There are Bullshit Experts
They used to know the thing, but they got fat feasting on the spoils of management.
They got abstracted away from the thing, levels removed from the muck, the tedium, and the failure of trying to make it work.
Of course, they’re rich now and comfortable, so that’s nice. But also atrophied. Their “build” muscles have withered away.
They are hemophiliacs waiting to be nicked.
I heard Theranos had some amazing experts on their board.
Old expert + no grinding + learned biases + safe and warm
And there are Bullshitters. Lots and lots of Bullshitters.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham calls this type of self-professed expert the “professional faker”
This is by far the biggest piece of the pie, the biggest part of the pyramid, the biggest pile of…
Yeah.
All sizzle and no steak.
If the world at large moves inexorably towards entropy and decay, these people seek to infuse bloat and more and more meetings.
A dead giveaway to find a BS’er- the incorrect use of nomenclature. I dislike the overt use of nomenclature as a means of obfuscation, but no one on your AI team should be saying “Our new LLM uses DALL-E for text generation”.
Show BS’ers the door.
They will eat away at the willpower and direction of those who want less meetings and more building of cool things.
No substantive deliverables + lot’s of meetings + incorrect use of domain nomenclature + managing up
…and Then There are the True Experts
They are the pathfinders, the luminaries, the transcendent practitioners.
They build cool things. They’re continuously engaged.
They still make big, generous contributions to their fields.
They get their own Chuck Norris-style facts.
Example- “Jeff Dean can beat you at connect four. In three moves.”
If you know your field, you know who they are.
True preternatural skill in something + always grinding + beginners mind + something else
I may never be a true expert in anything.
But that won’t stop me from trying.
Ping the system.
Stretch the boundaries.
Fail more.
Always Imposter Syndrome.
Never Dunning-Kruger.
Forever a beginner’s mind, an up-and-comer.
Don’t grow into a Bullshit Expert.
Stay wary.
Don’t slow down.