More on expertise

To follow up on yesterday's post on the value of resiliency over growth, I wanted to share this video of Nassim Taleb and a discussion that he had with the authors of a book called Dance with Chance. I've not read the book, but the brief interview crosses over a lot of different disciplines and will provide another angle towards looking at the world through a resiliency lens.

As humans, we are often fooled by the illusion of control and, as part of that, we have developed an over-reliance on experts. We, especially the so-called "experts", consistently underestimate the randomness and complexity of the world around us, to our detriment. Getting past the illusion of control and truly understanding what it takes to build resilient systems is a key step for those of us that want to bring about productive change.

Comments

[Stu]

I don't know if you're familiar with Stephen Mouzon's book The Original Green, but there is an excellent section on the death of tradition - specifically living traditions of town building - due to specialization.

"Living traditions capable of spreading the wisdom of sustainability need to operate broadly across a culture, but specialization tends to put people in little silos of their chosen specialty. Prior to industrialization, most people were part-specialist and part-generalist. They would specialize in an activity that could earn them outside income, but they would build their own buildings, make their own clothes, raise their own food, and make many of their other everyday things.

"A few extraordinarily intelligent or talented people could live entirely off their specialty, but most could not afford to buy all the things they needed from the income derived from their specialty. But the great efficiency of industrialization change all that in at least two ways. By building things much more efficiently, the things became cheaper. The other side of efficiency is that an industrial worker can produce far more stuff in the factory than they could if they were making those same goods or services by hand at home, so they were better off earning money to buy their stuff instead of making it.

"... There was, however, a serious unintended consequence: If places and buildings are things we buy from specialists instead of helping to build ourselves, then we have no authority to tell the specialists of places and building that what they are providing is not good enough, because they are presumed to know far more about places and buildings than we do.

"If you have no authority to tell a specialist that what they are producing is no good enough... and if they are focusing on smaller and smaller aspects of what they are producing, then those places and buildings, while they may be produced very efficiently, could not possibly address the complete range of human needs that were addressed when generalists previously made their own places and buildings."

[Stu]

OK, upon further inspection I see that you link to both Mouzon's blog in the right-hand column and his book in the recommended reading. So, you're familiar. Still, a relevant passage.

[Charles Marohn]

Thanks Stu - Yeah, amazing book. You totally understand what we're trying to express. Thank you for adding that great quote.