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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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Many years ago we bred and showed English Setters. We sometimes went to English Setter teaching events to learn more about our chosen breed. At these people often fell foul of the wonderful latin tag "Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses"
An example was one well know breeder who asked "but how the the gallstones get into the dog in the first place?" and really meant it. Perhaps it was right that she asked, but, and this is part of the point, she was also a teacher for part of that day on healthcare for the animals.
She'd been a dog breeder for a long time. She had loads of experience. But had she expertise?
How do we each avoid confusing our experience with expertise? And how do we recognise where we have no expertise at all?
Age used to be revered precisley because the old person was old. As Elizabeth Windsor said recently "All you have to do is to live long enough" (I paraphrased)
But, if an old perosn is rude, should they be revered? If an old perosn is wrong, should they be revered?
My point is, I think, that we guide the young and we guide those in a vulnerable state. As I have said so often these are often those who read but do not yet contribute. I'm nervous of lacks of either experience (time served doing something, not necessarily with any competence) and of expertise.
Do I mean we should stay silent when we are inexpert? No I do not. Yet I think we need to remember our own frailties.
An example: I neither have the experience nor the expertise to advise anyone in a gay sexual encounter without having had my advice checked by an expert gay lover. The parts of the site that deal with that were so checked. I was able to speak about the topic and can advise on it because I have checked my sources. Without that check I would have guided by guesswork.
Wherever we guide we need to give facts or ask questions that help others to guide or be guided.
I have pontificated enough. What do you think about expertise and experience?
[Updated on: Wed, 19 July 2006 22:42]
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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We have, or should have, the innate wisdom to determine from both expertise and experience whether we should speak stating a "truth", or whether we should ask what is true.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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This is so easy. I have been whipped, not spanked, whipped becasue I told my grandfather (not Cossie) he was wrong. Its this idea that because they are old, they must know it all and a brat should never question them. What a bunch of bull. there are people working for car manufacturers who dont know squat and have been there for 40 years. the only reason they still have their job is the union. My mom knows an old dude who is a mechanic, but bring him a new car and hes lost. Take a young kid fresh out of school and he can jump on it, wham bam its fixed. Things change. what was true 20 years ago have changed. Now if you have someone who is elderly but they keep up with things that are changing, then their expetise and understanding are of great value, and someone to look up to. Older people are supposed to support and help the younger ones avoid the pitfalls in life. they have life experience, something I dont have. The idea that children should be seen and not heard, is ludicrous. I can take a chemistry class and I can hold my own against any chemist anywhere, but when I get in a lab and have to concoct chemicals, Ill be lost. the experience of the older chemist will put him above me, till I learn from watching him how to do it. I guess Im saying, the young people coming up have this vast amount of knowlege to draw from and they can get the most up to date facts and experiences. I dont have to burn my hand to know a fire is hot. I can draw from the experiance of others. So when the snotty little kid on a bycicle tell you you may be wrong, you just might be. Its not disrespect. we learn constantly cause the world changes. when we stop learning, we need to go to a nursing home where nothing changes.
I believe in Karma....what you give is what you get returned........
Affirmation........Savage Garden
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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Experience has no value whatsoever unless it is treated as a learning process. Check out pretty well any industry, and you will find individuals who never were good at the job, have no real interest in it and thus never WILL be any good. Their experience counts for nothing. You will also find individuals who, although perhaps lacking the academic ability to move into design or management, have an intuitive ability to file away successes and failures in their minds, and to recall and apply those experiences when new problems arise. One of my wife' relatives was a shop-floor worker in an international engineering concern. He rose to be a foreman, and ultimately principal foreman at the factory. The idea of management terrified him, and he refused to leave the shop-floor, but he was a brilliant problem-solver when machining problems arose - so much so that the firm continued to pay him a full salary between the ages of 65 and 70 on the basis that he could be called in whenever the need arose.
Equally, expertise is of little value unless the expert is able to apply that expertise successfully. With due apology to Deeej, I would suggest that this is particularly evident in (though by no means limited to) professions such as medicine. For example, a psychiatrist may be very highly qualified in the academic sense, but unless he has good communication skills - which are of course honed by experience - he will not be fully effective because he will not be able to draw out all the necessary details from a patient who is not at ease with him.
What is needed is an amalgam of expertise and experience, coupled with the ability to think logically - call this wisdom, if you like! Given these three elements, any advice proferred is likely to be sound. In may not always be inspirational, but it's certainly unlikely to be harmful. One of the benefits of message-board discussions is the opportunity to generate a range of opinions; and this cannot be other than helpful in arriving at a balanced view.
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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Yayyyyy Brian!!!
Life's a trip * Friends help you through * Adventure on life!
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This thread reminds me of a colleague who, when he was young man, was rebuked by a middle aged woman teacher claiming tons of experience and expertise, so would he please keep his big mouth shut! His blunt (and very timely) reply was that although he aknowledged her long time experience, she had obviously been doing the same thing for 20 years, with little change, so she could hardly be called an expert.
What she lacked in expertise was obviously not compensated by any wisdom she might have accumulated through the years.
The old style father-to-son way of teaching, whereby both knowledge, experience and wisdom - and love and care - is passed on to the next generation, has gone lost in our western style mix of a highly organized society and fragmented familly structures. "In due course" learning hardly takes place anymore. Local and national curricula tell us what to teach, and when, regardless of the young person's intellectual or emotional state. At the same time the internet has become the big informal source of, often fragmented, knowledge, but it has no hand to offer, and we don't see the subtle reactions in each other's eyes.
Sometimes, Cossie and everyone, I wonder where the real sources of wisdom are. Where my mother grew up, in a little village swept by the roaring winds from the Atlantic ocean, we always had granddad, a very kind man who had the time to talk, to ask new questions and show us where the answers might be found. I seems to me that we, lacking many of the structures people used to have, have to be more personally and actively involved. How easy it is then to become cynical and arrogant, not to care..
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Expertise = Experience x Insight
Well, it sounds logical, anyway.
It depresses me no end to work in an area in which I have a modicum of expertise (computing) to see people who have used computers five times longer than me struggling to achieve the most basic of tasks. I can only conclude they have no insight into how the damn thing works.
Areas in which I have a little insight (perhaps) but not enough experience to count as expert include sexuality (anything like in that case) and cinematography (that one I am working on avidly); areas in which I have experience but no insight include ball games and chemistry.
In the film industry, a really good young director can walk onto the set with no idea what he is doing, other than that he knows what he wants; this sometimes works provided that the experience is provided by a very experienced and integrated crew. On the other hand, directors with plenty of experience but little insight can never rise beyond moderately competent.
David
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Cossie said,
>expertise is of little value unless the expert is able to apply that expertise successfully. With due apology to Deeej, I would suggest that this is particularly evident in (though by no means limited to) professions such as medicine.
Thank you for the apology, but I'm not quite sure what it was for!
I have no great love of medicine per se: if I did, I would probably be training to become a doctor. Those doctors who are any good at their job are those who are not just academically able but also are good at putting the patient at his or her ease, gaining useful histories, sorting out those things that are relevant and irrelevant to the problem, knowing the right treatment, treating the patient, performing surgery if a surgeon, dealing with complications on the spur of the moment, and knowing when to stop treating the patient. All of those rely not just on learning but experience and insight/intuition/specific intelligence, backed up (of course) by proper scientific justification.
The industry I'm interested in (the film industry), incidentally, is one where academic qualifications (even vocational training, in many circumstances) mean virtually nothing: you have to be able to solve problems on the spur of the moment by drawing on both experience and insight. You also need a good bit of experience.
>What is needed is an amalgam of expertise and experience, coupled with the ability to think logically - call this wisdom, if you like! Given these three elements, any advice proferred is likely to be sound.
This is a similar concept, but not quite the same as my postulation. In your case:
Wisdom = expertise x experience x insight (perhaps?)
I'm not quite sure what the different between expertise and wisdom is, though: I would be inclined to say that they are pretty much the same thing. The only difference is that wisdom tends to be found in older people.
Hmm. That would mean:
1 = experience x insight (your formula)
experience = 1/insight (rearrange it)
expertise/insight = 1/insight (introduce my formula)
therefore expertise = 1
???
Maybe I'm stretching the formulae too far. I still like my expertise = insight x experience, though. 
David
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cossie
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On fire! |
Location: Exiled in North East Engl...
Registered: July 2003
Messages: 1699
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... though I do see what you mean.
I was looking at expertise from the legal point of view - someone who would be regarded as an 'expert witness' - and, believe me, I have little regard for expert witnesses! Sitting behind a desk, looking at a computer screen, can teach you a vast amount of theoretical knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily put you in a position to draw the correct conclusion from a set of - at best - probabilities, based upon real events.
You define it differently. You are - effectively - saying that my wife's relative had expertise rather than experience. I would argue that as he had no academic training his skill must necessarily derive from experience.
I've no quarrel with that, as long as we know what we are talking about!
I don't claim any medical expertise - but I do claim that intelligent perception must play a part.
The apology was because I know that both your parents practise in the field. A close friend recently went to a psychiatrist, and - frankly - it was a total waste of time, because her background was insufficiently explored. I went out for a drink with her afterwards (She, of course, had water!), and offered her unskilled experience, which she found much more helpful. She suffers from anorexia nervosa. All I really suggested was the need to recognise her mental conflict. She had a subconscious urge to lose weight, because this made her feel 'in control' of her body. I suggested (over several conversations) that it was possible to exercise this level of control by admitting her ideal weight (which would free her from the attendant problems of feeling cold and tired) and controlling her food intake so as to keep her within 2kg above or 2kg below that ideal weight. After a dodgy start, it seems to be working well - but the psychiatrists advice was so vague that it was effectively useless.
For a' that an' a' that,
It's comin' yet for a' that,
That man tae man, the worrld o'er
Shall brithers be, for a' that.
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Hi Cossie,
>The apology was because I know that both your parents practise in the field.
That's true, but please don't let that prevent you from doctor-bashing if you want to! I have seen the occasional psychiatrist in my time: one was a child psychiatrist, who, while competent, did not manage to halt the downward slide at the time (I am not convinced whether anyone could, to be honest); one was an institutional psychiatrist who, among other things, prescribed a large dose of Valium to wake up his patients (me) while accusing them of deliberately and maliciously not cooperating when it put them to sleep (does he know what valium does??); the final psychiatrist was helpful, but I don't think she made nearly as much of a different as this place, for instance, as occupational therapy.
I am inclined to trust physicians a bit more, but that's because I have seen how my parents work and I know they don't make wild stabs in the dark (unless there's a power cut in the operating theatre, ha ha) in the same way as the psychiatric industry.
David
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Cossie said,
>You define it differently. You are - effectively - saying that my wife's relative had expertise rather than experience. I would argue that as he had no academic training his skill must necessarily derive from experience.
As there is practically no formal training in film that would imply there can be no such thing as an expert film-maker. Only an experienced film-maker. But I have met experienced film-makers who are really not all that good at their jobs. Adequate, but unable to compare to young, dynamic film-makers with less experience but better vision -- more expertise, in other words.
Let's take an academic discipline such as medicine. You might come across a consultant who is 60 years old, who trained in the 60s, when medicine was not nearly as advanced as it is today. He has had no formal training since then. But he is the foremost expert in his field. Contrast him with a junior doctor in his late twenties, just qualified, academically outstanding -- maybe even potentially far better than the consultant, and assume he has all the benefit of the last forty years of medical developments. But he's not an expert at all. I appreciate it's all a matter of semantics, but in this case I would also say most of the expertise comes through experience, not academic learning (even if experience does stand in for academic learning in this case).
David
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Re: Wisdom was not omitted 
