The silos of expertise: beyond heuristics and biases

28 Stuart_Armstrong 26 June 2014 01:13PM

Separate silos of expertise

I've been doing a lot of work on expertise recently, on the issue of measuring it and assessing it. The academic research out there is fascinating, though rather messy. Like many areas in the social sciences, it often suffers from small samples and overgeneralising from narrow examples. More disturbingly, the research projects seems to be grouped into various "silos" that don't communicate much with each other, each silo continuing on their own pet projects.

The main four silos I've identified are:

There may be more silos than this - many people working in expertise studies haven't heard of all of these (for instance, I was ignorant of Cooke's research until it was pointed out to me by someone who hadn't heard of Shanteau or Klein). The division into silos isn't perfect; Shanteau, for instance, has addressed the biases literature at least once (Shanteau, James. "Decision making by experts: The GNAHM effect." Decision Science and Technology. Springer US, 1999. 105-130), Kahneman and Klein have authored a paper together (Kahneman, Daniel, and Gary Klein. "Conditions for intuitive expertise: a failure to disagree." American Psychologist 64.6 (2009): 515). But in general the mutual ignoring (or mutual ignorance) seems pretty strong between the silos.

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Terrorism is not about Terror

32 gwern 24 March 2009 05:08PM
Statistical analysis of terrorist groups' longevity, aims, methods and successes reveal that groups are self-contradictory and self-sabotaging, generally ineffective; common stereotypes like terrorists being poor or ultra-skilled are false. Superficially appealing counter-examples are discussed and rejected. Data on motivations and the dissolution of terrorist groups are brought into play and the surprising conclusion reached: terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking.

 http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror