(2022-04-06) Chin Ability To See Expertise Is A Milestone Worth Aiming For

Cedric Chin: Ability to See Expertise is a Milestone Worth Aiming For. One of the inconvenient facts of expertise is that experts can see more gradients of expertise than novices can. A friend once described it to me as: “there are more levels of expertise than there are types of incompetence”, and I think about that framing a lot.

The obvious way this is inconvenient is that — as a novice, you often can’t tell why an expert is good at what they do, or how one expert is better than another. This in turn means that you can’t easily break down how or why experts are able to do the things that they do, so that you may learn from them.

Exploiting Expertise Observation as a Goal

First let’s talk about the problem we want to solve.

In some skill domains, it is easy to measure the steady accumulation of expertise

Unfortunately, in most skill domains that we’re interested in, it’s a lot harder to find a good reference point to aim for. “I want to get better at writing” you might say, “or running a company” — but what does ‘better’ mean? (ill-structured)

Before I give you an answer to this question of suitable skill goals, I want to talk about several adjacent ones. Some messier domains have fairly good, if vague, standards. For instance, Brazilian Jujitsu coach John Danaher has a relatively clear definition for ‘mastery’ in competitive martial arts:

Another alternative is to pick an external marker of success. For instance, if you’re working on mergers and acquisitions, you could make your goal “to have done 100 M&A deals by the time I’m 45.”

I’d like to suggest an additional bar.

I’ve noticed that in nearly every skill tree I’ve climbed, there comes a point where you begin to notice certain nuances of skill that novices not only don’t notice, but that you cannot articulate using the commonly accepted vocabulary of the skill.

In investment management, Warren Buffett is the Shakespeare of the industry. And everybody is living in his language and in his mental models to the point where it’s limiting. So I feel like a 25-year-old sometimes will be saying, “I’m sitting on cash just waiting for the fat pitch.” And I can’t tell whether he knows he’s quoting Buffett or not.

so when people use a lot of jargon and clichés and language that, at times, doesn’t feel like their own, to me, that’s a sign that maybe they’re a little bit earlier

Call this the ‘vocab point’, the point where you begin to make up your own language to describe the nuances of expertise you can see. I want to suggest that the vocab point is a good first milestone for any skill tree.

Note that the vocab point isn’t mastery — it marks, I think, the beginning of advanced proficiency. I think this makes it a good stopping point, because you are now able to see the shape of the expertise that lies above you; you are better able to evaluate if you want to go further.

I’ve started making it an explicit goal for some of the things I want to get good at.

I attended a handful of classes at the competition-oriented KL Judo Centre

I wanted to be able to see the things that Oon saw when he watched an international Judo match.

To truly see what an expert sees, you’ll need some understanding of what is difficult — or what is important — about the technique in question

If you want a non-sports example of the vocab point in action, take a look at Jacob Collier in Wired Magazine’s ‘person explains one concept in 5 levels of difficulty’ video series. Everything Collier says makes sense, up to the point where he gets to jazz legend and multi-Grammy-award-winner Herbie Hancock. At that point in the video, everything they discuss becomes incomprehensible to a musical novice.

I think one mistaken takeaway from this essay is that the vocab point is necessarily about articulation. Not every expert practitioner is good at articulating what they are able to notice. But the important thing is that they do notice.

If they talk shop with another expert, one who is better able to articulate it than they are, the less articulate practitioner should immediately know what the other expert is talking about, and should be able to contribute observations or suggestions on the thing they’ve both noticed.

This leads us to another potential failure mode of the vocab point: what if you’re noticing spurious nuance? The way you verify if you’re noticing spurious nuance is that you try and reach out to people who are more believable than you, and you ask them if they’ve noticed what you’ve noticed. If they scrunch up their face and say things like “sure, that’s interesting, but what strikes me as important in this case is …” you know you’ve noticed the wrong thing.

I don’t mean to say that experts are infallible. Certainly you should ask multiple experts

has gotten to a vocab point in some skill domain should know that expertise consists of many tacit … feelings.

It’s not too surprising, then, that there comes a point when you engage with a community of fellow practitioners, and people begin to talk about what ‘feels right to them’