Who’s An Expert?

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My job title contains the word “expert”, as does the name of my company. I work almost exclusively nowadays as an “expert witness”. Of course, I got to choose my company name and job title, so those two don’t mean much, and an expert witness needs only to “possess specialised technical, scientific, or professional knowledge beyond that of a layperson”.

So, how do you know if you are really an expert?

First of all, don’t ask the internet. Pretty much everyone on the internet is an “expert” on everything, yet they think the real experts are secretly alien lizards.

I wouldn’t ask AI either. It’s a bit of a suck-up, and not particularly reliable, even when you ask it to be brutally honest. It is however interesting to compare its “brutally honest” output with its standard responses, to get an idea of the magnitude of its flattery.

If you want to know if you are a credible expert in an area, you might consider whether you had formal education and training in that area. This is where pretty much all of those internet “experts” fall down. Their information comes from their social media bubble, and the dodgy YouTube videos and so on they recommend to each other. Any formal education they might have tends not to be relevant to the subject area. They are not all uneducated, but graduates have an unfortunate tendency to overconfidence in areas outside their formal training. They tend to be no more correct than non-graduates, but they are more certain in their opinions.

The extreme form of this can be seen in academics. A fair number of my former academic colleagues had strongly held opinions on all manner of subjects, well away from the tiny area in which they had a great depth of knowledge. Most damagingly, these often included engineering practice, an area in which they had zero experience.

This brings us to a key consideration. Have you got significant experience in applying your academic knowledge? There is a reason why I come across very few career academics in expert witness work, or process troubleshooting. They know “about”, but they do not know “how”. What is significant experience? In UK engineering, it is arguably the amount required to attain chartership back before they lowered the hurdle enough to allow academics to clear it. In other countries, it is meeting the requirement for professional engineer status. These levels of professional knowledge assess entry level expertise.

So, let’s say you have the required minimum level of education, and the minimum level of professional experience. You are an expert, as defined by the requirement for expert witnesses. When I did my first expert witness job, I was scarcely more expert than this. Did I automatically stay an expert for the next thirty years?

No, because currency also matters. Professional engineering practice has changed a fair bit since 1996. Unless the case was to do with professional practice in 1996, and I had a really good memory, I would not be much use as an expert. Nonetheless, I might still be more confident in my opinion than someone who spent the next thirty years working as an engineer, and studying engineering. The Dunning Kruger effect does not only affect the uneducated.

This is not a theoretical concern. I regularly come across people in expert witness practice who haven’t practiced engineering for decades. In my view, quite a few of these old buffers never really practiced engineering at all. Many are the kind of people who cannot get out of engineering roles quickly enough, and spent their careers watching people engineering (you know – managers).

We might usefully distinguish between two kinds of managers. There are people like me, often called subject matter experts (SMEs), technical authorities etc., whose experience and expertise in practical engineering qualifies them to take responsibility for the adequacy of designs done by others. Sometimes these people have the word ‘manager’ in their job title, but if they are in practice gatekeeping, they are experts.

Then there are man-managers, who responsibility is “building a team” through “leadership”. Management ends up being their field of expertise, not engineering. They are frequently not aligned with the consensus views of practitioners, especially when it comes to risk tolerance. The higher appetite for risk of managers compared with SMEs is well documented, and understandable. Management practice is not necessarily engineering practice. An engineering manager is not necessarily an engineer, even if they were in the early part of their career.

You may recall I dismissed job titles back at the start of this article, but “manager” is the one job title which tends to suggest that someone is not an expert practitioner. They may well have once been entry level experts, but the longer they have spent practicing a profession whose axioms are diametrically opposed to those of an expert engineer, the less likely it is that they are engineering experts.

Another issue I often see with “experts” with management backgrounds is their obvious expertise in writing reports to support the “right” answer. Writing reports which displease higher management is not the way to ascend the greasy pole. People who spend too long in man-management often don’t even know what evidence-based reasoning is any more. They instead tend to favour what psychologists call “motivated reasoning”.

This can be quite persuasive to inexpert audiences, and quite time efficient for those who do it, because of Brandolini’s law, aka the bullshit asymmetry principle: “the amount of energy required to refute nonsense is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce it”

When you are cross-examined as an expert witness, you can expect all of the above aspects of your expertise to be challenged robustly, as well as your independence, but this is as nothing compared with the degree of challenge you will receive on social media.

It’s not just the conspiracy theorists. The strongest challenges often come from otherwise well-qualified people who have failed to reflect on whether they are really experts in the area in which they are offering an opinion before commenting.

This is not to say that “the greatest wisdom is to know that you know nothing”, as social media (wrongly) thinks Socrates said. I know what engineers know, and I know how they know it. I literally read the book when I was studying for my PhD (it is by WG Vincenti and I recommend it highly). But engineering expertise isn’t just “book learnin’”.