Expertise

Expertise

Is interestingly tied to the estimated amount of time a person spends working on or learning something, whether chess (Chase & Simon, 1973) or a profession (Schön, 1983, 1987). Of course the complexity of the thing is an important factor in the amount of time required. If the thing is highly constrained, expertise would seem easier to achieve (e.g., tying my shoes); if the thing is complex, messy, and difficult to define, expertise is incomplete and ongoing (e.g., flying an airplane or making love). As a professional academic interested in workplace learning, for example, I learned in graduate school that Simon's early work on expertise involved chess playing and that Schön's work on reflective practice on-the-job represents some of the most influential research on the subject. Expertise, though, is messier than either Simon or Schön let on—lately, I've been speculating that experts can't exist, if by expertise we mean knowing everything about a particular thing or subject. I may be revealing that I am a victim of exposure to postmodern theory; I know just enough about the postmodern stance to use it against my own certainties.

Chomsky on capitalism

"Maybe 'capitalism' would be a good idea. We've never had anything remotely resembling it, and the reason we haven't is the owning class would never permit it because they know perfectly well that if capitalist institutions were established it would destroy the economy in no time, so therefore they insist on a powerful state that intervenes to protect them from the ravages of the market. Everybody seems to know this except economists" (Noam Chomsky, 2002, "Power and Terror").

Science horror

From Cheezy Science Fiction, Vol. 1: "Four men and a beautiful girl. Off on a fantastic voyage. Actually entering, inside the human body! Exploring an unknown universe. Unknown dangers."

Wow.

I wonder if anyone who has ever written a science fiction screenplay has ever designed an empirical study, collected data, or published about it? Vonnegut worked for General Electric, I believe, although it's never clear what he did while he worked there.

What's missing is the (almost comical) care that scientific discourse demands: a well-established mode of inquiry, proof, defense, and progressive argumentation.

A nice example from Noam Chomsky: "It seems to me that one might speculate a bit further—speculate in this case, since we’re talking about the future, not the past—and ask whether the concept of human nature or of innate organizing mechanisms or of intrinsic mental schematism or whatever we want to call it, I don’t see much difference between them, but let’s call it human nature for shorthand, might not provide for biology the next peak to try to scale, after having—at least in the minds of the biologists, though one might perhaps question this—already answered to the satisfaction of some the question of what is life” [from Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault Debate. NY, NY.: The New Press, p. 7].

Most of the scientists I admire have a common distain for postmodern theory. This is interesting to me as I've tended to interpret postmodern publications as performative events rather than as arguments (which presume taking a position and not just a position that attempts to argue against positions).

Work styles

When I set out to do work, I prefer darkness and a candle or two for the contrast with my computer displays.

Setting is almost everything. If I'm located in a coffee shop or the office, short-order work and limited attention-span tasks are all I can manage. In my home office, near the coffee maker, a futon for naps, an ashtray for atmospheric smoke, and the humming familiarity of the Internet, energized by the myth of uninterrupted blocks of time, I can bury myself in periodic snacks, pyjama bottom externalizing, multiple applications and multimedia bits, effortless focus and indulgent distractions (This American Life audio clips on Mind Games, New York Times stories on Breaking Up in a Digital Fishbowl, Facebook messages and email notes and blog entries and twitter glances and MS Word paragraphs and YouTube lyrics and man-whale ecologies via the Georgia Aquarium and Rock Island).

But all of these episodes are supposed to somehow come together in a coherent "to-do" list and in a completed online course on Advanced Instructional Design. That'll be a fine turn of events and I'm eager to see how it works itself out.