Edge.org [1] has just released it’s Annual Question [2]. This year’s version: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?” I’ve read a couple dozen answers so far. As always, the answers are intellectually stimulating, challenging to common sense and entertaining.
Television producer Karl Sabbagh [3] weighs in this year with his realization that expertise has serious limitations. I agree with him that expertise is not necesarily an indication of all-round wisdom, yet there is a general tendency to think otherwise:
I used to believe that there were experts and non-experts and that, on the whole, the judgment of experts is more accurate, more valid, and more correct than my own judgment. But over the years, thinking — and I should add, experience — has changed my mind. What experts have that I don’t are knowledge and experience in some specialized area. What, as a class, they don’t have any more than I do is the skills of judgment, rational thinking and wisdom. And I’ve come to believe that some highly ‘qualified’ people have less of that than I do.
I now believe that the people I know who are wise are not necessarily knowledgeable; the people I know who are knowledgeable are not necessarily wise. Most of us confuse expertise with judgment. Even in politics, where the only qualities politicians have that the rest of us lack are knowledge of the procedures of parliament or congress, and of how government works, occasionally combined with specific knowledge of economics or foreign affairs, we tend to look to such people for wisdom and decision-making of a high order.
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