11 days ago
- Expertise is defined from three perspectives: absolute task performance, relative performance to others, or underlying psychology, with a focus on the latter as the natural development of human capacity.
- Experts rely on tacit knowledge, which is hard to articulate and involves intuition, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, and adaptation, rather than explicit facts or protocols.
- Pattern recognition is central to expertise, enabling experts to quickly understand situations and act, but experts also adapt to novel patterns they have never seen before.
- Gut instinct is not magic but stems from subconscious pattern matching; it should be considered as information but validated through experience and reflection.
- Expertise is studied through methods like Cognitive Task Analysis and the Critical Decision Method, focusing on what experts notice rather than why they act, to avoid confabulation.
- Training expertise requires experience, feedback, and pattern matching, often using scenario-based approaches like ShadowBox exercises, rather than just deliberate practice.
- Deliberate practice is effective for structured skills with known solutions but less so for ill-structured domains requiring adaptability, where case-based training is preferred.
- The Constraints Led Approach emphasizes adaptivity to environmental and bodily constraints, promoting generalized competence over rigid skill repetition.
- Expertise contrasts with rationality models; experts use context-specific, qualitative reasoning rather than generalizable rules, making them highly adaptive to dynamic situations.
- Experts collect cases rather than principles, allowing them to discern subtle differences and adapt mental models, which distinguishes human expertise from AI generalization.