In regards to attribute 3 - I often tell people that I’m always willing to help, but I’m not always right!
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What a pleasure to read the responses to this post! It’s no surprise that iNaturalists value the “expert” traits of knowledge, experience, humility, and lifelong learning. As for the other type of expert, U. Utah Philips had this to say: “An ‘ex’ is a has been, and a ‘spurt’ is a drip under pressure.”
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Expertise is developed by years of study and practice in any given field. Formal education can get you there but it’s not the only way. As with many of us, some of the most expert naturalists I’ve had the pleasure to interact with had no formal education in biology.
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I was a titled “Subject Matter Expert” (SME)on a Government project for over 15 years.
I also have an advanced degree in Agriculture.
My project expertise was neural networking and text search algorithms.
Pretty far afield (literally) from milking cows or planting peanuts.
Yet I was a pretty decent grad student and kept my SME position for a decade and a half.
Truth is, both the advanced degree and being an expert took the same type of work.
A desire to pursue knowledge in the topic(s) relevant to your work.
Seeking out others in your field who may know more about the topic than you do and understanding their ideas and contributions.
A willingness to accept that todays ideas may be supplanted in the not too distant future. Working in software development really brought this reality home.
Believe you may be incorrect until you prove yourself wrong.
Take a week off, then start thinking you are wrong again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I do believe almost anyone can be an expert.
Maintaining the expertise is what takes work. Not everyone can keep it going.
No resting on the laurels. But the experts already know that.
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I agree with most of the comments here.
For me it boils down to:
Knowledge with a desire to keep learning
Willingness to share that knowledge with learners (hopefully future experts) in an understandable way
Ability to accept being wrong and learning from it
and, tongue firmly in cheek, if I know one more thing about Lower Tasmania than you that makes me the expert.
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can you be both pert and expert?
that’s pert or pert plus
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I can neither confirm nor deny that any particular shampoo selection has either a positive or negative impact on expertise.
However I find my hair has more body when I use Pantene.’
Thanks,
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I find that increasing expertise is often correlated with decreasing hair (i.e., age).
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Don’t go mixing up correlation and causation! Obviously the smarter you get, the less hair you will have on your head, as the brain pushes out the follicles from the inside.
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Male logic? (Don’t look at me but) There are iNat experts with grey hair.
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I’m a qualified biologist with all sorts of letters including PhD after my name but that simply means that I better understand the areas of the huge field of biology that I am NOT an expert in.
What having academic training does mean though is that you generally are more familiar with the scientific terminology and are familiar with the literature so that you can more rapidly find the information you need and (important) understand it and know what is important.
Being a scientist is not necessarily about being an expert in every field, it is about being confident to apply the scientific method to examining the things that interest you. Science is a process. Being able to identify, for example, all the birds or flowers you encounter does indeed make you an expert in the field of identifying all the birds or flowers you encounter but that does not mean you understand them - although of course you may well do so if you have done the studying that goes beyond identification.
Amateurs make excellent experts at times - and I am happy to be an amateur in the fields of biology in which I am not an expert.
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I agree with what you say but have reservations about “indigenous or local ways of knowing” because too often that knowledge is limited and not obtained by the scientific process.
Take for example the frequent disagreement between fishermen (indigenous or not) who will say there are millions of fish out there, I can harvest them without doing harm and the fisheries scientist who will simply say they are wrong and - important - has the data to prove it. The scientist is right and the fisherman is wrong because the scientist has followed defined and considered standard protocols to collect his/her data. Much the sam applies to the indigenous arctic communities who deny there is a problem with polar bear populations when there very demonstrably is.
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In terms of “the scientific process”… yes, “indigenous ways of knowing” are always going to come up short, by definition! But “indigenous ways of knowing” are often long established, and so reveal a deep understanding of, or at least influence by, critical factors that are at play. Otherwise they are “broken” or discredited at some point in their history. If we are trawling back through ancient traditions and trying to resurrect what had naturally ceased of their own accord, then likely those indigenous ways will be questionable, but I think you are referring to those that are still in use today.
But, and here is where I also have reservations but for different reasons. Those “indigenous ways of knowing” were developed over that long period of relatively little disturbance to the systems and processes that they model. In the modern times we are changing the world, and it’s systems and processes, so rapidly and widely, that we can no longer rely on those indigenous ways of knowing to be still an accurate model of them.
But there will still be aspects of the “indigenous way of knowing” model that could be valid, and regardless, a deep knowledge about “indigenous ways of knowing” is still an expertise worth recognising.
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Actually, the reverse is a serious problem of long standing. One of the most well documented examples is what happened in the northern Atlantic cod fishery (Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization areas 2J3KL). Prior to the 1980s it was one of if not the richest fishery on Earth. When Canada proclaimed a 200 nautical mile territorial limit in the 80s they turfed an international fishery that had been operating in what had been international waters without effective regulation. Inshore fishers were delighted as they felt that the international fishery had been out of control and greatly damaging the cod population which had been declining.
The regulators had other ideas, however, and approved the institution of a huge Canadian-based offshore fishery for cod, with generous incentives to build trawlers and processing facilities. The inshore fishers, heirs to a centuries-old tradition, protested but were ignored. There were scientists who disagreed but they were outside the mainstream. By 1992 the cod fishery was closed down completely. Aside from a small inshore stewardship fishery it remains closed.
The people running the science directorate at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans didn’t ever actually acknowledge that maybe the inshore guys had a point. Instead they embarked on a massive and absurd campaign to blame seals for the state of the cod fishery and promoted a seal cull as the answer to the industry’s woes. Again there were scientists who disagreed. They were muzzled. One, Ransom Myers, was actually sued by his former bosses (using a bottomless sack of public money) when he publicly described the pressures to toe the line that he had faced as a DFO scientist. He was fortunately supported by a bunch of academics and activists who raised money for his legal bills and his bosses eventually dropped the suit.
It is now understood that what happened with northern cod was a large scale environmental shift, that similar things have apparently been happening on a century scale for a long time and that the decline was greatly hastened by the decision (supported by reams of data and scientific analysis) to expand the Canadian fleet in the 80s.
This is merely one of the best documented instances. It is far from the only example. An enormous number of management decisions are not based on anything that could be called science, even though they are presented as science-based. Characterizations of risk are not infrequently laden with unsubstantiated assumptions informed by unstated management agendas. The ongoing pollution of ecosystems everywhere with exotic species whose only recommendation is that people like to shoot/catch/grow them enough that an industry can be developed around them is one depressing example.
Your characterization of the debate around polar bears is an oversimplification, I think, although it would be a miracle if people who earn income from polar bear hunting weren’t reluctant to accept findings from “experts” they don’t know when the experts recommend an end to their income. On the other end of the debate, observations from people on the land have provided some of the earliest evidence of the effects of climate change in the arctic. As well, polar bears are globally at risk but that does not preclude local populations being or appearing to be stable. Anyway, proclamation from on high is not the only way to do things. The Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, for example, has instituted programs to enlist the skills and knowledge of people on the land using traditional and modern technological systems and coupling that information with scientific methods.
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This is not specifically a problem with indigenous knowledge. It is the only reason any person or group ever opposes environmental protection measures.
Left to their own devices, people will kill the golden goose every time, and always for the same reason. Hence, the more strongly a protection measure is opposed, the more urgently it is needed.
This is a pretty solid example of the sort of unsubstantiated assumptions to which I was referring. There are, in fact, plenty of examples of people, communities, groups, NGOs and industries objecting to regulations because they are counterproductive, pointless, badly written,designed to favour one stakeholder over another or any of a long list of reasons. Plenty of resource users see the logic of sustainability. Regulations that rely on narrowly defined experts to dictate solutions seldom work as effectively as regulations developed with the engagement of affected parties.
Ultimately, every management decision is an experiment and should be treated as such. Its hypotheses should be made explicit and predicted outcomes made testable. That would be actual science-based management. Rules written by experts in isolation from input by people on the land and water are not always wrong but they are wrong often enough and for enough reasons that entire fields of resource science have emerged to deal with the issue (e.g. Structured Decision Making). Not only does such an approach improve the quality of the regulations it increases buy-in by those being regulated.
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Agree !
The debacle that ensued two years ago when we invited NatureServe Canada to systematically set conservation statuses for taxa in Canadian provinces is a nice microcosm of that. It was a good-faith effort made to solve a real problem (the relatively unsystematic way in which we obscure taxa) and wound up generating a great deal of resentment and bitterness in a community that’s a priori pretty sympathetic to conservation concerns.
It’s a bit frightening, really. All the players, after all, are conservationists and presumably of a generally similar worldview, but the misalignment of incentives between iNat users/data consumers and the conservation bureaucracy generated an enormous amount of friction.
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Well, sort of. The hidden assumption here is that “ways of knowing” are inevitably subject to strong selection under cultural evolution, and I think there are many exceptions to that; in addition to the recent changes in cultural niche that you mention, there are various reasons a false or incorrect belief or custom might persist. (It’s in harmony with a popular theoretical framework, like sympathetic magic; nothing actually solves the problem the custom purports to, but it’s relatively low-cost; the custom is a signal of tribal affiliation, and its cost is offset by increased cooperation from other affiliates; and so on.)
Now, the flip side of this, which I think you’re driving on, is that experimental science ultimately relies on generalizing from the results of some finite set of experiments to the world as a whole. In a well-designed experiment, the assumptions required to generalize will be simple and unexceptionable. Not all experiments are well-designed! It’s easy to overlook changes in context that void the generalizability of certain results. When there’s a conflict between (what we think to be) scientifically proven and “indigenous ways of knowing”, it’s certainly not a bad idea to think carefully about those assumptions, and consider whether our “proof” might be limited in extent.
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Ouch. Is there a discussion of that on the forum somwhere?