There’s one long thread here, although there are others, if you search for something like “Canada” and “obscured”: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/updates-to-conservation-statuses-in-progress-in-canada/608/32
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“A naturalist is an observer without formal training”? I beg to differ on this one. A naturalist is anyone who studies nature. It identifies our approach to the world through the lens of natural history, formal training or not, and can be expert or not. I love these stories of experts without formal training. Add to that Agnes Chase for the grasses!
My favorite title in my career was “Joseph Priestley Professor of Natural Philosophy.” No money attached to that one but I cherished it.
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It is charming to live in a place with institutional continuity with the golden age of amateur science, like the various local Academies of [Natural] Sciences. (And I expect when things ease off a little, I’ll be fixing deer fence in a Smilax jungle with one of your erstwhile colleagues–you’d think even deer would be smart enough not to eat a Euphorbia, but go figure.)
It’s interesting to reflect on where the notion crept into (American) national culture of academia as an exclusive repository of expertise. I would suspect the immediate post-WWII period, as academia underwent logarithmic growth and the conditions described in Eisenhower’s farewell address supplanted the Edisonian mythos[1] of the obsessive inventor tinkering in a corner of the factory.
Field naturalism has probably preserved the tradition of the intelligent amateur better than most areas: after all, we all go out and make observations and identify things with a few simple tools. I don’t need an NMR in the spare room to tell me that I just saw a gray squirrel! Of course, that made it hopelessly déclassé when compared with the universalizing promise of molecular biology, but probably also spared it from getting completely hoovered up by universities.
I’m cautiously optimistic that we may yet see a revival of that. The engineers keep pushing to make apparatus and instrumentation cheaper and more foolproof and durable. There’s quite a bit of science, IMO, that could become a somewhat expensive hobby (like owning a boat, say), the obstacles being more cultural and regulatory than technical.
[1] Yes, we know Edison was a Very Unscrupulous Person. That’s beside the point.
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I like to think that iNaturalist will play a significant part in reviving interest in natural history → appreciation of natural environment → sense of stewardship. We sure need it, and not just by experts.
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I know a elderly country gent named Cecil. He was born and raised in poverty in a “holler” in West Virginia. I don’t think he’s ever left the state. He knows more about Appalachia and its flora and fauna than anyone I’ve ever met. He has stacks of hand-written journals documenting his observations. He knows local lore, including Native American oral traditions for just about anything you could imagine. He lives deep in these woods and his knowledge of them is broad and deep. He is the kind of expert I want to be.
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Mine is salt and pepper, more salt, and less pepper, each year.
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The pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction now. It is currently fashionable for random social media users to think they are refuting established science, and that “the scientific establishment” (whatever that means) is either overlooking the obvious, or involved in a cover-up.
The way taxonomy is going, you soon will!
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To be clear, as people may or may not know this, but barbarians were called what they were because they burbled Latin and Greek; due to this, the Roman Empire incorrectly assumed that they did not have a sophisticated culture with art or leadership. Only in more modern times are the Visigoth, Osigoths, and other “Barbarian” cultures truly appreciated.
Now, if I am misunderstanding what you saying, then please correctly me.
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I am sympathetic, I think to the point of view you’re expressing, but this is wandering into the realm of politics (albeit at meta-level) rather than nature discussion, and it’s probably better to try to drift things back towards naturalism.
When you’re designing and carrying out scientific experiments, you’re usually engaged in an optimization problem involving time, money, and technology, with some ability to substitute one with the other two. Doing science as part of a big organized system can often increase the total amount of resources you have to address the problem, but there will be some sort of metric to meet so the system can figure out how many resources to allocate to you versus other people who also want to do science. There’s a lot of science to be done, and even in a resource-rich society, conditions will be Malthusian.
What makes me excited about both strictly technical developments (DNA sequencing getting cheaper and highly commodified, apparatus like USB microscopes becoming available at a consumer level) and technical-social things like iNat (which solves a lot of coordination problems) is that they open up a much larger pool of resources for science. It makes it possible for individuals to contribute small amounts of money, time, and technology, which, taken as a whole, may exceed the resources that would be made available by the system (at least for some things), and helps ease the Malthusian pressure on what science gets enough resources to get done.
Of course, some of that effort will go towards experiments and observations that are, by most metrics, wasteful, in the sense that they do very little to advance understanding. Given these tools, some people will use them for fooling around, or outright crankery. On the other hand, it also lets people pursue things that they’re passionate about that are hard to justify by institutional metrics, and I think that’s very neat.
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famous, yes, but that’s a gross simplification of only part of their culture.
that said, I do think the rest of this conversation should return to the original topic: What does it mean to be an expert?
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Oh, I didn’t mean to accuse you of being deliberately political, and I find the discussion very interesting, and it should be possible to discuss and critique modes of human organization in a detached fashion.
But I have also lived on the Internet before and after the rise of social media, and I’m pretty sure that in short order, someone would insist that person A’s abstract views on bureaucracy means that they MUST hold certain very specific object-level views on the pandemic and its control, the governance of the United States, etc., and, well, things slide downhill from there
I do see the relevance of this to the original question of the thread, I just think making it more nature-specific would make it a safer topic to pursue.
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Indeed. and getting back to the topic at hand: in the age of social media, having a strong opinion on something makes you an “expert.”
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I think it’s not because of Internet, but part of human nature, humans are made to believe old people and experienced people (so usually they’re in both groups), it helped youngs to not kill themselves too fast, but now it also leads people believing if someone behaves like he’s a master/expert in X, he most likely is one, no matter what amount of false info he can produce.
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Eh, the cod issue is more an example of what happens when regulators listen to people who tell them what they want to hear rather than scientists with actual real data. It was clear back in the 1950s that large-scale trawling could wipe out the cod industry, and they went ahead and did it anyway because in the short term it was massively profitable. Much the same dynamic is playing out with WESPAC, the Western Pacific fishery commission, which regularly disregards scientific evidence in order to increase fishing limits.
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I won’t dispute that cherry-picking data is a problem or that it played a role in the collapse of northern cod but it isn’t the whole story.
Arguments against trawling are centuries old. What was known about deepwater fish stocks in the 1950s was pretty limited and saying that
is not strictly correct insofar as the data and computational tools didn’t exist that would have allowed such a definitive conclusion for 2J3KL cod. What was known was that with the cessation of trawling (and fishing generally) during WW2, ocean fish stocks increased dramatically. There was an appreciation that trawling (and not just trawling) could drive stocks to very low levels but the position that such a thing was inevitable in the 1980s was not universally (or even very widely) held within the fisheries science club.
The issues with northern cod involved a failure of science on several levels and they were systemic. Yes, there were individuals who questioned the consensus that assumptions about equilibria in ecosystems were unrealistic but they were a minority. So-called technology creep meant that relationships between catch per unit effort and stock status were constantly changing but were modelled as static. The same holds true for assumptions about natural mortality and other parameters. There were masses of data and mountains of analyses. “Experts”, not all of whom toiled for management agencies, did not see the collapse coming until it was looming. Yes, other “experts” tried to tell them but they were in the same position as climate “experts” who were trying to warn of climate change at a time when they were outside the consensus. Things have improved slightly since Galileo was shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition but speaking truth to power has always been a dicey business.
Through the entire debate about 2J3KL cod in the 70s and 80s, “experts” whose families had fished for a living in the near shore for centuries tried and failed to be heard. They told a consistent story based on observations on the water. They were ignored and they were wiped out. Maybe there was no way for even that fishery to survive the ecological shift that took place but its demise would certainly have been slower and more manageable if they had been listened to. When the fishery starts up again, as it inevitably will in some form, most of their families will not be part of it.
I only cited this example because it is so well documented. There are many other instances. For a thoughtful and compelling discussion of the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and science read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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There has been a long-running discussion in UK about whether taxonomy is a dying skill. It has been somewhat derailed by not distinguishing between taxonomy and the ability to identify specimens.
But the aspect that is relevant here is that one of the arguments used to imply the demise of taxonomy is that the experts are mostly elderly. I think this situation is inevitable. Given that expertise is relative, and you tend to accumulate more as you get older, of course the people at the top of the expertise pyramid are likely to be elderly. When one dies, the role of top authority will pass to someone younger, but probably only a little younger.
If a young person wants to be the top expert, I suggest the only way is to find a taxonomic group that no else cares about. Anyone want to do the Symphyla?
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Why have humans ever been attracted to bellicose, overbearing personalities offering simple answers to complex questions and driving societies to conflict and destruction? Demagogues are not new or restricted to any particular aspect of human social interactions. The tools of demagoguery have changed with the rise of social media but the thing itself is unchanged.
Demagogues are more or less antiexperts. They appeal to emotion and deride intellect. They market falsehood not truth. They are as old a phenomenon and as common as dirt.
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I agree with part of it, there’re many young enthusiasts who are majorly into taxonomy, plus in many fields experts to have like generation, take entomologysts, they grew out of university, take years in field and start teaching others, like 10 years younger, those start teaching younger generation too, so you can start learning from them right in school or in university, surely you don’t become an expert just from this fact alone, but some of those young people know a lot of some old people don’t, especially now in the age when not every elderly person can catch up with all new information. My friend made his own key for local Caelifera and was studying subspecies of one of grasshoppers. Surely most insect experts are at least 50+, but they were doing pretty much the same stuff when they were 30 or 40, so I doubt they weren’t experts, just not as big ones.
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Who are these some people? I’ve never heard anyone claim this. This seems like a straw man, set up for the sole purpose of being knocked down.
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