I’ve encountered it in all sorts of places. “What are your qualifications?” gets asked in pointed ways in all sorts of contexts where the range of acceptable answers is extremely small. Try arguing energy policy with an oil industry “expert” and see how far you get without a relevant (to them) degree or job title.
I sat on a local Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy back when that was a thing and conversations regarding the ozone layer, pesticides or climate invariably encountered fierce resistance to science-based arguments from industry managers on precisely those grounds. They didn’t go after the technical points they attacked the presenter as a non-expert.
It’s about what it means to be an expert and some posters have effectively taken a position that scientist experts are better than non-scientists for various reasons. It’s hard to talk about that without citing examples where it was clearly not true.
This post was motivated by two interactions I’ve had in the past year (neither of them on iNat but one offline and one on another online community). On both occasions, I had someone tell me that they didn’t believe my identification of something because I wasn’t an “expert”. When I asked who they’d consider to be an expert, both of these people said that it would have to be someone in academia or with an academic background in botany (paraphrasing). I suspect that a good number of people in the world at large (probably less so in the naturalist community) have this implicit idea that “experts” must have some kind of formal accreditation.
You are right, that is one of many ways people will use to avoid facing arguments that would make them understand something that their salaries require them to not understand. I’ve had the same thing happen, and when they find out I have a Ph.D. they just switch to some other line of attack.
That’s interesting. I’m sorry if you were disrespected. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a situation where a naturalist didn’t know that degrees and identification ability have little to do with each other.
You don’t even have to get that obscure. The family of wasps in my avatar has about 2400 species described but most are impossible to identify due to poor descriptions, and there are probably at least another 2000 undescribed. There are only about 3–5 people in the world seriously working on them, including me, and I can only be considered an expert on one small part.
If you can put a Ph.D. or M.S. after your name and point to research you’ve published, or you’re employed as a biologist based on your experience and training, it’s probably easier to identify yourself as an expert in some field of biology. Your expertise has been vetted through the academic process or through other training. If you’re self-taught or informally taught and don’t have the academic or employment credentials, your expertise might be questioned. Not saying that’s correct or appropriate, just the reality.
Having spent entirely too much time hanging around academia I will offer an alternative take and I may exaggerate a tad just to make a point.
Academic methods have been maintained and developed over several centuries through social processes that have evolved slowly and retain far too many characteristics of a time when they were the exclusive preserve of privileged, powerful elites - which, come to think of it, they kind of still are, if to a less extreme degree. They are long on the rhetoric of preserving fundamental principles like critical capacity/skills, fairness, and respect of human dignity but frequently operate in manners that are diametrically opposed to the promotion of those qualities. I have witnessed disputes between highly educated, nominal adults that would be embarrassing in a three-year-old, including some that lasted years. At any given time academic departments may be dominated by a prevailing orthodoxy that is venomously intolerant of opposing views and impervious to appeals to the qualities it bangs on about when talking about itself. They generally have great libraries and there are always a few genuinely original and creative souls about the place who make studying there worth the annoyance of dealing with the stuffed shirts and prima donnas.
Amen. There are few things more bureaucratic and hidebound than academia.
Thanks for giving us the opportunity to learn about Bill (and his wife Eileene! I enjoyed reading about her as well). Somewhat unrelated to your main point, but:
It’s lengthy and somewhat dense, but I think very valuable to the question of “how do we do science better?” (The “cargo cult” bits make it sound polemical, initially, but it’s a sober and clear-headed look at the question.) The “Legitimate peripheral participation” and “Communities of practice” sections are, I think, particularly relevant for us here, for those not eager to slog through all of it.
The experts are likely exhausted. Having seen the amazing collection of expertise on iNat, it is easy to see how the expectations of people/the masses/non-experts become tiring and time consuming, even in a friendly environment like here. It is not that they are inadequate or unwilling, but that the demands on them are too numerous.
This is exacerbated by people that are unwilling to use logic and look for information for themselves - the internet has trained us to look for easy answers (and maybe also education has failed us). Another detracting factor for experts giving their input, is that on the internet and social media there are people that will deride and attack knowledge and expertise because they do not agree or because they find it condescending.
The iNaturalist community seems to avoid this issue, and I hypothesize it is because people are here to learn and to share, not to be right.
And I would argue there is really no requirement for an expert to be a decent human being, though we would like this to be true. Thankfully iNat tends to attract those that like to share their knowledge :)
This exactly makes me so excited to see where science will be in a few decades. I also am interested to see how the internet and the availability of information will continue to foster and enable the development of non-academically trained expertise. My expertise is not in biology or taxonomy, but I am amazed at the resources I can find on esoteric taxonomy if I dig a little.
Biodiversity Heritage Library has been absolutely transformational on esoteric taxonomy issues–even more so when you couple it to the widespread digitization of plant specimens, particularly types. Getting that information disseminated out of a comparatively small number of repositories means that even a comparatively ordinary person, with some capacity for attention to detail, can contribute productively to the compilation of definitive species lists and that sort of thing.
I agree. I study fungi and ID what I can and sometimes it is a best guess based on checking my books and papers by those I consider to be experts. What frustrates me on iNat is an ID that is clearly wrong, usually from CV.
When I correct such an ID I take the time to explain why and add links with species information. My opinion is that just throwing out a name is not instructive. This is time consuming and I’m only dealing with fungi in Oregon and low hanging fruit at that!
Can understand why experts will pick and choose.
I hadn’t known about the BHL - that is very cool. It would be great if the digitization of university libraries and collections would be uploaded to BHL or a similar platform. The work of BHL to seek permission to make copyrighted works available under CC licenses is invaluable.
I totally agree. If I am disagreeing with an ID, I try to always give an explanation I keep draft iNat journal pages to store common responses and references for things I identify commonly. I really, really appreciate when someone answers my questions on IDs though :)
Fungi have got to be a difficult niche! I feel like the computer vision and people (myself included) generally aren’t very good with IDing fungi. I think I’d get tired real quick of providing explanations for corrections to computer vision (I would almost recommend against this for CV IDs, in consideration of your sanity…)
The computer vision suggestions aren’t so bad. They at least serve the purpose of helping even someone with no knowledge come up with an initial guess. And it is at least accurate enough to get the trivial cases right most of the time and get within the right ballpark (maybe class, order, or family at best rather than genus and species) on slightly trickier ones. Often a little refinement from a user with some basic knowledge can sort out most of the egregiously wrong suggestions, and other identifiers can help from there. It’s not really meant to take the place of an expert identifier, just to help point the majority of the massive amounts of observations received on iNat in the right general direction.
I agree with you.
Sometimes users rely on it even when they know the correct id! They write in the description it is X and then choose something from suggestions, totally wrong! Makes me wonder why. It adds to the field of how a true expert should behave, when he should believe other authorities on their word or should he do it at all?
That’s a double-edged sword, though. When I read about the scientists of the past, who perhaps began publishing papers in their teen years, I pondered the question, where did I go wrong, that I did not achieve that, despite growing up in a (relatively) privileged position? But I concluded that it isn’t that I went wrong, but that more of the basic discoveries had yet to be made in their time. What could be discovered 150 years ago with the equivalent of a kid’s chemistry set of today has been, well, already discovered now. As the tools you mention become more widely available, it may indeed set off a new wave of youthful, cutting edge discoverers; but once they make the easiest discoveries that those tools enable, that wave will end and science will be back in the well-equipped, well-funded laboratories again.