Expertise Boundaries Quotes

Everybody's got a different circle of competence. The important thing is not how big the circle is. The important thing is staying inside the circle.

I’d like you to know that almost all of the directors I have met over the years have been decent, likable and intelligent. Nevertheless, many of these good souls are people whom I would never have chosen to handle money or business matters. It simply was not their game. They, in turn, would never have asked me for help in removing a tooth, decorating their home or improving their golf swing. … We are all duds at one thing or another. For most of us, the list is long. The important point to recognize is that if you are Bobby Fischer, you must play only chess for money.

I strongly discourage any intellectuals, regardless of race, from speaking on matters for which they have limited or no expertise.

Who's to say because you're just a basketball player, or you are a basketball player, who's to say you can't chime in on other subjects or other important topics?

Experts don't know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are.

Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it. Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

I can direct breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I take pride in my kitchen, but I'm not going to direct a movie.

The general public doesn't know and probably doesn't care about punctuated equilibria nor indeed should they, or the greenhouse effect on some other planet - they barely have the ability to cope with the greenhouse effect on their own planet. So I think you have to distinguish between the broad visibility of a scientist when he or she is speaking to a general public and trying to address general issues and the continued position that a scientist may have into the history of a particular subject.

Expert knowledge is limited knowledge

One man may have some special knowledge at first-hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.