Expertise is ‘Just’ Pattern Matching

Professor K. Anders Ericsson explains in his 2016 deliberate practice book that human expertise results from the development of effective mental representations of whatever field you wish to specialize in. Although this view of expertise as tacit knowledge is relatively well-known, it seems uncontroversial. The art of practice, however, may simply ... See more

One of the most challenging ideas I have encountered. The idea is to recognize a situation in a developing environment. This is done by translating that recognition into a set of cues, plausible goals, and expectations, along with a set of trained actions. If you are familiar with the situation, you construct variations of intended actions on the f... See more

The idea that 'expertise is just pattern-matching is challenging to me because it doesn't seem like it should be so simple. What about creativity? Don't different mechanisms than prototype-based recognition drive creativity? The short answer seems to be 'yes, creativity relies on connecting different ideas, which is independent of expertise. The an... See more