The Difference Between Experience and Expertise

We can define an expert as someone who has spent a significant amount of time studying a related field, and as such it’s reasonable to assume that experts are slightly better at avoiding the problems of information cascades, binary voting, and free market default values... This is because the time afforded to experts to think allows them the space ... See more

Model managers of tomorrow will need to learn the same things. They’ll need to know which AI models to use for which tasks. They’ll need to be able to quickly evaluate new models that they’ve never used before to determine if they’re good enough. They’ll need to know how to break up complex tasks between different models suited to each piece of wor... 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

Management is a skill that is extremely difficult to evaluate. Certain domains are more challenging to evaluate than others.It is not easy to talk about management, but it is more challenging to implement. I have long empathized with Herbert Simon's quip that "management principles are simple, even trivial." Putting believability into practice requ... See more

Apple is not a company where general managers oversee managers; rather, it is a company where experts lead experts. The assumption is that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well than to train a manager to be an expert. 

Epstein looks at multi-decade research about forecasting and how specialists constantly can’t predict with any accuracy while generalists manage to do better. In short; people who are broadly curious, and interested in multiple fields, fare better and adjust their models more easily when proven wrong.

Another view is that there are costs to generalizing and that you’re better off hiring specialists — employees who have very deep expertise in an important area — or encouraging your employees to become specialists in whatever they do.