I believe it is true, based on my observations, that a "gaggle of giggling girls", pre-teens, has a greater ability to master the intricacies of technical equipment, in particular a "cell phone", than does the average senior faculty member at a university. If you don't like the "cell phone" example, use the mastery of completely free Voice-over-IP services such as Skype for long-distance calls, or calls around the planet for under 5 cents a minute.
I pick on females not because I am trying to be stereotypical, but because I am directly challenging several stereotypes at once, regarding females, faculty, and technical mastery skills.
I am not addressing activities that are of no interest to senior faculty members, such as sharing their day to day lives on Facebook. I am talking about simple communication, a basis for collaboration, as well as ability to master new technology given several years to find time to do so.
I believe this is a profound data point. It calls into question many of our core assumptions, including the focus and evaluation of how we educate or youth.
In particular, this instance highlights part of what appears on investigation to be a much larger problem -- the downside of academic education, and the downside of expertise.
In any rational measure of mastery of a cell phone as an "Activity of Daily Life" in today's society, it appears that senior academics have to rate in the "disabled" category.
If it were only academics, this would be important but, well, "academic". Sadly, the downside of expertise appears to apply as well, perhaps even more so, to two very important groups -- business management, and medical doctors.
And, of course, then if you are considering automating the electronic health record at a large academic medical institution, you have all three to deal with, perhaps in the same group of people.
While it can be somewhat fun to disparage experts, managers, and academics, let's try to stick to known facts here, and see where our mental models need updating, and then look at what the policy implications are of all this.
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First, there are well-documented problems with experts and expertise. A great deal of research has been done by the military, and lately by those following financial disasters, on how it is that some truly smart people can behave so stupidly, or how a fully-trained, highly-motivated observer can miss exactly what it was that was right in front of them.
One well-respected researcher in this field is Dr. Itiel Dror, at University College London. Here's the abstract of a paper he published last year:
Dror, I (2011) The Paradox of Human Expertise: Why Experts Can Get It Wrong. In: Kapur, N and Pascual-Leone, A and Ramachandran, VS, (eds.) The Paradoxical Brain. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. (In press).
Abstract
Expertise is correctly, but one-sidedly, associated with special abilities and enhanced performance. The other side of expertise, however, is surreptitiously hidden. Along with expertise, performance may also be degraded, culminating in a lack of flexibility and error. Expertise is demystified by explaining the brain functions and cognitive architecture involved in being an expert. These information processing mechanisms, the very making of expertise, entail computational trade-offs that sometimes result in paradoxical functional degradation. For example, being an expert entails using schemas, selective attention, chunking information, automaticity, and more reliance on top-down information, all of which allow experts to perform quickly and efficiently; however, these very mechanisms restrict flexibility and control, may cause the experts to miss and ignore important information, introduce tunnel vision and bias, and can cause other effects that degrade performance. Such phenomena are apparent in a wide range of expert domains, from medical professionals and forensic examiners, to military fighter pilots and financial traders.
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/48372/
How can this be?
To illustrate, Dr. Dror suggests that you attempt the following task.
There is no rush and no time limit. Don't proceed until you have
completed this task and feel confident you have not made a mistake.
Count how many 'F's are in the following text:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…
=========== stop here until you are done =======
V
V
V
V
V
V ... take your time
V
V
V
V
V
V ... double check your work
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
V
======== ANSWER BELOW.
The correct answer is six. There are six F's in the text.
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…
Don't feel bad if you got it wrong. I counted three.
This is an example of a kind of problem that expert readers have that beginning readers, such as your young children, probably do not have.
Most people have learned to read for "content" and they have learned, implicitly, that the word "of" does not have much content, so their mind basically uses "white-out" on the words "of" and they disappear from our view.
The problem is that EXACTLY the same type of inability to see what is, in retrospect, in plain sight, happens to all kinds of experts -- including doctors, CEO's, and academics.
In fact, the more they have trained their senses to notice certain things, the LESS likely they are to notice other things that they have, at the same time, learned to ignore.
So, can you see what's in front of you?
Identify the person in the image, then turn around, back up 3 or 4 paces, turn around and see what you see. From normal viewing distance, this is clearly Albert Einstein. From across the room, this is "clearly" Marilyn Monroe.
There is a larger version at MIT where this "hybrid image" originated.
http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybrid_gallery/monroe_einstein.html
My point here is not just for fun --- people who are "close to" this data see one things, and people who are not "close to" this data see something else entirely.
We are surrounded by issues that are invisible in plain sight, and sources of disagreement that are due to our perspective that we don't expect to be there. Being an "expert" doesn't free a person of having the same types of problems, but it does decrease, substantially, their willingness to consider that an interpretation different from their own, especially by a non-expert, might have any value at all.
Back to the core point of this post -- Almost everyone has problems with their eyeballs, which are recognized and dealt with by "glasses" or "contact lenses" and not really considered disabilities. Some people don't like to admit they have a problem, and prefer to wear contacts, or avoid wearing glasses whenever possible.
However many people, and in particular experts, have a different type of problem with seeing that is an unavoidable side-effect of their expertise. This is more subtle, and potentially much more dangerous, but also flies in the face of their own self-image of "expert" and therefore is not admitted, adjusted or compensated for.
The first step in dealing with a disability is recognizing that one has it, and also realizing that the world has not ended just because of an issue with one small sub-system of what it means to be human.
(end of part 1)
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