I agree with Owen's comments and the others. The basic message of my post, however, seems to be something like, "Make sure you compare your plans to reality" while emphasizing the failure mode I see more often in EA (that people overestimate the difficulty of launching their own project).
Would it be correct to say that your comments don't disagree with the underlying message, but rather believe that my framing will have net harmful effects because you predict that many people reading this forum will be incited to take unwise actions?
Agreed. This updates my view.
Fascinating - this ranks as both my most downvoted and most shared post of all time.
Yup, this is an important thing to keep in the background of expert assessment.
I'm glad you think it's nonsense, since - in some strange state of affairs - a certain unnamed person has been crushing on the communal Pom sheet lately. =P
Well-observed! Here's my guess on where I rank on the various conditions above:
Bob, a graphic design novice, pays no attention to the signs and advertisements along the side of the street, even though they are within his field of vision. It may have been that lots of data relating to expertise was literally and metaphorically in my field of vision, but that I wasn't focusing on it very well, or wasn't focusing on the proper features.
Potential improvement: Rather than a binary pass fail for experts we should like a metric that grades the material they present.
Agreed. I tried to make it binary for the sake of generating good examples, but the world is much more messy. In the spreadsheet version I use, I try to assign each marker a rating from "none" to "high."
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise
How worthwhile do you think it would be for someone to read the handbook?
Issue: It seems like the model might have trouble filtering people who have detailed but wrong models.
100%. The model above is only good for assessing necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. I.e., someone can pass all four conditions above and still not be an expert.
+1
Though I suspect it will be difficult to get to a sufficient threshold of EAs using LinkedIn as their social network without something similar to a marketing campaign. Any takers?