
Lazy Expert Syndrome - LazyExpert
http://riskology.co/lazy-expert-syndrome/
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barrkel
Something similar happens when riding motorcycles. At first you're cautious
because you don't know how to evaluate the risks. Then you move into a peak of
overconfidence where the usual risks are known; but this is the most dangerous
period. It's only after a while at this level, perhaps after a few scares or
accidents, that a new appreciation for unusual risks starts to come in. You
start to become less optimistic, and consider what could go wrong, not just
what's likely to go wrong. You start actively seeking reasons for the traffic
around you to do the unexpected.

Mature evaluation of risks increases the weighting given to tail events, black
swans etc., particularly if the outcome is severe. Teaching this perspective
ought to be effective in keeping it in mind for the teacher too.

~~~
jbrooksuk
My Dad - who used to drive an Ambulance then Fire Engines (for about 20 years)
- taught me to drive and use something called "Defensive Driving Techniques".
Where most people look at one or two cars ahead and hopefully the one behind,
my Dad taught me to look at _every_ car that I can see, using every gap,
window, mirror etc to be aware of my surroundings. Look at people, bus stops,
crossings, shops in towns etc.

He also suggested that rather than just looking at a car, you look at the
position of the car, who's driving, the age, have I seen them drive weirdly
yet? This way you can build up a much better mental model of how they're going
to react to something. This has saved me numerous times where I've judged what
a car will do just by how they're placed in the road, even if they look like
they may do something else to a normal driver.

It's a technique that I've shown to my girlfriend and it's changed her driving
(for the better) and what I'll be teaching my kids when the time comes.

~~~
CraigJPerry
That's a kind of brute force approach. It seems sub optimal but I don't know
how to reason about it.

Should I say that observing every vehicle across the median on the oncoming
carriageway is inefficient? Well I can't say that because occasionally some
small cargo or even a wheel falls off and bounds across to the oncoming lane -
something you definitely want to see coming.

Perhaps taking a zonal approach is as effective and certainly less taxing on
the driver.

Scan each zone, some zones get scanned more frequently, and look for anything
unusual.

~~~
Jtsummers
Defensive driving is really just a specific application of situational
awareness [0]. With practice and experience you'll go from just maintaining
visibility and space for reaction time to actually remembering where drivers
are that have been blocked from your view by other vehicles. You never really
track _every_ vehicle and pedestrian, but you do make note of particular ones
and the rest get lumped into groups based on their behavior. You'll learn to
anticipate the car that's going to make a left turn in front of you by taking
your foot off the throttle earlier instead of braking at the last second.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation_awareness)

~~~
gretful
you're talking about chunking: at first you try to remember everything, then
as you gain experience you learn you can abstract certain items away to a
general model of them (chunk) without having to remember the specifics of each
individual item.

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pm90
Richard Feynman attributed to this phenomena, although he did not name it as
such. Paraphrasing here, but he did not accept a position at the Institute for
Advanced Study precisely because it would no longer allow him to teach. Or to
be more precise, he wanted to always be in a position that would _make_ him
teach, forcing him to rethink the basic ideas.

Its interesting that I was just having a conversation about this yesterday. In
today's world, you simply can't stop learning after you've got a job. You have
to keep learning, not only new technologies, but also revisit the fundamentals
every now and then. To be sure, if you work in a field that you like (as I do)
it is much easier to do this. If not, you can rationalize the time investment
as going towards making you better at your job.

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OwlyCode
This is so true, and goes the same for every job. I saw expert developers push
stuff right into master and deploy it without testing because "they know what
they do and you have to be productive".

~~~
devonkim
I get nods when I demand some form of automated testing because "everyone's IQ
and experience tends to become irrelevant at 3 am when you're tired and hungry
working on a critical bug before the release ships." I ask people if they
trust that developer, not the usual person you know. Beyond that, there's few
better ways to show how to use a piece of code than by writing a test that
actually does use it as you would, so it cuts down on some documentation if
people can trust that it'll be there.

~~~
kirse
Well of course devs are up to 3am, it's because they're forced to spend huge
chunks of time writing and updating all those automated tests.

Not writing the tests gets one to bed earlier, ergo well-rested programmer,
ergo no release bugs.

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nmridul
And then you become so good in teaching that you end up being lazy again ...
Now you start teaching others how to teach .. and the cycle repeats ..

Jokes apart, the solution is good and practical.

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idiot900
I like the solution to this problem: teach others best practices and you'll
become better too. This is, incidentally, how academic medicine works.

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confluence
Why invent a new marketing buzzword name for what everyone already calls
complacency?

~~~
ajanuary
Newbies can be complacent. Plus it has the flattering word "expert" in it.

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snowwrestler
One practical definition of an expert is someone who can achieve good outcomes
even while, or because of, breaking the rules. Great writers break "rules" of
grammer all the time, sometimes even basic ones in the case of folks like e.e.
cummings or Cormac McCarthy.

Why do we have rules at all? If we all knew everything about everything, then
we wouldn't need rules; we'd just make every decision correctly on our own.
But we don't know everything about everything, so rules provide simple
heuristics to guide our behavior.

But sometimes a person knows everything about 1 or 2 things. And in those
things, if they really know what we're doing, they don't need rules, because
their understanding exceeds simple heuristics.

So, I think the word "expert" is misplaced here, which is IMO part of the
problem. Just because you've done something for a long time, that doesn't make
you an expert. And expertise is a narrow lane--an expert in bricklaying might
not be an expert in construction safety.

All that said, I have found that teaching is a great way to develop personal
competence. But it's not because I'm lazy, it's because teaching forces me to
examine the rules, and the basis for their creation, which builds real
competence and ultimately expertise.

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wcchandler
I'm really interested in the Al Capone story now. That part was very well
written.

~~~
gwern
Looking at WP, I think they overstate the importance:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Trials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Trials)
It sounds like various local governments just began throwing the book at him
on any charges they could trump up, until negotiations with the IRS went
terribly wrong and they had an admission of his income levels which they could
use against him and make real charges stick. (And then syphilis meant he was
no longer a threat.)

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Grae
Early on at Thinkful we were concerned about being able to consistently find
skilled mentors to work with students learning front end web development. We
hoped expert developers would find our model of mentorship personally and
professionally rewarding but we were far from certain. We've built an
outstandingly talented team and I attribute much of our success to filtering
specifically for those developers and designers who've already come to this
realization and decided to act on it.

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drdeadringer
I tend to think of this more as getting cocky than lazy, although both are
linked here. It is something to be mindful of as you push past it.

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Yadi
Very interesting! I bet most entrepreneurs that I know who even work really
hard have Lazy Expert Syndrome.

I guess mentoring would be a great thing to do.

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liotier
To further the conclusion, as a general principle the best way to be an expert
at something is to teach it !

~~~
venomsnake
An old student's joke -

A student always fails exam. And takes extra classes - the professors explains
and explains. But the student - "I don't get it, I don't get it". Finally the
professor loses his mind "Oh, come on - I already got it from that much
explaining"

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ClassicFarris
Also Known As: The Sophomore Slump

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CardenB


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waps
This is such typical HR/manager dribble.

1) constantly compliment, in extremely general terms, their employees : "The
world is better off without Capone’s expertise, but it’s not better off
without yours", "how even the smartest people in the world can destroy their
lives and careers with a tiny mistake". But only in general terms.

2) their only purpose is to increase their own money : "We were obsessed with
safety. Insurance for construction companies is extremely expensive; one way
to stay competitive was to make sure no employees got hurt". The article
itself is just attention-grabbing, and it's obviously succeeded with very
little actual content.

3) Between the lines it is clear what they really think about their employees
: "You see, you’ve been blessed with the ability to think, reason, and do
math". In other words, he thinks his (ex-)employees are morons. "That’s how
the brain works—it fears what it doesn’t understand.". He proceeds to "explain
how your mind words", again patronizing, childish and confirming his own
superiority.

4) They suggest having the solution. Just read the titles "How To Stay On Top
Of Your Game And Never Make Rookie Mistakes", "Why You Suffer From Lazy Expert
Syndrome"

5) Of course, they don't have the solution. The problem is that the solution
is the point where the good balances out the bad. Where your way of working
prevents you getting fired, or even gets you good review, but otherwise is as
little work and as little risk as possible. But of course, there is zero
guidance in the article about where to find this point.

Probably there's 2 reasons for this. Firstly, they don't want you to think in
your own interest. The interest of the manager comes first (I'd say the
company's interest, but let's be honest here), and that means maximizing
output (as alluded to in the skills of an expert cook. Inaccurate, of course.
My dad's a cook and I've asked this many times. The thing that distinguishes
an expert cook is consistently good food. NOT more of it, even though a
significant part of training for cooks is how to increase food output to a
point without degrading quality too much. But consistently good food, that's
bloody hard)

6) Due to lack of a solution, an extremely general advice is given. "Become a
mentor". Right. Supremely unhelpful of course. Like all of management. You
could make a list of 10 inspirational lines and you'd have a good summary of
hundreds of terabytes of these pieces.

Also, I've studied AI and the idea that the brain "fears what it doesn't
understand". That is just so wrong it's ridiculous. When you train a person
for something new, what happens is that the higher (and MUCH slower) brain
processes train the lower ones to perform a task. There is no fear involved
(in non-extreme situations, not talking about learning to skydive here), there
is simply switching from working from an abstract model (e.g. from a book,
from a trainer) to working in an extremely non-abstract situation (the real
world). For abstract models, the brain is very, very slow, inaccurate and also
very, very much non-parallel. Non-abstract reflexive models - very, very fast,
extremely accurate and massively parallel (10-15 neurons involved at most in
decision making, you can combine it with dozens of other tasks without effort,
very fast and appears even faster because the brain responds to it's
prediction of a future situation, not to the impulses it's actually receiving,
creating the -usually good enough- illusion of infinitely fast reactions as
long as the prediction is accurate (e.g. nobody has a brain fast enough to
make a tennis racket track a tennis ball. That is impossible with a feedback
loop that takes 0.10-0.15s to react, it needs thousands of hertz. Yet lots of
humans do so). And of course, hilarity ensues, often painfully, if the
prediction is wrong).

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hmans
tl;dr Buy my online report.

