Experts

We have become a society of experts, but the narrowness of our expertise is mind-boggling.  Malcolm Gladwell has suggested that to become an expert in one’s chosen field or arena, at least 10,000 hours of intense, intentional study and/or practice is necessary.  Using the Beatle’s seeming overnight popularity in the 1960s as a prime example, he peels back the layers of the onion and removes the veneer that their talent, unlike their success, was not an instantaneous phenomenon.  Much to the contrary, they had put in diligent, long hours to achieve their level of proficiency.  A few millennia ago, even globally there were on a handful of experts at any one time.  Most people were allotted the agrarian, subsistence lifestyle and had little time for anything other than providing for basic needs.  Royalty, say an Egyptian pharaoh and a few in his court, had time for learning language(s), astronomy, or expert level architecture, that is, fitting pyramid bricks together so precisely that not even a single sheet of paper could pass through – even thousands of years later!  Further along in history, as societies prospered, a few more people who had either become expert merchants or tradesmen (or more likely had fathers that were such) had excess leisure time and became experts in matters like philosophy, such as Plato and Aristotle, or math, such as Euclid and Pythagoras.  Experts were relatively few though, and these ‘experts’ in their respective fields were the sole proprietors of this knowledge, typically because they founded or discovered their particular area of knowledge.  By the time of Renaissance, experts more of the artistic or scientific type – think Michelangelo and Donatello for mutant ninjas, I mean, artists, and Galileo and Kepler for scientists.  Few men, though, could claim an expert-level understanding and practice of all of these fields, though there were a few, including the epitome of the ‘Renaissance Man’, Leonardo Da Vinci.   As of late, however, ‘experts’ are not only a-dime-a-dozen, they’re everywhere in every possible field imaginable.  Assuredly, there are already plenty (too many) ‘experts’ in ‘Pokemon Go’.  Because of the exponential increase in the exchange and production of information, there are experts even on the exponential increase and exchange of information – just see TedTalks for dozens of examples.  Because of the specificity of study and knowledge needed to be an expert now, specialists in this area have to hone in on the implications of information explosion for jobs, or the emotional effects humans and computers and humans interacting daily will have on society, or what year computers will become more intelligent than humans (I am not making this up – these are considered legitimate areas of study and therefore have legitimate ‘experts’).  In a world of near-logarithmic explosion of information and technology, it is near impossible to be a true modern ‘Renaissance Man’, unless, of course, you are Sherlock Holmes.   It is comforting to know we don’t have to be experts to use our talents.  Kingdoms are not built by experts, but by servants.