In nanotech? True enough, because I am not convinced that there is any domain expertise in the sort of nanotech Storrs Hall writes about. It seems like a field that consists mostly of advertising. (There is genuine science and genuine engineering in nano-stuff; for instance, MEMS really is a thing. But the sort of “let’s build teeny-tiny mechanical devices, designed and built at the molecular level, which will be able to do amazing things previously-existing tech can’t” that Storrs Hall has advocated seems not to have panned out.)
But more generally, that isn’t so at all. What I’m looking for by way of domain expertise in a technological field is a history of demonstrated technological achievements. Storrs Hall has one such achievement that I can see, and even that is doubtful. (He founded and was “chief scientist” of a company that made software for simulating molecular dynamics. I am not in a position to tell either how well the software actually worked or how much of it was JSH’s doing.) More generally, I want to see a history of demonstrated difficult accomplishments in the field, as opposed to merely writing about the field.
Selecting some random books from my shelves (literally random; I have a list and am selecting random lines from the file, discarding fiction and anthologies), I find:
Nigel Slater, “Real fast food”. Slater is more food-journalist than chef, but there the proof is in the eating. I have made many things from his books and found that they consistently taste good and don’t require excessive effort, which for me is sufficient reason to consider him a domain expert. Non-technical domain, though.
Alec Vidler, “Essays in liberality”. A book of theological essays. Highly non-technical domain, much worse even than nanotech in terms of whether such a thing as domain expertise exists.
Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the rainbow”. I like Dawkins, but it’s debatable whether he passes my domain-expert test; the main thing he’s known for in evolutionary biology is the “selfish gene” concept, which is more a new perspective on ideas others had already had than a new discovery in its own right.
John Potter, “The Cambridge companion to singing”. Potter is a tenor who has made >100 commercial recordings and performed in groups such as the Hilliard Ensemble. Singing well enough that anyone wants to sell your performances, or well enough to be a member of a group like the Hilliard Ensemble, is a difficult accomplishment in the field, and for this I consider him a domain expert. (Until his retirement he was also on the music faculty at a good university, but that’s only indirect evidence.)
Peter Sagal, “The book of vice”. Highly non-technical domain; author is a humourist and journalist. Not a domain expert.
Ruppert, Wand & Carroll, “Semiparametric regression”. I’ll consider only the first-named author. Author of what looks like about 100 statistical papers. Many of them are applied stats papers in journals with other subjects, suggesting that what he does is useful outside statistics itself. I had a look at one of his papers; it looks as if it is doing actual mathematics, discovering useful things about the merits of a couple of different approaches to data-smoothing. Sure looks like a domain expert.
H G Atkins, biography of Heinrich Heine. Non-technical domain. All I can easily find out about the author is that he was a professor of German at a good English university. Writing and publishing a biography of Heine is arguably itself evidence of domain expertise in, er, the life of Heine, but this one isn’t easy to assess with confidence.
Laura Miller, “The magician’s book: a skeptic’s adventures in Narnia”. About those books and C S Lewis’s life. Author does not appear to be a domain expert by my criterion.
Matthew Chapman, “40 days and 40 nights”, about the Dover intelligent design trial. I guess the domain is something like “history of church-and-state fights in the US”; I don’t think the author is a domain expert by my criterion.
A K Dewdney, “The Planiverse” (a sort of updated “Flatland”). Not clear what would constitute domain expertise, and maybe this should be excluded from the list for being fiction, though clearly its main point is not storytelling. At any rate, Dewdney is a professor of computer science but I don’t think he qualifies as a domain expert on two-dimensional universes occupied by intelligent beings.
That’s 10 books, which seems like a reasonable place to stop. Somewhere between 3 and 5 of the authors are domain experts by my criterion (generalized in what I think is an honest way to domains other than technology). Maybe 3 of the books are concerned with technical domains (Dawkins, Ruppert et al, Dewdney) and 1 or 2 of the 3 authors qualify.
I picked some more random books to bring the number of technical-domain ones up to 10. I’ll summarize more briefly. “(P)” means pop-science/pop-maths; “(T)” means technical works aimed at experts. Ruelle, “Chaotic evolution and strange attractors” (T); domain expert. O’Neill, “Doing data science: straight talk from the frontline” (P): marginal, leaning toward domain expert. Mlodinow, “The drunkard’s walk: how randomness rules our lives” (P): marginal, leaning toward not. (Author is a domain expert in theoretical physics, not so much here.) Steele, “Probability theory and combinatorial optimization” (T): domain expert. Nick Lane, “The vital question: why is life the way it is?” (P): not a domain expert. Gribbin, “In search of Schrödinger’s cat” (P): not a domain expert. Hatton, “Safer C: developing software for high-integrity and safety-critical systems” (T): domain expert. So, counting Dawkins, O’Neill, Mlodinow as half-domain-experts, I make that five out of 10.
So it seems like if you pull a book on a technical topic off my bookshelves at random, about half the time the author is a domain expert in this (admittedly fairly strong) sense; it seems to be pretty much all the time for hardcore technical works for expert audiences, whereas popular books are more likely to be written by journalists or by experts in other fields.
I wouldn’t call that “very few people”, in this context. (As a fraction of the whole population it’s “very few”, and I’m perfectly OK with that and assume you are too.)
In nanotech? True enough, because I am not convinced that there is any domain expertise in the sort of nanotech Storrs Hall writes about. It seems like a field that consists mostly of advertising. (There is genuine science and genuine engineering in nano-stuff; for instance, MEMS really is a thing. But the sort of “let’s build teeny-tiny mechanical devices, designed and built at the molecular level, which will be able to do amazing things previously-existing tech can’t” that Storrs Hall has advocated seems not to have panned out.)
But more generally, that isn’t so at all. What I’m looking for by way of domain expertise in a technological field is a history of demonstrated technological achievements. Storrs Hall has one such achievement that I can see, and even that is doubtful. (He founded and was “chief scientist” of a company that made software for simulating molecular dynamics. I am not in a position to tell either how well the software actually worked or how much of it was JSH’s doing.) More generally, I want to see a history of demonstrated difficult accomplishments in the field, as opposed to merely writing about the field.
Selecting some random books from my shelves (literally random; I have a list and am selecting random lines from the file, discarding fiction and anthologies), I find:
Nigel Slater, “Real fast food”. Slater is more food-journalist than chef, but there the proof is in the eating. I have made many things from his books and found that they consistently taste good and don’t require excessive effort, which for me is sufficient reason to consider him a domain expert. Non-technical domain, though.
Alec Vidler, “Essays in liberality”. A book of theological essays. Highly non-technical domain, much worse even than nanotech in terms of whether such a thing as domain expertise exists.
Richard Dawkins, “Unweaving the rainbow”. I like Dawkins, but it’s debatable whether he passes my domain-expert test; the main thing he’s known for in evolutionary biology is the “selfish gene” concept, which is more a new perspective on ideas others had already had than a new discovery in its own right.
John Potter, “The Cambridge companion to singing”. Potter is a tenor who has made >100 commercial recordings and performed in groups such as the Hilliard Ensemble. Singing well enough that anyone wants to sell your performances, or well enough to be a member of a group like the Hilliard Ensemble, is a difficult accomplishment in the field, and for this I consider him a domain expert. (Until his retirement he was also on the music faculty at a good university, but that’s only indirect evidence.)
Peter Sagal, “The book of vice”. Highly non-technical domain; author is a humourist and journalist. Not a domain expert.
Ruppert, Wand & Carroll, “Semiparametric regression”. I’ll consider only the first-named author. Author of what looks like about 100 statistical papers. Many of them are applied stats papers in journals with other subjects, suggesting that what he does is useful outside statistics itself. I had a look at one of his papers; it looks as if it is doing actual mathematics, discovering useful things about the merits of a couple of different approaches to data-smoothing. Sure looks like a domain expert.
H G Atkins, biography of Heinrich Heine. Non-technical domain. All I can easily find out about the author is that he was a professor of German at a good English university. Writing and publishing a biography of Heine is arguably itself evidence of domain expertise in, er, the life of Heine, but this one isn’t easy to assess with confidence.
Laura Miller, “The magician’s book: a skeptic’s adventures in Narnia”. About those books and C S Lewis’s life. Author does not appear to be a domain expert by my criterion.
Matthew Chapman, “40 days and 40 nights”, about the Dover intelligent design trial. I guess the domain is something like “history of church-and-state fights in the US”; I don’t think the author is a domain expert by my criterion.
A K Dewdney, “The Planiverse” (a sort of updated “Flatland”). Not clear what would constitute domain expertise, and maybe this should be excluded from the list for being fiction, though clearly its main point is not storytelling. At any rate, Dewdney is a professor of computer science but I don’t think he qualifies as a domain expert on two-dimensional universes occupied by intelligent beings.
That’s 10 books, which seems like a reasonable place to stop. Somewhere between 3 and 5 of the authors are domain experts by my criterion (generalized in what I think is an honest way to domains other than technology). Maybe 3 of the books are concerned with technical domains (Dawkins, Ruppert et al, Dewdney) and 1 or 2 of the 3 authors qualify.
I picked some more random books to bring the number of technical-domain ones up to 10. I’ll summarize more briefly. “(P)” means pop-science/pop-maths; “(T)” means technical works aimed at experts. Ruelle, “Chaotic evolution and strange attractors” (T); domain expert. O’Neill, “Doing data science: straight talk from the frontline” (P): marginal, leaning toward domain expert. Mlodinow, “The drunkard’s walk: how randomness rules our lives” (P): marginal, leaning toward not. (Author is a domain expert in theoretical physics, not so much here.) Steele, “Probability theory and combinatorial optimization” (T): domain expert. Nick Lane, “The vital question: why is life the way it is?” (P): not a domain expert. Gribbin, “In search of Schrödinger’s cat” (P): not a domain expert. Hatton, “Safer C: developing software for high-integrity and safety-critical systems” (T): domain expert. So, counting Dawkins, O’Neill, Mlodinow as half-domain-experts, I make that five out of 10.
So it seems like if you pull a book on a technical topic off my bookshelves at random, about half the time the author is a domain expert in this (admittedly fairly strong) sense; it seems to be pretty much all the time for hardcore technical works for expert audiences, whereas popular books are more likely to be written by journalists or by experts in other fields.
I wouldn’t call that “very few people”, in this context. (As a fraction of the whole population it’s “very few”, and I’m perfectly OK with that and assume you are too.)
Thank you for this comprehensive answer. I like the requirement of “actual practical accomplishments in the field”.
Googling a bit I found this article on miniaturization:
https://www.designnews.com/miniaturization-not-just-electronics-anymore
Would you consider the cited Thomas L. Hicks from American Laubscher a domain expert?
He certainly looks like one to my (itself rather inexpert) eye.