If a gears-level understanding becomes the metric of expertise, what will people do?
Go out and learn until they have a gears-level understanding?
Pretend they have a gears-level understanding by exaggerating their superficial knowledge?
Feel humiliated because they can’t explain their intuition?
Attack the concept of gears-level understanding on a political or philosophical level?
Use the concept of gears-level understanding to debug your own knowledge. Learn for your own sake, and allow your learning to naturally attract the credibility it deserves.
Evaluating expertise in others is a different matter. Probably you want to use a cocktail of heuristics:
Can they articulate a gears-level understanding?
Do they have the credentials and experience you’d expect someone with deep learning in the subject to have?
Can they improvise successfully when a new problem is thrown at them?
Do other people in the field seem to respect them?
Goodhart’s Epistemology
If a gears-level understanding becomes the metric of expertise, what will people do?
Go out and learn until they have a gears-level understanding?
Pretend they have a gears-level understanding by exaggerating their superficial knowledge?
Feel humiliated because they can’t explain their intuition?
Attack the concept of gears-level understanding on a political or philosophical level?
Use the concept of gears-level understanding to debug your own knowledge. Learn for your own sake, and allow your learning to naturally attract the credibility it deserves.
Evaluating expertise in others is a different matter. Probably you want to use a cocktail of heuristics:
Can they articulate a gears-level understanding?
Do they have the credentials and experience you’d expect someone with deep learning in the subject to have?
Can they improvise successfully when a new problem is thrown at them?
Do other people in the field seem to respect them?
I’m sure there are more.