Who Defines Expertise? | Hacker News Reader

Who Defines Expertise?

insidehighered.com

55 pointssndean11 comments

I'm kind-of mystified what the objections to these new requirements are. 18 hours of coursework, or alternatively, at least have to explain your experience. That's a pretty low bar for being able to profess on a subject. If I were taking a course, I would certainly hope the professor had at least 18 hours of graduate coursework on a subject.

The rules these people are objecting to literally make an exception for them to explain that 50 years of teaching a subject counts as credit. If they can't do that, is it possible they shouldn't be teaching the subject?

Why shouldn't professors have a minimum requirement? It sounds like before these bare minimum rules it was a free-for-all.

> I have learned that English and philosophy have much in common. Both disciplines emphasize effective and clear communication, critical thinking, and the analysis and interpretation of texts,”

This quote is laughable. Those things are common across all academic disciplines. This justifies a music teacher professing about medicine with no experience at all.

I remember reading something once along the lines of "knowledge is just the opinions of those in power".

Interesting approach, and may be valid for some fields. I feel that most of science is about discovering falsifiable objective truths, though the specific set of potential truths that are chosen for research activity is definitely influenced by those in power.

In the long run that is correct. However, in decision making, when work is "cutting edge" the opinions of experts/"key opinion leaders" weighs more heavily, or equal to, data.

For example, it is now >50 years since anthropogenic global warming was first proposed. The first intergovernmental action I can find with a brief search that tackles climate change is the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Legislation surrounding CO2 emissions was not introduced until the 2000's. The matter is still "controversial".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Conve...

To be fair, while we can run controlled experiments on components of this problem, I don't think we can run a global controlled experiment of the entire system, or fully understand the long-term impact of climate change on humans in the face of advancing technology.

That problem exists for almost all innovative work. Generally, a paradigm becomes accepted when the predictions that follow from it are found to hold true. For people to make the effort to test such predictions requires (from a human standpoint) a "leap of faith", regardless of the integrity of the data that lead to said paradigm being proposed.

"History, Lister, is written by the winners."

Experts are those employed to say what The Powers That Be (tm) prefer to hear, regardless of how wrong they get it. Others get no play.

I disagree.

Some things are demonstrable. When I started finding and reporting cyber security holes to various governments and governmental departments I was hired to help them. They fixed the holes or at the very least they started a public review of cyber security and got the process for better our regulations started.

Don't give in to cynicism.

Western governments have corruption and malaise, true, but government is made of people and most people want to make things better and fairer and our democracies aren't perfect but you can make a difference if you put your best foot forward. You just need to try.

This is more of a problem at smaller schools. At the "majors" (MIT/Harvard/Columbia) such cross-discipline work is unremarkable, if not necessarily common. Stanford, to my surprise, appears to me to be more bureaucratic in this regard.

And very small institutions don't care: they make their own way (and may not be able to afford a huge faculty).

If you're above tiny but not a marquee name then accreditation is vital to your survival. You don't do anything to mess that up!

A similar conundrum exists in UK universities. It was decided that all university lecturers (professors in US parlance) should have a teaching qualification regardless of experience in actual teaching. The solution was to create a series of new post-graduate certificates in teaching, the requirements of some of which are fairly easy to fulfill if one does actually have academic teaching experience, e.g. 10,000 words one's teaching philosophy plus a few classes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com