Amateur Renaissance: Redefining Expert

The peril of blindly relying upon experts is the central focus of this project. This team's goal would be to mitigate a fast emerging problem across many fields by redefining both the use and terminology around expert. Ideally this would increase the freedom to judge expertise within a commonly defined framework. We'll also examine issues such as whether a gradient of definitions is needed ranging from 'Amateur' to 'Expert' and beyond. This could better enable society's use of distributed knowledge, which is ever growing across the World Wide Web.

There are, for example, fields like accounting, brain surgery and soil analysis where expertise has a proven track record. There are also fields where experts are considerably more fallible. These range from clinical psychology to political science and economic forecasting to stock brokering. You would obviously never have brain surgery done by anyone other than a skilled and licensed surgeon, but you might heed a forecast by a business writer over an economic expert.

A narrow and concentrated focus is the hallmark of being defined as an expert, but the gap between them and an avid amateur varies greatly field to field. Our language simply doesn’t deal with this ambiguity well. However, the true cost is not in words, but in unnecessary loss and failure. There should be a better way and we believe that our Open4Definition process can provide a better pathway.

This will be an ideal project for unrestrained or creative thinkers. The key, however, to creating a measurable impact on society will lie in also attracting an uncommon team of Implementers. In addition, if you have a passion or personal experiences relating to experts or their advice please also share that with us.

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