Quotes about Expertise

The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general-staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when the solutions don't work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.

It is astonishing with how little reading a doctor can practice medicine, but is not astonishing how badly he may do it.

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

We master the technique of our jobs.

Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

The world cares little about what a man knows;it cares more about what a man is able to do.

Remember: the amateur works until he can get it right. The professional works until he cannot go wrong.

The top experts in the world are ardent students. The day you stop learning, you're definitely not an expert.

In proportion as labor is divided, arts are perfected.

What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.