recalling a twenty year old experiment
Twenty years ago, a sociologist of science called Harry Collins tried out an experiment. He had been researching the community of physicists who worked on gravity waves for the preceding two decades, trying to get insight into standards of proof and how experimental results were reconciled and interpreted. In furtherance of this project, he had been attending gravity waves conferences, where he was a familiar figure and had lots of friends in the community (because he talked to lots of people, physicists often sought him out to get gossip and news on what other labs were doing and seeing). The experiment was a sort of Turing test – one group of physicists came up with a list of half a dozen questions about gravity waves, and then sent them by email to both Collins and a physicist, with instructions just to answer them from general knowledge rather than looking anything up. A jury of other physicists were then given the job of deciding which set of answers had come from Collins, and which from the physicist. And all but one of the judges identified the sociologist as the physicist. Although extremely funny, this wasn’t actually meant as a practical joke; it was meant to test a serious hypothesis about expertise. Harry Collins theorised that there was a thing called “interactional expertise” (basically the ability to hold a sensible and useful conversation about a subject) which was distinct from “contributory expertise” (he didn’t actually even know enough maths to do gravity wave physics). Deep interaction with a knowledge base and literature could provide one, but it wasn’t the same thing as actually working within the field.
Callin it "Poster's Expertise"
