Why I Hate Narrow-minded Experts

[Bradford]

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/why_i_hat ... d_experts/

[icycalm]

This is a very complex subject. What you wrote is of course correct, but in order to be able to apply it to every critical situation a number of subtle clarifications must be made. Above all, that there are different levels of expertise, and therefore also of reviewing.

There is a saying that goes something like this:

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he comes to know everything about nothing."

I will one day explain what that means. No doubt the anti-expert monkeys would jump on it to fend off the elitists who are tyrannizing them with their superior tastes and expert views, but that would be a very shallow, and therefore wrong, interpretation of that saying.

In the field of videogames, everything turns around the "tree of gaming" I mentioned on rllmuk. When casual gamers react positively to expert reviews it is a sign that they are interested in pursuing a specific branch further; when they react negatively it means they would rather pursue some other branch. The entire expert/non-expert argument has nothing to do with the subject of expertise itself, but simply with tastes in different genres. Everyone is, more or less, an expert in something. When FPS fans say that they hate fighting game experts, all it means is that they want the fighting game fans to shut up about their favorite games. When RTS fans say they hate bemani experts, all it means is that they want bemani experts to shut up about their favorite games. It is an issue of space. Ideally, each type of game should have its own magazine, just as basketball, tennis, running, martial arts, boxing, RPGs, etc. each have their own magazines, and so no one has any reason to tell anyone else to shut up. If you don't like tennis you simply do not buy tennis magazines and you never think about tennis -- you certainly don't go around telling tennis experts to shut up, or that you understand tennis better than they do.

Oh man, what a sad and boring story. Conclusion: everyone who currently writes about games is a retard and should be shot, preferably after having been tortured for several years.

[icycalm]

And then of course you get the OTHER retards, the holistic/artfag retards, who will read the above and then blurt out something incoherent about "innovation". As if the existence of all these specialized sports/gaming magazines somehow prevented the invention of new sports or games!

Bleh, etc.

[icycalm]

I'll try to give an example of what I mean by "different levels of reviewing" by using your medical profession metaphor.

A doctor, who is someone who is an expert in medicine, is certainly more of an expert in medicine than a nurse, but he still needs the various medical specialists to be at his command. So he will send the patient to the cardiologist, or the neurosurgeon, or the endocrinologist or whatever, but he will afterwards gather their reports and their recommendations, put them together, study them, and arrive at an optimal course of action for the patient. The specialists themselves couldn't have done this -- each of them could only provide their recommendations within their field of expertise, but not outside of it.

So there are two levels of expertise here. There is the doctor, who is an expert in, let us say, overall medicine. And there are the others: the cardiologist, who is an expert in cardiovascular matters; the neurosurgeon, who is an expert in neurology; the endocrinologist, who is an expert in the endocrine system, etc.

And now here's the gist of all this: The doctor is as ill-equipped to do the job of the cardiologist or the neurosurgeon as they are to do the doctor's job! Asking the general doctor to provide, all by himself, a diagnosis on an entirely specialized subject is just as retarded as asking the specialists to do the same on something that falls outside their area of expertise.

What is even more retarded, of course, is asking the nurse to provide her opinion on anything.

Now guess which of the above classes of medical professionals corresponds to which types of game writers.

[Answers:

I am the doctor

People like EOJ, Daigo Umehara, Fatality, etc. are the specialist doctors

Game journalists are the nurses]

[icycalm]

And again, by comparison with the medical field, we can see the stupidity of calling experts "narrow-minded". Because in the medical field, one of the first things that future experts learn is how to recognize the limits of their own expertise! You will never get one specialist attempting to shove his opinion in the domain of another -- because he recognizes the fact that he does not even deserve to have an opinion! This skill, the ability to recognize one's own limitations, has got to be drilled into them at all costs, because the lives of people are at stake.

In games writing, of course, nothing is really at stake, so no one has to learn anything, which is why no one does. And hence people keep yapping and yapping at everything and anything, oblivious to the coarseness, ignorance, stupidity and ridiculousness of their own misinformed opinions.

[Bradford]

I was just thinking that one of the points I don't think I made clear enough in my original post is that an expert at a particular subject will necessarily be capable of understanding certain related subjects. Maybe to some this will sound contradictory to Icy's last post, above, but I don't think it is. The tree metaphor suits this perfectly - naturally, the expert understands things at the highest level of the tree that are unique to his specialty, but to have gotten there he also understands all of the lower branches, many of which are common to many other specialties.

To say that someone who only understands the lower branches is better equipped to explain them, or that their opinion is actually more valuable because it is "clear headed" and "from scratch," is so outrageously and willfully stupid that I lack the words to fully articulate it. Has ignorance always been so celebrated?

Don't answer that.

[Archonus]

I think another issue that's relevant here is the refusal of some of those posters on rllmuk to accept that someone might actually possess more knowledge about a subject than they do. They really just kept attacking icycalm's demeanor, or his use of philosophical methods and quotations, making him out to be some pretentious nobody without actually trying to understand what it is that he's SAYING. It's really just immaturity on their part. Or trolling.

I'm not afraid to admit that I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about at times, icy, but when that happens I just try to read what it is you said again and think about what it could mean, or I ask questions. Calling you a stuck-up blockhead because you're quoting Nietzsche isn't exactly productive.