Comment by mjburgess

My current view on this is that it's a symptom of exactly what "expertise" means in academia. It does not mean expert judgement, nor expertise forged in experience.. no it means being an expert at giving accounts of one's knowledge in connection with other explicit accounts of knowledge.

Very little of anything worth knowing, in practice, can be given this account or a reliable one at least (physics sure,.. teaching?). Say, after decades of teaching, an exceptional teacher is not going to be able to (in general) report their methods in terms of the explicit accounts of methods as established in books. These are highly varied anyway, and full of rival theories.

Indeed, a person who could give such a count is most likely to be a poor teacher by comparison: since all their labour has been in the creation of these accounts, not in teaching (or far less).

You cannot do both. You cannot both acquire a vast depth of expertise that grounds good judgement (risk/reward, problems that arise in practice, context-sensitive question, intuitions for failure/sucess, etc.) -- and develop baroque accounts of that knowledge (its origins, remembering which papers you read, remembering all your projects, all the theories developed by academics, their history, and so on).

If knowledge is only, as academics say, just their own sort of accounting -- then one would feel stupid all the time. Since almost nothing can be thus accounted for.. and yet the world is replete with highly practiced experts in a very large number of domains.