[META] How to be an expert

[Jon maddog Hall]

When I was going to college, I was (unsuccessfully) studying to be an
electrical engineer.  I had real problems with the volumes of math Drexel
was slinging at me.

For a while I considered becoming a forest ranger, a popular job in the
eco-friendly, hippie, back-to-the-earth, summer-of-love late 60's, and
I went to visit the chief forester for the state of Maryland to see what
a job as a ranger was like and if I could do it.

The guy behind the desk was in his early thirties (and mind you, his title was
"CHIEF Forrester"), and I was impressed with what he knew and his title.
I guessed that he was an "expert" in his field, and he blushingly admitted that
most people would call him that.

I asked him what you had to know and how many books you had to read to get
that title and position.  He told me that he had done a lot of field work,
and had read a lot of magazines, but the total books that he had read in
college to get his degree was behind me on the shelf.

I turned around, expecting to see a wall of books, and what I saw was:

	o one book on trees
	o one book on shrubs
	o one book on flowers
	o one book on "animals"
	o one book on insects
	o one book on ecology and the environment

basically about three to four feet of books.

Now at Drexel I had already read through about twenty feet of books, and so
theorized that if I could read through four feet of books on any topic,
think about it a bit and work in the "field", that I could probably be
considered an "expert".

I think we have several people on this list who I would consider to be
"experts", and probably several more that are experts but I don't know
them well enough to know that.  And we probably have a lot more people who
are "experts" in areas that do not come up on this list.

But I learned one thing that day, and that was that most people could probably
be considered to be an "expert" in anything they spent enough time and energy
pursuing beyond what the normal person spent (which is precious little in most
cases).

maddog

P.S.  Before I put on my "smokey hat", I found out about software, and turned
my attention to that.  Twelve books and ~500 hours of "field work" and at least
one university and one company thought I was expert enough to graduate me
and give me a job respectively. - md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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