Use Your Blinker! (Episode 1)
Signaling inexperience amidst the death of expertise
Have you ever been told to “stay in your lane?” Depending on the context, it means you should stick to your area of expertise, or to your professional experience, or to your specific subject.
But it’s a strange metaphor.
I mean, I get it. We’ve all been there: the guy in the next lane creeps into yours and you don’t know if he’s really changing lanes or just drifting across the lane lines because he’s watching cat videos on YouTube. I will be among the first to criticize other drivers for availing themselves of my lane without warning—when my daughter was just two years old, she learned the word “chucklehead” from watching me drive in Boston traffic. And I make no apology for it.
There is a time for staying in one’s lane.
We’re living in an era defined by what Tom Nichols called “The Death of Expertise.” In that book, Nichols argued that our era is characterized by people rejecting expertise en masse, not just because they see experts as unnecessary, but because they see experts as standing in the way of common sense solutions.
One reason for this phenomenon (one among many) is that experts tend to veer outside of their respective lanes. Public health experts feign social justice expertise. Tech experts in Silicon Valley feign government expertise. And, almost overnight, following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, my LinkedIn feed exploded with hundreds, nay, thousands of “experts” in how to use generative AI to grow your business.
Philosopher, Nathan Ballantyne, calls this “epistemic trespassing.” Epistemic trespassing occurs when “experts drift over a highly-visible boundary line and into a domain where they lack either the relevant evidence or the skills to interpret the evidence well. But they keep talking nonetheless.”
At first glance, it might look like what we need is for experts to stay in their lane.
On the other hand, we have to change lanes sometimes. It’s the only way for us to get off the highway and get to where we’re going.
You don’t have to stay in your lane. Or, to put it in terms my two year old might have understood, One does not make oneself a chucklehead by changing lanes. One makes oneself a chucklehead by changing lanes without signaling.
This is the better metaphor: We don’t need experts to stay in their lanes. We need experts to use their blinkers.
We’re living through an historic disruption in how people consume information. The gatekeeper function that once dominated the media landscape ensured, for good or ill, that editors at major media publications could filter information before it reached the masses. Sometimes, this meant ensuring that the uninformed and unhelpful opinions of non-experts never made it to the page. Sometimes, it meant embedding, wittingly or not, a bias in the telling of the news—sometimes both. Meta’s recent announcement that Facebook will disband its third party fact-checking program is just the latest step away from editors and gatekeepers and toward the democratization of information.
In the age of podcasts, social media accounts, and, yes, Substack newsletters like this one, the message is cast directly from the transmitter to the receiver without any intermediate editing or gatekeeping. So formidable has this new media become that Presidential candidates feel pressure to do podcasts (for instance, President Trump on The Joe Rogan Experience and former Vice President Harris on Call Her Daddy) in the same way that ten or twenty years ago, candidates felt pressure to do interviews with shows on one of the three major broadcast TV stations.
Maybe this is all for the best. Maybe it’s good for us, the viewers, listeners, and readers, to hear from people—expert or not—without the interference of an editor or editorial board. But this unfettered access, this direct connection, does come at a cost.
I was at a conference recently and, after my talk about how AI will affect military ethics, a few people gathered around the coffee carafe to talk more. The man to my left said that the problem with discussing AI ethics is that the big AI companies “program their own ethics” into their algorithms. I tried to explain to this little group that had gathered that it’s more complicated than that. I said something like, “the training phase of a large language model consists in developing statistical correlations between elements in the training dataset. While the choice of training data certainly does . . . ”
“Actually, that’s wrong,” the man interrupted me. I let him finish and then tried again, but with a different audience this time. The first time I tried to make my case, I was making it to the man who raised the issue. He made a claim about how AI works that I thought was false and I tried to convince him of that point. But his interruption showed that he wasn’t interested in that conversation. So, on my second attempt, I wasn’t trying to convince him. I was trying to convince the small handful of people who had gathered to listen. You see, the others in the group now had a choice. They were about to hear two contradictory claims about how large language models work. They would have to decide which to accept, or to accept neither.
Just a few minutes before, I was at the podium speaking into the microphone. In that capacity, I was speaking as an expert and my expertise had been curated by the event organizers. The organizers played the gate-keeping function. They ensured that only those with sufficient expertise would speak from the podium into the mic.
Ahh, but in the atrium outside the ballroom, we were in a brave new world. No longer was our discourse mediated by editors. This discussion was democratized. Each of us had equal authority in that little circle of interlocutors to offer our opinions.
The US military has a term for this coffee-carafe-style meeting of equals. They call it “BOGSAT.” It’s just a “Bunch Of Guys/Gals Sitting Around a Table.” Here’s a typical exchange:
“We had a meeting about this.”
“What did the general say?”
“Oh, she wasn’t there. It was just a BOGSAT”
The BOGSAT method can achieve phenomenal results, but only if the guys and gals sitting around the table have the right collective expertise and experience to solve the problem at hand.
Back to the metaphor: “Stay in your lane” is a caution issued to professionals of every stripe that they ought not to opine outside of their expertise. You’re a school teacher who wants to make a comment about domestic US politics? Stay in your lane. You own a car dealership and you have thoughts about the war in Ukraine? Stay in your lane. You’re a philosophy PhD, US Air Force officer, former Predator pilot, just war expert and you want to say something about Christian Nationalism? Stay in your lane.
But this is, frankly, terrible advice.
I am many things, and you are, too. It’s true that I have real, credentialed expertise in military ethics and moral philosophy. It was hard-earned and other experts respect my opinions, which are informed by years of careful and thorough study. It’s true that I have extensive experience working in AI policy and that I can speak authoritatively on the ethical issues that AI imposes upon us.
To borrow from Nathan Ballantyne again, it’s not the credential that gives me the ability to employ expertise. The credential is just a formal marker that the profession has recognized that, within my area(s) of expertise, I have (1) access to the relevant evidence and (2) the skills to interpret that evidence.
Even though I do have formal expertise in these areas—I also have opinions outside of these areas. In other words, though I am these things, who I am is not exhausted by these things.
I am also a husband and father. I’m a member of my local community. I’m a citizen and a voter. I’m a member of a faith community. I am a stakeholder in my state’s and my county’s public school system. I’m a youth soccer coach. And the older I get, apparently I am also an amateur bird watcher, I guess, which I did not expect and have not yet fully accepted.
Anyway, people are complex and multi-layered beings. And the fact that I have validated expertise in one field doesn’t mean my opinions in another field are worthless. But it does mean that they are worth less.
I hold views–and sometimes I would like to express views–that are outside of my areas of formal expertise. And when I do, it is my responsibility to hold those views more loosely than I hold the views that are grounded in my expertise. I will be more easily convinced to change my mind about the quality of a Supreme Court decision, or about some principle in modern physics, or about some tenet of Hinduism than I will be in my own areas of expertise because I am a novice.
The “stay in your lane” mantra is terrible advice because it prevents me from drawing on this vast and complex personal history and experience that really can contribute to a good BOGSAT conversation—and possibly a great BOGSAT solution.
So, I would offer what academics call a friendly amendment to the “stay in your lane” received wisdom. I don’t need to stay in my lane as much as I need to use my blinker.
As a person who has some expertise in some areas, I owe it to you to signal when I’m changing lanes. I owe it to you to make it clear when I’m speaking from my specific areas of expertise and when I’m engaging as a citizen, a father, a dog-owner, or a book-lover.
In a discussion about AI ethics, or just war theory, or military operations, I’m drawing from extensive experience in the form of military experience, academic training, or policy work. When I talk about domestic politics, or the public school system, or inflation, or how, whatever you think of Die Hard, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is also not really a Christmas movie, I’m doing so as a lay person. On those topics, you and I are just a bunch of guys/gals sitting around a table.
And that’s not just fine, that’s great. I love a good BOGSAT. But I also love to hear experts talk and write within their areas of expertise. We need both and we need to be able to tell the difference.
In other words, you don’t have to stay in your lane. You just have to use your blinker.
Credit Where It’s Due
This post was edited by Megan Chapa and the inimitable Joseph Fridman.
As always, the Views Expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any part of the US Government.