Prometheus 6

You've got to keep your eye on Clay Shirky

Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr
Posted by Clay Shirky

I want to offer a less telegraphic account of the relationship between expertise, credentials, and authority than I did in Larry Sanger, Citizendium, and the Problem of Expertise, and then say why I think the cost of coordination in the age of social software favors Wikipedia over Citizendium, and over traditionally authoritative efforts such as Britannica.

Make a pot of coffee; this is going to be long, and boring.

And so it was...but Mr. Shirky hits it with a domain-independent pattern often enough that you gotta read his stuff.

First, let me say that I am a realist, which is to say that I believe in a reality that is not socially constructed. The materials that make up my apartment, wood and stone and so on, actually exist, and are independent of any observer. A real tree that falls in a real forest displaces real air, even if no one is there to interpret that as sound.

I also believe in social facts, things that are true because everyone agrees they are true. My apartment itself is made of real stuff, but its my-ness is built on agreements: my landlady leases it to me, that lease is predicated on her ownership, that ownership is recognized by the city of New York, and so on. Social facts are no less real than non-social facts — my apartment is actually my apartment, my wife is my wife, my job is my job — they are just real for different reasons.

If everyone stopped agreeing that my job was my job (I quit or was fired, say), I could still walk down to NYU and draw network diagrams on a whiteboard at 1pm on a Tuesday, but no one would come to listen, because my ramblings wouldn’t be part of a class anymore. I wouldn’t be faculty; I’d be an interloper. Same physical facts — same elevator and room and white board and even the same person — but different social facts.

Some facts are social, some are not. I believe that Sanger, Carr and I all agree that expertise is not a social fact. As Carr says ‘An architect does not achieve expertise through some arbitrary social process of “credentialing.” He gains expertise through a program of study and apprenticeship in which he masters an array of facts and techniques drawn from such domains as mathematics, physics, and engineering.’ I agree with that, and amended my earlier sloppiness in distinguishing between having expertise and being an expert, after being properly called on it by Eric Finchley in the comments.

However, though Carr’s description is accurate, is it incomplete: an architect does not achieve expertise through credentialing, but an architect does not become an architect through expertise either. An architect is someone with expertise who has also been granted an architect’s credentials. These credentials are ideally granted on proof of the kinds of antecedents that indicate expertise — in the case of architects, relevant study (itself certified with the social fact of a degree) and significant professional work.

Consider the following case: a young designer with an architect’s degree designs a building, and a credentialed architect working at the same firm then affixes her stamp to the drawings. The presence of the stamp means that a contractor can use the drawings to do certain kinds of work; without it the drawings shouldn’t be used for such things. Both the expertise and the credentials are necessary to make a set of drawings usable, but in this fairly common scenario, the expertise and the credentials are held by different people.

This system is designed to produce enough liability for architects that they will supervise the uncredentialed; if they fail to, their own credentials will be taken away. Now consider a disbarred architect (or lawyer or doctor.) There has been no change in their expertise, but a great change in their credentials. Most of the time, we can take the link between authority, credentials, and expertise for granted (its why we have credentials, in fact), but in edge cases, we can see them as separate things.

The clarity to be gotten from all this definition is a bit of a damp squib: Carr and I are in large agreement about the Citizendium proposal. He thinks that conferring authority is the hard challenge for Citizendium; I think that conferring authority is the hard challenge for Citizendium. He thinks that the openness of a wiki is incompatible with Citizendium’s proposed form of conferring authority, as do I. And we both believe this weakness will be fatal.

Where we disagree is in what this means for society.