The harder the expert tries to explain, the more the room believes the novice.
The expert is exasperated. The novice feels contemptuous and superior. The expert gropes for a way to demonstrate the validity of his view at a level the novice can understand, is reduced to sputtering incoherence, and this only strengthens the novice’s illusory sense of superiority. Venkatesh Rao calls this little piece of sketch comedy the tragicomic exasperation of expertise. Play it out at broader scales and you get all the pathos and pageantry of human society.
Picture a senior engineer telling a product manager that the “one small change” to the checkout page will take three months, because it touches the payment system, which touches the fraud rules, which touch the audit logs. Each link is obvious to her and invisible to him. The longer she talks, the more she sounds like someone making excuses, and he leaves the meeting sure that engineering is slow and defensive.
The usual advice is that she should explain it better: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Why doesn’t that work, and why does the impasse last?
Why the impasse is stable
First, there may be no path to persuasion. The knowledge that makes the engineer right is precisely the knowledge the manager lacks, and you cannot use a conclusion to prove its premises to someone who does not have the premises.
Second, the novice may never suffer consequences, or may suffer them and rationalize them. If the project does run late, the manager can read the delay as proof that engineering is slow, which is what he believed going in. That is the trapped-prior mechanism: consequences arrive already pre-rendered as confirmations of the existing view, and the engineer never gets her “I told you so.”
Third, numbers favor the novice. The engineer’s peers are too thin on the ground to come to her aid, while the manager’s position is more intuitive and takes less effort to hold. And his contempt often contains a little reaction formation: understanding would mean admitting he was wrong in a way that costs him status.
The expert’s hidden agenda
So why does the engineer keep trying? Because her first-order agenda, which she will usually deny, is: let me educate you to appreciate me. That agenda has no happy ending for anyone. It arrests her development, keeping her trapped in an over-the-shoulder glance of longing for validation from those she has left behind. And it breeds confused contempt and resentment in the novice, who can sense that more than agreement is being asked of him.
There is a harder edge as well. At a deep level, expertise and priesthood cannot be cleanly told apart, because the standards of truth belong to the community that claims the right to define them. From the manager’s chair, the engineer’s certainty can look exactly like a priest’s, and sometimes it is one. Against someone whose truths are set by a different community, there may be no real weapons of persuasion at all.
Putting the explanation down
A strange journey begins when the exasperated expert first suppresses her frustrated desire for validation and asks: do I actually need this person to understand?
Resignation is the necessary first step: not from the truth, but from the agenda of educating others to appreciate you. Once the engineer gives up needing the manager to see what she sees, she stops performing expertise and goes back to the work it enables. The manager loses his foil, and his contempt loses its target. Her own development, arrested by the glance over her shoulder, can resume.
The manager may never be persuaded, and whether anyone sees that she was right is outside her control. Whether the system gets built is not. The tragicomedy is that her greatest obstacle was never his ignorance but her own need for recognition, which leaves her with an uncomfortable question about all those meetings: how much of the explaining was teaching, and how much was asking to be thanked?
References:
- The Tragicomic Exasperations of Expertise — Venkatesh Rao / Ribbonfarm