Expertise

“You ask hard questions.”

“No I don’t. I ask easy factual questions: you know the answer or you don’t; no thinking involved.”

 

Facts are easy; deductions are harder and inductions are hardest. I would so appreciate it if people were taught to think much earlier in life deliberately rather than by some undisclosed process of osmosis.

 

Developing expertise is said to take about ten thousand hours: at 4 hours per day, 5 days per week, 45 weeks per year that is about 11 years. It cannot be hurried or circumvented.

 

The medical students and doctors who come through the department cannot be much better than they are because they have not had enough time to be better. They cannot be expected to learn A&E medicine in their short stints. They can learn an approach, a perspective, and a process and they can calibrate their knowing and their not-knowing.