Thinking Bottle

The Bright Blind Spot

11 min read

TL;DR

Knowing someone who knows a subject is just as critical a skill as knowing the subject itself. An “expert” whose knowledge you consult based on their title in a subject you have no idea about might not even have as much knowledge about that subject as you do.

There is no simple solution to this.

Long Read

The most reliable way to make the right decision on a subject is to know that subject, to be an expert in it. If you don’t know the subject, it’s to consult someone who knows or is an expert. In this case, even if you don’t know the subject well enough to decide, if you know enough to understand whether someone else knows it or not, you can correctly choose the person to trust. If you don’t know even that much, the matter comes down to titles. While these are mostly academic titles, they can also be the achievements in the person’s resume.

I think a person needs to know every subject enough to understand the other person’s level of mastery by making critical observations in every subject they need, and I will share my thoughts on how you do not increase your chances of making the right decision when choosing the person to consult based solely on title.

First of all, I want to show Matt Might’s work comparing doctoral education with all human knowledge, which I saw during my student years and constantly stayed in the corner of my mind. I converted this series of a few images into a gif format. The inner circle in the first frame represents all human knowledge, while the shapes in the middle grow circularly with the education you receive up to university. Here, the very center point represents the most basic knowledge, and the boundary of the circle represents the most recently learned knowledge. With university, you start acquiring a specialization, and he expresses this situation with the shape that emerges like a pimple on the circle and grows in one direction. A master’s degree advances this specialization even further, and you are now getting closer to knowing everything humanity knows in that subject you specialized in. You push that boundary, and after a certain point, you cross the boundary. You create a tiny protrusion on that circle. It represents a piece of knowledge that no one knew before and that you discovered. The illustrator calls this a Ph.D. If it were me, my approach would be different at some points, but it is certainly a very beautiful work that inspires people aiming for academic studies.

Matt Might, The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. to explain what a Ph.D. is to new and aspiring graduate students.

Although it is a work that very well explains what it basically wants to tell, I will make a change to this example to make the point I’m going to explain. In graduate education, no one gains such a monolithic pool of knowledge. In fact, knowledge progresses in the way you see in the figure below. To explain this briefly from two perspectives, if you try to learn everything known about a subject from the most general to the most specific, your life will not be enough to even learn the current knowledge on that subject. On the other hand, you do not need to have a perfect mastery of every aspect of a subject to bring innovation to it. On the contrary, to rise to the level of bringing innovation, you have to skip some things, and these skips, which you determine with your foresight and luck, determine whether you will be successful or not.

Actually graduate education. Sorry Matt.

It is a known fact that as people specialize in a subject, they lose their flexibility in that subject. You can do a detailed reading by accessing this valuable article published by Erik Dane in 2010, which explains the details of this issue within a psychological framework. I will cling to this subject from a much more superficial place.

If you are an expert in a subject, you need to be aware that there are many things you don’t know even in the subject you are an expert in. Actually, knowing deep down how full of holes your knowledge is in the subject you master can result in “imposter syndrome” because even though everyone around you claims how masterful they are in their own subject, since you know the holes in your own knowledge, you can lose confidence in yourself. It is problematic for the person with expertise to see themselves as either inadequate or flawless in that subject. The person should analyze their strengths and weaknesses well in the subject they are an expert in. This is a topic related to knowing oneself, and while we’re at it, I invite you to examine the Character Profiling Framework with AI post.

If you need an expert opinion and come across someone who thinks of their expertise as a monolithic ingot of knowledge as Matt Might describes, and you ask a question from a vacant spot in this knowledge repertoire which is actually full of holes, be sure that the answer you get will not be ‘I don’t know’. Especially those we see on social media who claim to have a say in a certain subject, who express their ideas as if they are experts in subjects they are not experts in, or those who abuse the titles they obtained with their expertise in a different subject, will definitely lead you to wrong decisions. It makes more sense to roll the dice than to credit these people. I have two solutions to detect these people. One of them is that even if you don’t have enough knowledge to make the main decision on that subject, at least having some basic knowledge allows you to audit whether the things people say on this subject align with at least the basic principles. You can think that people who have mistakes in basic principles will also have problems at higher levels. The other way is to examine the people’s titles, but while examining, look specifically at what subject they gained a reputation based on. A person being a professor in a field does not mean they have studied everything in that field. In addition to these, one also needs to know common fallacies. For this, there is a nice list on Wikipedia, and there is also a book in Turkish called “Encyclopedia of Fallacies: A Short History of (Not) Reasoning”. Think of fallacies as tricks in dialogue. However, their number is limited and if you have knowledge, they are easy to spot. This way, even if you don’t understand a subject at all, you can understand whether the argument established by the expert across from you contains fallacies, or you can ask questions to understand it.

Now let’s come to the blind spot in the light examples:

One of the most striking and costly examples of this is the story of Nobel laureate geneticist Hermann Muller, who laid the foundation for modern radiation safety standards (the LNT model). While making his Nobel speech in 1946, Muller announced to the whole world that even the lowest dose of radiation is cumulatively harmful (“there is no threshold value”). However, the archives show that just weeks before this speech, Muller had seen a critical experiment (the Caspari study) showing that low-dose radiation is harmless thanks to repair mechanisms, but he deliberately covered up this data to protect his own theory and reputation. Because the scientific world focused at that moment not on the robustness of the data, but on the halo created by Muller’s “Nobel” title, this “willful blindness” went unnoticed for half a century. As a result, multi-billion dollar global regulations were built on an ideological, rather than scientific, preference that an expert hid behind his title. Today, the LNT model is still widely used in practice. If you want more detailed information on this topic, there is a presentation by Dr. Edward Calabrese on YouTube.

A similar example of ‘authority bias’ and manipulation was experienced in nutritional science during the demonization of fats. For half a century, the whole world, guided by the giant authorities of the era like Ancel Keys, avoided animal fats and cholesterol sources like eggs. When authorities said ‘don’t eat fat’, we assumed the science behind it was solid. However, documents (Project 226) that emerged years later proved that in the 1960s, the Sugar Industry funded prestigious Harvard scientists to write articles taking the blame for heart diseases off sugar and putting it on fats. While experts cleared sugar using their titles, they ignited the fuse of the obesity epidemic by directing humanity to ‘light’ but sugar-loaded products. Indeed, scientific facts fell into place only in 2015 when the US Dietary Guidelines accepted that ‘dietary cholesterol has no direct relationship with blood cholesterol’ and removed the limitation. Again, the price of following funded expert opinion rather than the truth was paid by millions with their human health. You can review the study conducted by Kearns et al. (2016) for this.

Lastly, I will mention the novel The Caves of Steel published by Isaac Asimov in 1954. There is a theme related to humanoid robots that Asimov processes in his Robot, Empire, and Foundation series and many other standalone novels. The theme I am talking about is the emergence of humanoid robots after the invention of robots, these robots gaining consciousness, struggling with humanity, and being destroyed. In his books that tell of long after these events, these events appear like mythical stories from the past or are completely forgotten. The key point of this theme is that robots are humanoid. That is, these robots are not vacuums, they use vacuums, they are not coffee makers, they use coffee makers. The author gives an explanation in the novel The Caves of Steel about robots being humanoid. Humanity has made all tools to be used by itself, and because of this, rather than redesigning every product separately and producing and using many products that are essentially robots, in a house with one humanoid robot, all the devices that are already present can be used by the robot. When you buy just one robot, it does the ventilation of your house itself, turns the lights on and off, makes your coffee, then goes out and waters your garden, repairs your fences, and receives your incoming packages. Although this seems ideal, it has stayed in my mind as a mistake of the master regarding the future. Because it is quite easy to robotize daily devices, whereas producing a humanoid robot was quite difficult. Of course, I was definitely not alone here. For example, when you look at the responses to a quora question, you can see that engineers also thought this way. The view on the functionality of small, target-oriented robots and the impossibility of humanoid robots is very common. Today, the prevalence of this view still continues, but we might be about to understand that we have a great misconception about this. Since the technology that will make humanoid robots possible is a very marginal technology, most software developers and engineers are ignorant about this subject, and in the frameworks they know, this situation is impossible. Their being technically very deep in robotics might paradoxically have narrowed their visions. While they focus on ‘the difficulty of a robot standing on two legs’, Asimov saw the fact that ‘the world is already designed for bipeds’. Over-specialization sometimes prevents seeing simple but universal truths. This story has not concluded yet, but the progress Boston Dynamics has made in the past 16 years and the numerous humanoid robots announced in the market in 2025 (even though many of them were announced with marketing gimmicks) and even going on sale show that there is a demand for this, that technology now allows it, and that companies that will produce such products in the market have now entered competition. It can be expected that the competing companies will multiply the speed of progress up to this point. This could mean that owning a humanoid robot in the coming years will be as common as owning a robot vacuum cleaner.

I want to end this topic by remembering Asimov. He had a tremendous foresight, and I hope his ideas in The End of Eternity are wrong. In memory of Asimov, there is an activity called the “Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate” organized every year. You can watch these on YouTube.

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