We often assume that because someone is experienced in a field that they are therefore well informed about it. One is particularly likely to believe this if the person involved is oneself. One might as well argue that because I take the streetcar every day that I am an expert on public transportation, or that because I watch television every day I'm an expert on television. Obviously you acquire some knowledge from your experience, but it does not necessarily constitute an understanding of your experience.
And we may simply fail to learn from our experience. Psychologists talk about the consulting room phenomenon — faced with evidence that a diagnostic test such as the Rorschach test doesn't work the way it's supposed to, some psychologists and psychiatrists will reply that they've seen it work in their consulting rooms. In fact, individual practitioners have little opportunity to establish in their practice that a test actually works. The chief criterion they can use is the success of treatment, and even a correct diagnosis may lead to unsuccessful treatment, while an incorrect one may lead to successful treatment. We can also sometimes be a little lenient in deciding how successful we’ve been.
We have seen how authorities — people with great experience in their fields — usually disagree with each other. That is, their experience has led them to contradictory conclusions, and those conclusions cannot all be informative.
We derive information from our experience — we don't just pick it up by accident. We derive it by analyzing our experience in certain ways, acting on the conclusions we’ve drawn from our analysis, and then testing the adequacy of our conclusions.
First article in the Uninformation series
Actual Analysis
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