Hacker News

There's a better approach: experts can show you the road, imitators can't. Everything else is a consequence of that fact.

Let me start saying that "second-hand knowledge" is an oxymoron. You don't get to know something because someone told you so; you're fooling yourself dammit. The only way to get knowledge is to build it yourself, based on experiences and logical (i.e. not fallacious) reasoning.

And what distinguishes experts from everyone else - including imitators - is that experts know it. As such, if you want to identify an expert, look at their ability*¹ to show the reasoning and experiences necessary to reach a certain conclusion. Imitators won't be able*¹ to do so, but they'll still claim expertise.

Note how this summarises a lot of points within the text: imitators being unable to answer questions at a deeper level, adapt their vocab*², or to know the limits of their expertise.

Two points that I disagree with:

Imitators get frustrated when you say you don’t understand.

There are two implicit assumptions here that makes this point completely rubbish:

• Assuming that you're able to accurately identify frustration. Frustration is a feeling, the only one who knows for sure if someone is frustrated is the person themself. Nobody else does, and imitators might be really good at hiding that frustration.
• Assuming that the frustration will be necessarily from concerns due to appearance. Nope -interacting with dumbarses is a bother*³, and experts*³ get frustrated too when they show you a reasoning and you say "I dun unrurrstand, I is so confusion...".

So no, you shouldn't use frustration as a guide to "is this an expert, or an imitator?".

Experts can tell you all the ways they’ve failed.

This one is more like a half-disagree. Sure, experts know that failure is part of the learning process; but they still have three faces to keep (towards the general public, towards their closed ones, and towards themselves), and talking about failures is bound to hurt at least two of those faces.

Notes:

1. "Ability" should not be confused with "willingness". Plenty of times experts simply can't be arsed with you.
2. Knowledge involves the concepts, not the words used to convey those concepts. As such, that point (Imitators can’t adapt their vocabulary.) is actually good.
3. Source: like most people, I'm an expert on some things and a dumbarse in other things.