Expertise and the Inverted Parabola
Jens O. Meiert, July 18, 2008 / October 2, 2008.
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I am not a mathematician, but it looks like gaining and applying experience and expertise manifests itself in an inverted parabola. So knowledge or its use, respectively, apparently faces the situation that beginners don’t know what to do and thus don’t do much, while true experts do less as they know what to leave out.
Figure: My favorite parabola.
This is not a new “less is more” pleading but rather something I’d like to discuss since often feeling reminded of when, for example, observing HTML markup in the wild. So HTML novices create documents or sites using the 10 elements they know; after some time they use 25; at the zenith, certainly having gained considerable experience, they go for all 77 elements of XHTML; at some point they discover that this might be excessive and make things simpler, likely for the sake of maintainability; one day, they wake up and throw everything out that is not needed, at all.
In other cases, supposed designers decorate the hell everything they find without adding any value and rather distracting from what is important, right after they struggled getting anything done at all and before eventually discovering that form should follow function and that design is not art is not decoration. Same for the first website: Get it out is the first objective, squashing everything in that is in range is next, normalizing the site might mean the next iteration, almost taking it off in order to focus on the relevant stuff eventually proves the learning process. And the accessibility élèves know the same deal: Add the first alt text, add input placeholder text, add “skip” links, add this, add that, then do the first test and remove some things again, as some techniques impose more problems than they solve, or aren’t our problem at all.
Apparently, this is just logical, but I find it interesting nonetheless. There is no shortcut to gain expertise, and the beginner’s “not applying much” does not equal the experts’ “not applying much”, not at all. However, I wonder if beginners aren’t sometimes better off then the “intermediates”. After all, not knowing about something or not doing anything at all must not be a bad thing …
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Comments
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On July 18, 2008, 11:08 CEST, Robert said:
After all, not knowing about something or not doing anything at all must not be a bad thing …
This, dear master, is the definite proof that you might not be a proficient mathematician but well on your way to true Zen enlightenment
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On July 18, 2008, 12:36 CEST, Stefan Asemota said:
Come on Jens, only a true mathematician could have calculated the http://worlds-highest-website.com/
… really enjoying your thoughts. See you all at the bottom of the curve ! 
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On July 18, 2008, 16:23 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
Robert, Stefan, haha, thank you!
