I’ve long felt contrary around
the famous quote from Suzuki Roshi, “In the beginner’s mind there are many
possibilities but in the expert’s mind there are few.” It sounds snappy, it’s a
great sound-bite and on the surface it seems to be make sense and be true, but
it’s facile, simplistic and most of the time untrue, and when it is true, only
superficially so. Most of the time, beginners don’t know or understand enough
about the topic at hand to actually have much in their mind in terms of
possibilities. Just imagine someone with no understanding of particle physics:
what could they possibly imagine as a possibility if they know nothing? But
experts who do know and understand can imagine things a beginner cannot even
begin to comprehend. Or imagine a beginner approaching her first lesson in
saxophone. She will be lucky if she gets any sound at all, and if she does it
may sound more like a wet fart than anything. She’d be at a loss to imagine the
possibilities (Circular breathing? Voicing? Extended harmonics? Listen to a
performance of Colin Stetson to see the possibilities a virtuoso/expert can
bring forth). And in those cases
where it’s true that a beginner may hold many possibilities, we then have to
ask how many of them are actually possible? How many of them are efficient and
workable?
Researchers have studied
expertise and found some interesting things. One is that it takes about ten
years of practice to reach expert-level proficiency in any field or activity.
It takes so long because one needs to develop the ability to anticipate
problems, which it turns out, is not the result of simply having knowledge of a
given field, but of structured knowledge.
An example comes from the rarefied world of international tennis competition.
The best ones don’t merely react to what their opponents are serving, but are
capable of anticipating where the ball will go before the opponent even hits
it! This is an acquired intuitive skill, made possible because the brain has
seen enough similar situations, that it can extract patterns and thus predict
where the ball is most likely to go from the anticipated angle of impact on the
opponent’s racket.
Even more telling, Cindy
Hmelo-Silver and Merav Green Pfeffer have investigated the difference between
superficial and structural knowledge in the case of people’s understanding of
aquaria. Children, “naïve” adults (such as myself, having no real interest in
the subject), and two types of experts: biologists with a specialzation in
ecology and aquaria hobbyists were compared. As one would expect, children and
naïve adults evidenced a very simplistic understanding of the workings of an
aquarium, and – tellingly, in light of Suzuki Roshi’s famous quote – often
resorted to one type of causal explanation and failed to appreciate the intricacies
of the system. Experts were greatly appreciative of the systemic functioning of
an aquarium and could describe multiple causal pathways affecting the enclosed
ecosystem.
Further, what’s really
interesting is that the researchers found that the two types of experts
differed quite dramatically in the kind of knowledge of aquaria they had built.
Biologists explained the functioning of the aquaria as microcosms of natural
ecosystems at an abstract-theoretical level. Hobbyists understood their aquaria
around the practical issues of filtering systems, feeding systems, and anything
that played an active role in keeping the aquarium functioning well and the
fish healthy. Thus, along with evidence that there is a profound difference
between naïve and expert knowledge, there is evidence that there is more than
one way to be an expert! These differences among experts have less to do with
any intrinsic properties of the system (though they do play some role) than the
particular kinds of interest that different individuals have in that system.
