We live in a complicated world. It’s often hard to know what to believe and whose advice to trust. One way we make sense out of the confusion and improve our lot in life is by depending upon experts, and the advice they give.
These individuals (and organizations) typically have domain knowledge, experience, and relevant skills that they can use to assist people and organizations on whose behalf they work.
When thinking about experts, we can ask at least eight interrelated questions.
• What is an expert?
• How does one become an expert?
• How do we evaluate experts?
• Are some experts better than others?
• Does domain expertise carry from one situation to another?
• Why do individuals and organizations use experts?
• What types of advice do experts give?
• Once experts give advice, is it adopted, and how is it used?
That being said, many of us know or have experienced individuals and entities that are frequently unable or unwilling to identify or use the services of experts. It might even be us. (For example, almost everyone knows someone, a relative, co-worker, or boss, who is all too willing to play amateur skilled tradesman and with predictable results). Not only can this situation can frustrate people who take this kind of approach, but it can have ramifications for those who are close to the entity (e.g., family members, employees, etc.), and the customers and clientele that the person or organization is supposed to serve.
More commonly the projects and initiatives end up operating at a suboptimal levels or even failing, resources (e.g., money, time, loyalty, trust in the leadership and organization, etc.) are wasted, and people involved get exhausted and become cynical.
Sometimes failure to enlist the services of experts can lead harmful and negative consequences too (e.g., buildings falling down, spread of disease, etc.).
In extreme cases people may be injured or die, and communities decimated if experts are not consulted and the advice they give is not accepted and acted upon in a timely manner.
Why people and organizations don’t use experts when they truly should?
First, the entity may be suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect (i.e., overestimating one’s knowledge and/or one’s skills), through.
Second, they suffer from the illusion of explanatory knowledge (i.e., when people think they know the causes of something but really don’t). (Similar to people who assume that their lived experience is sufficient to understand a problem or situation).
Third, they are lazy. They can’t be bothered with doing the hard work of identifying and vetting possible experts.
Fourth they are cheap. The person/organization may go as far as to identify one or more experts, but when they find out how much they charge they experience sticker shock, and either creatively ignore the problem or challenge, hope that it goes away, and do the job themselves.
Seventh, even if the entity knows about the expert’s qualifications, they may not agree with the person’s opinion or advice and thus not utilize their abilities.
Eighth, their biases or preconceived notions prevent them from considering the expert’s perspective.
Ninth, they may be overwhelmed by the amount of information and advice they receive, and as a result, they may not have the resources to carefully consider all of it.
Tenth, they may have a conflict of interest with the expert.
Eleventh, they may influenced by misinformation or propaganda, and may be more likely to ignore experts who provide evidence or facts that contradict their beliefs.
Twelfth, experts may be seen as a threat to the power or authority of people or organizations, and may be ignored or dismissed as a result.
Thirteenth, they don’t know how to identify or judge the quality of experts.
Finally, they may also be under a time crunch. For example, when a person is choking and turning blue in the face, they don’t have the time to go on the internet to chose an appropriate medical professional. In this moment of distress they need someone immediately and anyone will do.
How do we get people and organizations to use and implement the advice of experts?
There are no universal or widely accepted methods to get people and organizations to use the services of experts, and use varies from one situation to another and one recipient of the information to another.
But there are some general guidelines that “experts” have suggested to encourage adoption of their services. These include:
Build trust: Provide important assistance over a significant period of time.
Communicate effectively: Package the information in a manner that is easy for the audience to understand.
Address concerns and objections: Predict possible negative reactions to your advice and respond in a timely fashion when these crop up.
Provide support and resources: Similar to the role of mentors, assist individuals and organizations implement the expert advice you provide them.
Show the benefits: Don’t be content with outlining how failure to take expert advice will negatively impact the individual or organization, but carefully explain how the advantages that your expertise will positively impact the entity.
Use incentives: Give the individuals and organizations some sort of a benefit (e.g., discounted rate over time), or positive attention (e.g., list them on your website as one of your success stories) ; and
Lead by example: Explain and show the entity how you and your organization have benefitted by following your advice.
In the future, it may be helpful to identify situations that are more likely to require the use of experts (i.e., how to best respond to the COVID-19 pandemic), and one’s that are less necessary (i.e., what to eat for breakfast).
In this context we might want to create rubrics or heuristics that we can implement very quickly. To minimize poor decision-making in this context.
Photo Credit
Title: The Three Stooges
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/1535813082_169d718197_c-1.jpg620800Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2023-01-16 15:08:352024-09-22 12:21:32Why are people and organizations unable or unwilling to use experts?
The recent arrest of Criminology graduate student Bryan Kohberger as the suspected murderer of four University of Idaho students prompted some people, including members of the news media, to ask if earning a degree in Criminology (the study of the causes and effects of crime) or Criminal Justice (the analysis of the dynamics of law enforcement, courts, corrections, and juvenile justice) motivates someone to “commit a crime and/or believe that they can get away with murder/homicide.”
Although there’s some logic to this question, the short answer is maybe, but not likely.
Why? There are about four interrelated reasons that cast doubt on this kind of reasoning.
First, earning a degree in a particular academic field doesn’t mean that the recipient of said achievement is going to use the knowledge they acquired or skills they mastered to engage in deviant or criminal behavior. If this was the case, then more pharmacy students would become drug manufacturers and dealers, structural engineering students would intentionally build inferior bridges, etc.
Second, every year lots of students earn undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in the fields of Criminology/Criminal Justice. Very few of them, however, commit crimes, not to mention murder. If the pursuit of or earning of a degree in Criminology/Criminal Justice enabled students or graduates to get away with murder, then we would probably see a lot more people fitting this description arrested and charged with homicide (or other types of newsworthy crimes). (Which is not the case). I would also argue that the average Criminology/Criminal justice student is more interested catching bad guys (and women) and assisting victims of crime, then using this knowledge to “commit the perfect murder.”
Third, there are many reasons why people commit murder, and an even smaller number of them who believe that they are smart enough or have the appropriate knowledge or skills to outwit homicide investigators, judges and juries. I’d even speculate that there is an even smaller number of people who think or believe that they can get away with murder because of their knowledge or mastery of forensic science (i.e., the collection and scientific analysis of legal evidence).
Fourth, almost all people who engage in murder and believe that they will get away with the crime, are NOT in the process of earning an advanced degree in criminology/criminal justice.
Where does this leave us?
Although it’s important and interesting to ask provocative questions about perpetrators’ motivations, the public, especially the news media, need to move beyond simplistic thinking and assume that there is some deeper complex rationale why people engage is extreme kinds of human behavior like murder.
Photo Credit
Title: Crime Scene Investigations 990 / North Las Vegas Police CSI
Photographer: TDelCoro
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/4873531782_bc906ea463_o.jpg12321777Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2023-01-09 04:53:362024-02-04 04:31:16Does earning a degree in Criminology/Criminal Justice help someone get away with murder?
Another year is almost in the bag and, in general, I’m happy with how things worked out. Yes, I failed to make good on a number of commitments to myself and others, but things are going to be different in 2023. I promise.
One thing I’m proud of is that while I dragged my feet on a handful of projects, I’ve managed to stay true to my goal of writing one blog post a week. This was a challenge I set for my self in the spring of 2020, as a writing and journaling exercise to help keep me sane as the world shut down. Though things have more or less opened up fully again (for better or for worse), I’ve decided to keep this blog project going.
Over the past year, in addition to teaching, departmental/college/university/various learned society service, and engaging in scholarly research I continued to blog on a regular basis. I thought it would be fun to look back on what’s resonated. Maybe you’ll find this exercise interesting too.
Here are the ten most popular blog posts (according to google analytics) ranked from least to most active, with a little self reflection,.
Street culture remains one my core interests and a lot of things about it continue to resonate with me. But in a field that encourages creativity, experimentation, and thinking outside of the box, I’m often struck with just how many people and entities (mainly businesses) narrowly circumscribe the field as graffiti, street art, and street wear. Undoubtedly a lot of this interpretation has been fueled by the recent NFT craze, but the field is so much more than this broadly popular connotation. With this sentiment in mind, I wrote the blog post.
As one of the founders of Convict Criminology (CC), I think that it is important to periodically remind others about the major goals of this approach/methodology. CC rests on the pillars of scholarly research, academic mentoring, and political activism. However it’s also important to explain how established members of CC can assist formerly incarcerated people get into respectable graduate programs and help them to succeed once they have been admitted. This post and other similar ones on CC are being integrated in to a book that I am working on.
As I scour social media and some scholarly research I’m often interested by how/why intelligent people, often under the cloak of political activism, who seem to have failed to do their homework and settle for superficial understandings of the concepts of appropriation, co-optation, commodification and fetishization. This piece attempts to explore these nuances.
Lots of people write, and some base their work on scholarly research. But more frequent than not, scholars manage to get their work published in a variety of academic venues and editors and reviewers fail do their due diligence. Thus work gets published that is superficial at best. Yes I know it is getting tougher. People don’t want to review but sheesh.
During the COVID 19 pandemic my social media feed contained lots of posts from disgruntled graduate students and untenured or recently tenured faculty complaining about the toxic working conditions of academia. I get it. There are lots of other professions that are better than working as a professor at a university. That being said, reading some of the posts I was often surprised not at how well they could document the bullshit that academics have to put up with, but with what I saw was the lack of viable or coherent alternatives.
Every contemporary crisis seems to bring with it new types of graffiti and street art. We are reminded that graffiti in principle and street art, to a lesser extent, are a weapon of the weak. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought death and destruction, and was also accompanied by a new wave of wall art (i.e., graffiti and street art) not just in the Ukraine, but in Russia and surrounding countries. This blog post attempts to make sense out of this creative work.
Although I’m not unique, I frequently travel outside of Washington DC (where I live) and Baltimore (where I work). When I travel to other places, I frequently walk the streets and back alleys looking at their urban art. I also frequently hear people who, after visiting cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Athens, decry the amount of graffiti that they see there. I pose the question and attempt to answer do some cities actually have more graffiti there than others?
American liberal arts colleges ad universities are changing, and it’s not just because of COVID. Here is my foray in to this time honored question regarding the state of higher education in the United States. We know that most universities are slow to change, but there are a bunch of things going on with universities that are fundamentally altering how instruction is delivered, who the people who want to make their career there are, and the importance society is putting on the institutions as bastions of knowledge and power.
Living in Washington, DC and paying attention to numerous types of media one can’t ignore politics at large, let alone the investigation into the insurrection of January 6. Very shortly we are going to have a report and hopefully the work that the committee has done will be helpful to the United States Department of Justice in focusing their investigation.
By far my most popular blog post this year was my very personal story about how I came to learn how to cook Japanese cuisine. I hope to publish a few more pieces like that, not just about Japanese food, but about personal exploits.
—
Moving forward I hope to implement a few changes or experiments as I like to call them. I’ll be changing the frequency of blogging (from once a week to every two weeks). I’m going to experiment with opening up the blog posts to comments. And I’m going to write about more personal experiences.
Thanks for reading my work, and giving me feedback.
Looking forward to more of it in 2023.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Kat
Title: Procrastination
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/10004574893_339b347ec7_o.jpg397800Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2022-12-26 03:32:542022-12-27 11:54:51How I procrastinated on major projects in 2022
Why are people and organizations unable or unwilling to use experts?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossWe live in a complicated world. It’s often hard to know what to believe and whose advice to trust. One way we make sense out of the confusion and improve our lot in life is by depending upon experts, and the advice they give.
These individuals (and organizations) typically have domain knowledge, experience, and relevant skills that they can use to assist people and organizations on whose behalf they work.
When thinking about experts, we can ask at least eight interrelated questions.
• What is an expert?
• How does one become an expert?
• How do we evaluate experts?
• Are some experts better than others?
• Does domain expertise carry from one situation to another?
• Why do individuals and organizations use experts?
• What types of advice do experts give?
• Once experts give advice, is it adopted, and how is it used?
That being said, many of us know or have experienced individuals and entities that are frequently unable or unwilling to identify or use the services of experts. It might even be us. (For example, almost everyone knows someone, a relative, co-worker, or boss, who is all too willing to play amateur skilled tradesman and with predictable results). Not only can this situation can frustrate people who take this kind of approach, but it can have ramifications for those who are close to the entity (e.g., family members, employees, etc.), and the customers and clientele that the person or organization is supposed to serve.
More commonly the projects and initiatives end up operating at a suboptimal levels or even failing, resources (e.g., money, time, loyalty, trust in the leadership and organization, etc.) are wasted, and people involved get exhausted and become cynical.
Sometimes failure to enlist the services of experts can lead harmful and negative consequences too (e.g., buildings falling down, spread of disease, etc.).
In extreme cases people may be injured or die, and communities decimated if experts are not consulted and the advice they give is not accepted and acted upon in a timely manner.
Why people and organizations don’t use experts when they truly should?
Similar to above, there are a numerous logical, scientifically sound, and interrelated reasons why people and organizations don’t use experts when they truly should. And just because a person has a university education, from a respected institution of higher education, does not prevent them from failing to seek out expert advice.
First, the entity may be suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect (i.e., overestimating one’s knowledge and/or one’s skills), through.
Second, they suffer from the illusion of explanatory knowledge (i.e., when people think they know the causes of something but really don’t). (Similar to people who assume that their lived experience is sufficient to understand a problem or situation).
Third, they are lazy. They can’t be bothered with doing the hard work of identifying and vetting possible experts.
Fourth they are cheap. The person/organization may go as far as to identify one or more experts, but when they find out how much they charge they experience sticker shock, and either creatively ignore the problem or challenge, hope that it goes away, and do the job themselves.
Fifth, they don’t know how to go about finding and evaluating experts.
Sixth, they may not be aware of the expert’s credentials or expertise on a particular topic. (This can be tied to not understanding or appreciate the expert’s field thus may not appreciate the value of their insights).
Seventh, even if the entity knows about the expert’s qualifications, they may not agree with the person’s opinion or advice and thus not utilize their abilities.
Eighth, their biases or preconceived notions prevent them from considering the expert’s perspective.
Ninth, they may be overwhelmed by the amount of information and advice they receive, and as a result, they may not have the resources to carefully consider all of it.
Tenth, they may have a conflict of interest with the expert.
Eleventh, they may influenced by misinformation or propaganda, and may be more likely to ignore experts who provide evidence or facts that contradict their beliefs.
Twelfth, experts may be seen as a threat to the power or authority of people or organizations, and may be ignored or dismissed as a result.
Thirteenth, they don’t know how to identify or judge the quality of experts.
Finally, they may also be under a time crunch. For example, when a person is choking and turning blue in the face, they don’t have the time to go on the internet to chose an appropriate medical professional. In this moment of distress they need someone immediately and anyone will do.
How do we get people and organizations to use and implement the advice of experts?
There are no universal or widely accepted methods to get people and organizations to use the services of experts, and use varies from one situation to another and one recipient of the information to another.
But there are some general guidelines that “experts” have suggested to encourage adoption of their services. These include:
Build trust: Provide important assistance over a significant period of time.
Communicate effectively: Package the information in a manner that is easy for the audience to understand.
Address concerns and objections: Predict possible negative reactions to your advice and respond in a timely fashion when these crop up.
Provide support and resources: Similar to the role of mentors, assist individuals and organizations implement the expert advice you provide them.
Show the benefits: Don’t be content with outlining how failure to take expert advice will negatively impact the individual or organization, but carefully explain how the advantages that your expertise will positively impact the entity.
Use incentives: Give the individuals and organizations some sort of a benefit (e.g., discounted rate over time), or positive attention (e.g., list them on your website as one of your success stories) ; and
Lead by example: Explain and show the entity how you and your organization have benefitted by following your advice.
Convincing people and individuals that they need to go beyond folk explanations and remedies, and consult one or more experts (and take their advice) is not easy. And in many respects this is the harder task.
In the future, it may be helpful to identify situations that are more likely to require the use of experts (i.e., how to best respond to the COVID-19 pandemic), and one’s that are less necessary (i.e., what to eat for breakfast).
In this context we might want to create rubrics or heuristics that we can implement very quickly. To minimize poor decision-making in this context.
Photo Credit
Title: The Three Stooges
Does earning a degree in Criminology/Criminal Justice help someone get away with murder?
/by Jeffrey Ian RossThe recent arrest of Criminology graduate student Bryan Kohberger as the suspected murderer of four University of Idaho students prompted some people, including members of the news media, to ask if earning a degree in Criminology (the study of the causes and effects of crime) or Criminal Justice (the analysis of the dynamics of law enforcement, courts, corrections, and juvenile justice) motivates someone to “commit a crime and/or believe that they can get away with murder/homicide.”
Although there’s some logic to this question, the short answer is maybe, but not likely.
Why? There are about four interrelated reasons that cast doubt on this kind of reasoning.
First, earning a degree in a particular academic field doesn’t mean that the recipient of said achievement is going to use the knowledge they acquired or skills they mastered to engage in deviant or criminal behavior. If this was the case, then more pharmacy students would become drug manufacturers and dealers, structural engineering students would intentionally build inferior bridges, etc.
Second, every year lots of students earn undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in the fields of Criminology/Criminal Justice. Very few of them, however, commit crimes, not to mention murder. If the pursuit of or earning of a degree in Criminology/Criminal Justice enabled students or graduates to get away with murder, then we would probably see a lot more people fitting this description arrested and charged with homicide (or other types of newsworthy crimes). (Which is not the case). I would also argue that the average Criminology/Criminal justice student is more interested catching bad guys (and women) and assisting victims of crime, then using this knowledge to “commit the perfect murder.”
Third, there are many reasons why people commit murder, and an even smaller number of them who believe that they are smart enough or have the appropriate knowledge or skills to outwit homicide investigators, judges and juries. I’d even speculate that there is an even smaller number of people who think or believe that they can get away with murder because of their knowledge or mastery of forensic science (i.e., the collection and scientific analysis of legal evidence).
Fourth, almost all people who engage in murder and believe that they will get away with the crime, are NOT in the process of earning an advanced degree in criminology/criminal justice.
Where does this leave us?
Although it’s important and interesting to ask provocative questions about perpetrators’ motivations, the public, especially the news media, need to move beyond simplistic thinking and assume that there is some deeper complex rationale why people engage is extreme kinds of human behavior like murder.
Photo Credit
Title: Crime Scene Investigations 990 / North Las Vegas Police CSI
Photographer: TDelCoro
How I procrastinated on major projects in 2022
/by Jeffrey Ian RossAnother year is almost in the bag and, in general, I’m happy with how things worked out. Yes, I failed to make good on a number of commitments to myself and others, but things are going to be different in 2023. I promise.
One thing I’m proud of is that while I dragged my feet on a handful of projects, I’ve managed to stay true to my goal of writing one blog post a week. This was a challenge I set for my self in the spring of 2020, as a writing and journaling exercise to help keep me sane as the world shut down. Though things have more or less opened up fully again (for better or for worse), I’ve decided to keep this blog project going.
Over the past year, in addition to teaching, departmental/college/university/various learned society service, and engaging in scholarly research I continued to blog on a regular basis. I thought it would be fun to look back on what’s resonated. Maybe you’ll find this exercise interesting too.
Here are the ten most popular blog posts (according to google analytics) ranked from least to most active, with a little self reflection,.
10. The downsides of commodifying Street Culture
Street culture remains one my core interests and a lot of things about it continue to resonate with me. But in a field that encourages creativity, experimentation, and thinking outside of the box, I’m often struck with just how many people and entities (mainly businesses) narrowly circumscribe the field as graffiti, street art, and street wear. Undoubtedly a lot of this interpretation has been fueled by the recent NFT craze, but the field is so much more than this broadly popular connotation. With this sentiment in mind, I wrote the blog post.
9. Helping Formerly Incarcerated people get into respectable graduate programs in Criminology/Criminal Justice
As one of the founders of Convict Criminology (CC), I think that it is important to periodically remind others about the major goals of this approach/methodology. CC rests on the pillars of scholarly research, academic mentoring, and political activism. However it’s also important to explain how established members of CC can assist formerly incarcerated people get into respectable graduate programs and help them to succeed once they have been admitted. This post and other similar ones on CC are being integrated in to a book that I am working on.
8. Misapplying appropriation, co-optation, commodification and fetishization
As I scour social media and some scholarly research I’m often interested by how/why intelligent people, often under the cloak of political activism, who seem to have failed to do their homework and settle for superficial understandings of the concepts of appropriation, co-optation, commodification and fetishization. This piece attempts to explore these nuances.
7. Sins of omission? Why do researchers neglect to review or cite relevant scholarship, but reviewers and editors accept this material for publication?
Lots of people write, and some base their work on scholarly research. But more frequent than not, scholars manage to get their work published in a variety of academic venues and editors and reviewers fail do their due diligence. Thus work gets published that is superficial at best. Yes I know it is getting tougher. People don’t want to review but sheesh.
6. Quitting academia: Is the grass really greener on the other side?
During the COVID 19 pandemic my social media feed contained lots of posts from disgruntled graduate students and untenured or recently tenured faculty complaining about the toxic working conditions of academia. I get it. There are lots of other professions that are better than working as a professor at a university. That being said, reading some of the posts I was often surprised not at how well they could document the bullshit that academics have to put up with, but with what I saw was the lack of viable or coherent alternatives.
5. Painting without permission: Graffiti & Street Art as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Every contemporary crisis seems to bring with it new types of graffiti and street art. We are reminded that graffiti in principle and street art, to a lesser extent, are a weapon of the weak. The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought death and destruction, and was also accompanied by a new wave of wall art (i.e., graffiti and street art) not just in the Ukraine, but in Russia and surrounding countries. This blog post attempts to make sense out of this creative work.
4. Why do some cities appear to have more graffiti and street art than others?
Although I’m not unique, I frequently travel outside of Washington DC (where I live) and Baltimore (where I work). When I travel to other places, I frequently walk the streets and back alleys looking at their urban art. I also frequently hear people who, after visiting cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Athens, decry the amount of graffiti that they see there. I pose the question and attempt to answer do some cities actually have more graffiti there than others?
3. Most American Universities are no longer sustainable in their current form
American liberal arts colleges ad universities are changing, and it’s not just because of COVID. Here is my foray in to this time honored question regarding the state of higher education in the United States. We know that most universities are slow to change, but there are a bunch of things going on with universities that are fundamentally altering how instruction is delivered, who the people who want to make their career there are, and the importance society is putting on the institutions as bastions of knowledge and power.
2. Why is the Committee to investigate the January 6th attack holding televised hearings now?
Living in Washington, DC and paying attention to numerous types of media one can’t ignore politics at large, let alone the investigation into the insurrection of January 6. Very shortly we are going to have a report and hopefully the work that the committee has done will be helpful to the United States Department of Justice in focusing their investigation.
1. How learning to cook Japanese food improved my life
By far my most popular blog post this year was my very personal story about how I came to learn how to cook Japanese cuisine. I hope to publish a few more pieces like that, not just about Japanese food, but about personal exploits.
—
Moving forward I hope to implement a few changes or experiments as I like to call them. I’ll be changing the frequency of blogging (from once a week to every two weeks). I’m going to experiment with opening up the blog posts to comments. And I’m going to write about more personal experiences.
Thanks for reading my work, and giving me feedback.
Looking forward to more of it in 2023.
Photo Credit:
Photographer: Kat
Title: Procrastination