T: Time (and series wrap-up)

Post no.5 in a 5-part series on basic conditions for expertise

This one is the most straightforward of all the necessary conditions for expertise. (Thus, I won’t go into much detail.) Simply: An expert needs to have spent enough time processing and interacting with the relevant data with robust feedback loops.

Ask: Has this expert put a plausibly sufficient amount of time into learning or using the skill in order to gain expertise?

For some skills, like using a spoon, there is a short latency between beginnerhood and expertise. For others, like having well-calibrated political views, there is quite a long latency. Accordingly, you can probably trust the average claim about spoon-use and should be suspicious of the average claim about politics.

There you have it: the PIFT method for assessing basic conditions for expertise. Here is what the underlying model looks like:

If it seems that we have misidentified or failed to identify a necessary condition for expertise, please let me know!