Curing Ultracrepidarianism

A Polymathic Paradox

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic takes a look at a potential paradox within the Polymathic mindset, where, on the one hand, there are experts who speak authoritatively outside of their expertise to the detriment of knowledge. On the other hand, our charter here on Polymathic Being involves exploring far outside of traditional silos of expertise to find counterintuitive insights. Let’s look at the cure Ultracrepidarianist miss that we Polymaths embrace.

The Problem

Ultracrepidarianism… Let me pause while I use my phonics skills to say it…

Never mind… Moving on! According to Rational Wiki:

Ultracrepidarianism is the tendency for people to confidently make authoritative pronouncements in matters above or outside one’s level of knowledge. Often, those pronouncements fall entirely outside the ultracrepidarian’s realm of legitimate expertise.

Lest you be confused, Ultracrepidarianism isn’t about credentials per se. The root crepida is Greek for a sandle, and the word harkens back to the phrase “ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret’“ literally, “Let the cobbler not judge beyond the sandle.” Where, apparently, Greek artist Apelles was willing to take a cobbler's critique of the sandal he was drawing, but was unwilling to accept other artistic critique.

It’s not a bad injunction, as we saw in You Know Nothing, regarding our cognitive blindnesses (yes, plural blindness), specifically regarding the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

I want to start off on this one by clarifying that many people misinterpret the Dunning-Kruger Effect¹ as being a lack of intelligence, but this is incorrect. It is more about low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge. It’s not discussing unintelligent people, but the specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task. Smart, even (and maybe especially) those considered experts, asked to work outside of their skills, suffer as equally or more as anyone else, not from a lack of intelligence, but of experience and information.

And this insight gets to the core of the problem with a lot of our current discourse around science, whether it be the catastrophe of how we understand climate change or how masks work. It’s baked into our misunderstanding of vaccines and even the missing link between sunglasses and skin cancer. We have experts who speak with authority, and yet are quite often wrong!

Shane Littrell, PhD, who introduced me to Ultracrepidarianism, describes the death of expertise as being self-inflicted. It’s part media hype, part actual credentialism, part publish or perish, and carries significant risk to our scientific enterprise when:

Inevitably, these so-called “scientific experts” devolve from valuable, insightful fountains of area-specific knowledge into unmitigated firehoses of bullshit.

The "death of expertise" was an assisted suicide

This is, in part, because they tend to build from what they know, and instead of updating what they know, they rotely apply their models to everything. Rational Wiki goes on to describe that as:

Another expression of ultracrepidarianism, as instantiated by those with an actual expertise in something, is the tendency to start treating all other fields as somehow being sub-categories to your own field: epistemologists saying “it’s all epistemology in the end”, mathematicians saying “it’s all mathematics in the end”, physicists saying “it’s all physics in the end”, psychologists saying “it’s all psychology in the end” (et cetera) and thus proceeding to apply their methods to a completely different field which they hardly realize they don’t understand.

With the problem well defined, let’s dive into the cure.

The Cure

If you’ve been reading Polymathic Being for a bit, I hope you see what looks like contradictions in a few of the things we’ve poked at before. The first is that our explorations often make authoritative pronouncements on a diverse number of topics. The second is that this angst against the experts might sound a bit like gatekeeping, where, unless you actually have the credentials, people think you shouldn’t have an opinion. That’s a topic we addressed in Who are You to _____?

However, there’s a nuance here. The problem with Ultracrepidarianism isn’t that they have an opinion on a topic outside of their explicit expertise. It’s that they’re making authoritative pronouncements outside their level of knowledge. Simply put, they’ve approached that topic with zero humility, zero curiosity, and zero reframing. They’re forcing everything else into their model and/or using their authority to shield from critique. Put another way, the only thing greater than their ego is their ignorance.

Conversely, the Aspiring Polymath stretches their brain. Each of these essays isn’t speaking outside of my expertise. It’s expanding my knowledge and, hopefully, expanding your knowledge. It’s not forcing a model, but learning, unlearning, and relearning new models that better match reality.

The cure for Ultracrepidarianism isn’t censorship. It’s embracing the systems thinking mantra of humility, insatiable curiosity, and intentional reframing. This framework allows us to make authoritative pronouncements because we’ve expanded our legitimate area of expertise. What’s fantastic about that opportunity space is that it opens up the conversation for more people, helps remove gatekeepers, and uncovers counterintuitive insights across domains and disciplines.

What do you think? What experts have you found making pronouncements outside their expertise? Are they right or wrong? Are they credible? Share your thoughts:

Brain Stretch

Embracing My White Belt

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Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.

• Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays

• Never Stop Learning Insightful Life Tips and Tricks

• Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing

• Educating AI Integrating AI into education

• Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency