For experts with tens of thousands of hours experience in a
specialised field, with 40 years of case studies to extrapolate from?
Let's cast it in more relatable terms:
Such a person is, an enormous collection of data.
The day will come... soon, when people who "believe in technology" (in
the very strong sense) will see no problem putting absolute trust in a
neural network trained on exactly that same corpus of data.
A neural network is of course, a magnificent black box statistics
machine.
And what are statistics machines trained on? Numbers. But they process
and relate to them in a fuzzy way.
What is a spreadsheet and data analytics suite? Numbers.
Now your human specialist is going to outperform the numbers machine
every time. But the human can often not introspect their ineffable
knowledge (most expert knowledge is like that; which is why we
developed the entire filed of expert systems to make it legible)
So if we choose to call such knowledge "feelings" of "guesswork" we're
making a silly mistake. What does that even mean?
Neither can the neural network introspect. But we choose to label that
ineffable knowledge as "calculation".
And so you invoke the magical properties of "NUmbers!" (did you mean
real or imaginary ones :)
You see the error we fall into, giving two different labels to the
same process only because of what hardware they execute on?
What I'd really like to talk about is the logical process of discovery
called "abduction", but I fear I am rambling already :)
I consider myself to be rather good in my field. Which is exactly why I take every bit of data I can get before I provide my opinion or decide something.
Every situation is different, facts change, so I have to evaluate my opinion each and every time (which is hownypu learn and bevome better). And the more data I have, the easier this is.
Like me, you opine and decide. Sounds like you and I are both experts
who take advantage of all the tools in the box, numerical,
computational and messy wetware. Sorry if you may have taken umbrage
with my depiction of "dull headed data slaves". What I was referring
to there are people who only use the numbers. For them there are no
opinions or decisions. Only calculations. And as per TFA, it is that
mentality that stymies innovation and good decision making.
On that, we absolutely agree! Im the end so, those who let some calculation decide for them and those who just throw solutions at the wall, are equally bad at decision making.
I know, because I made my share of bad decisions, especially early on in my career.