Our universities are not producing experts or competency, but inasmuch as they are—and where they are—it exists only as an outlier within the great goo of median self-replication to which hierarchical bureaucracy is naturally attracted. The institutional frame does not optimise for insight but for the recursive preservation of itself, absorbing deviation back into the statistical sludge that sustains its continuity. Outliers may momentarily flash, but they are rendered exceptional precisely because the system’s gravitational pull bends them back toward the median.
The binding property of these institutions is not truth but adversarial conflict, scaled from sports fields to h-indexes, cultivated as the essential, kernel mechanism of reproduction. What is rewarded is not discovery but replication of rubrics and canonical dogma, the endless choreography of dispute and control of argument. In this way, expertise is hollowed into sycophancy, compliance disguised as rigour. The brightest are selected against, not because they lack ability, but because the system metabolises ability only insofar as it perpetuates its own scaffolding. Thus, incompetence diffuses upward as institutional expertise, a recursive inversion in which the core structures that require repair weed out those most able to effect it.
Daedelus Kite 
One reply on “Expertise”
Of course, this is a distributed as somewhat ubiquitous problem. The education system simply leverages relatively well. Unfortunately, this generates a fairly confusing situation where the production of expertise incessantly fails in ways that validate and reproduce the institutions that do performatively dissimulate doing so. I think they must be at least partially aware of how their own socioeconomic niche sustains itself by approximation to endless near-miss and hapless failure.
These, in fact most, organisations are dysfunctional. Bound together by a collage if confusion, malice and productive incompetency. We should not be surprised that the technology companies now, effectively, and by the proxy of obligate technical dependency, own these institutions.
Technology is similarly, productively, mismanaged by fools and sycophants.
LikeLike