Way of the turtle

133

---

The Myth of the Expert
The “don’t optimize” counsel is an effect of what my friends and
I like to call the myth of the expert. Unfortunately, in most fields the
number of people who really understand what’s going on is very
limited. For every true expert, there are scores of 
pseudo-experts
who are able to perform in the field, have assembled loads of knowl-
edge, and in the eyes of those who are not experts are indistinguish-
able from the true experts. These pseudo-experts can function but
do not really 
understand the area in which they claim expertise.
True experts do not have rigid rules; they 
understand what’s
going on, and so they do not need rigid rules.
Pseudo-experts, however,
don’t understand, and so they tend to
look at what the experts are doing and copy it. They know 
what to
do but not why it should be done. Therefore, they listen to the true
experts and create rigid rules where none were intended.
One sure sign of a pseudo-expert is writing that is unclear and
difficult to follow. Unclear writing comes from unclear thinking.
A true expert will be able to explain complicated ideas in ways that
are clear and easy to understand.
Another common characteristic of pseudo-experts is that 
they know how to apply complex processes and techniques and 
have been well trained but do not understand the limits of those
techniques.
In trading, a good example would be someone who can perform
complex statistical analyses of trades, runs a simulation that gener-
ates 1,000 trades, and then assumes that she can draw conclusions
from those trades without regard for the fact that they might have
been drawn from only two weeks of short-term data. These people