We used to call that sewing machine music.
I try to keep myself well-informed about a few things, but I am by no means much of an expert in anything except the very narrow field that I used to work in (and even that has changed in the 4 years since I retired). And I’m fine with that.
You’re making the assumption that you’re somehow getting the same quality as the experts get. The experts can make sure they’re getting the good stuff because they know the difference between good and bad quality. You, at best, are trusting to random chance. And it’s likely that you’re getting a larger than random share of bad quality stuff because people save the good quality stuff for the experts who will insist on it.
I’ve worked with several folks who would argue to the contrary. :rolleyes:
Sometimes, being an expert, or at least very knowledgable about a particular subject can become a real source of pleasure when you come across references to it unexpectedly.
1 - A couple of days ago, my youngest daughter showed me characters in a videogame she loves. Each of them had a sort of motto related to their names. For one of them, the motto was a cleverly oblique reference to an old song. I chuckled. My daughter was just puzzled.
2 - At work, I once said to an IT consultant : “I have a question”. He muttered “42”. I basically went 
.
3 - On a Classical music forum, a poster mentioned that Bartók had written a violin concerto that contained some then-unusual quarter-tones for Menuhin, who refused to play it as such and demanded they be changed to “normal” intervals (tones or half-tones). Another poster who was known for his borderline catty, dry wit posted something like : “Well, of course. He was already playing quarter-tones when they were not called for. Asking him to play them on purpose was running the risk of hitting a perfectly tuned note.” This remains to this day my favourite non-Monty Python pythonesque quote.
So yeah, knowing a bunch of stuff with some depth can turn out to be great fun.
To this day I still say that whichever person came up with “Do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” was a goddamned liar!!!
+1
There’s a few things I know a good bit more about than the average person (though not an expert) and could possibly make a living at, but never would because it would ruin my enjoyment of it when I got home.
There are exceptions though. Long before the internet, I used to buy Hong Kong movie memorabilia by mail order catalog. I had a chance to talk to the owner on the phone a couple of times and she told me she was a big Jackie Chan fan and by buying non-Jackie things for resale she covered her trip and personal purchase costs. I don’t know what she did other than her mail order business, but I don’t think that was her sole source of income.
It can be helpful if you want to find more things that you like. But it’s fair to say a lot of it is BS.
It didn’t do John Holmes any good either
More like thrashing, actually.
Knowing a reasonable lot about a lot of things let me pass the Jeopardy test easily, so it helped there at least.
Or the gigolo business, for that matter.
But, seriously, I knew very early that I loved doing martial arts and I had a talent and skill at teaching it. Very briefly I had dreams of opening a studio of my own one day. But then I was somehow privy to the workings of my instructors’ studio and later of their second branch studio as well. And seeing the issues of the daily business, of billing problems and recruiting efforts and tax payments and audits all helped me realize it wasn’t quite-so-fun behind the scenes; it was work, it was a business like any other. And I knew I didn’t want to spoil my love of martial arts with the necessary evils of running a business. So I’ve mostly just taught for free.
True but, particularly in the arena of food consumption, if you can’t tell the difference between Uncle Ben’s Minute Rice and the long grain rice at your local Chinese restaurant, you won’t know what you’re missing when you taste Nishiki rice from California, or understand how it’s different from Nishiki rice from northwestern Japan. And, quite frankly, you won’t care, either!
The modern world requires specialists. Specialization helped hunter/gatherer societies become farmer/artisan/soldier/thinker societies and the rest, as they say, is history. And while experts are specialist specialists who help refine and expand the knowledge within their specialties, societies don’t need as many of those in order to enjoy the benefits of their efforts.
And there’s also the matter of topic. If you’re the worlds greatest expert on gall wasps, not a whole lot of people will bug you. When you’re the foremost researcher on human sexuality, then you become a historical figure!
And, for that matter, there’s a lot of expertise that is either underappreciated or completely unappreciated. Al Gore’s daughter’s question on the environment spurred him to become quite an expert on the human factors in the changing climate of our planet. He wasn’t the first to put it all together and he’s not the foremost expert, but when he tried to share his knowledge and understanding, most people (well, those with wealth, status, and/or power; nobody else matters, right?) just wished he would shut up and go away.
–G!
If there’s
Anything
You wanna know
Just ask me
I’m the world’s
Most
Opinionated man
…–Stephen Stills (CSN)
…Anything You Wanna Know
…So Far
I decided a while back that dermatology is the one medical specialty I’d never want to have. Do you know a single person who doesn’t have at least one skin condition? Acne and dandruff alone have to account for over half of humanity!
I’ve got some things I’m an expert at, and part of the reason I’m an expert in them is that I enjoy them: I didn’t set out to be an expert, I became one by doing. Others I used to be an expert at, but they were professional interests and didn’t interest me enough to keep up once they stopped being part of my job. There’s things at which I’m good without bothering with the fancy stuff at all: my roasts don’t look particularly pretty, but they also don’t spend a lot of time looking like anything but “food being devoured”.
I’ve known people who, as Beckdawreck said, had become experts in a very narrow field to the point of neglecting other things. Some of them were “experts” in such a narrow part of their chosen field that they were the equivalent of someone who knows how to steer a car without knowing how to sit in its driver’s seat (1): the holes in their knowledge made them much worse at their chosen slice of field than someone with “a decent base”.
1: for those of you who remember your chemistry: BS in Orgo, MS in Orgo, PhD in Orgo, and they didn’t know that “you heat endothermic reactions and cool exothermic reactions”, on account of this being physical chemistry and therefore something they weren’t going to sully their brains with. They had not taken any physical chemistry except for whatever was part of their pre-university curriculum: no thermodynamics, no kinetics, nothing. I’m ChemE, specialty Orgo, and was doing Theoretical Chemistry: I had them for breakfast, spit out the bones and then asked for pancakes.
I’m not an expert in anything. There were periods of time where I was quite knowledgeable about a few useless things, but eventually I lost interest or they moved too fast, and I never really bothered to catch up again. Now I don’t know all that much even about things I enjoy.
It’s a bit embarrassing to impart knowledge of something I used to know and then be corrected because it’s completely misremembered or way out of date. I step back a lot and say nothing these days. I haven’t been on the General Questions forum in months* for that reason.
*or maybe even years
FWIW, multiple studies indicate that wine tasting is BS. The idea was that wine flavors were objectively identifiable, so a bunch of Frasier types would be able to discern the specific flavors, brand, and even the year by taste alone.
Studies have shown that wine experts cannot reliably distinguish flavors or types. They’re just making it up by whatever arbitrary criteria, and they rely on external information when making their assessments. In attempting to discern the difference between a highly-regarded, expensive wine and whatever random table wine, even experts do no better than chance.
I work with a number of people who have the title, “Expert in XYZ.”
But after years of working with them, I have discovered they’re not experts. They’re bullshitters. They spend every hour at work trying to convince people they’re an expert, as opposed to becoming a real expert. They get lots of awards, and fool a lot of people.
Interesting. I’ve noticed that with people I always shared a common interest in as to musical types/genres really began to diverge once they became musicians. It seems like It’s like someone suddenly taking a liking to bland food because they became enthralled with the process of how it’s made than how enjoyable it is to consume. In turn, their tastes became more mellow, and they began to like the more wishy-washy works of favorite bands, once they took up guitar…because it was easier for them to play. The ones that formed, or joined bands to play in small venues/bars, all play just covers of typical top-40 “sellout” music, or if you will, corporate rock. Ostensibly, because “that’s where the money is”…I guess.
I generally would disagree. There may be some areas in which expertise is mostly bullshit (I have my suspicions about wine tasting) but I think usually experts have information that genuinely exists. Some things are better than others. And experts, who know the field, know which things those are. So as a consequence they are experiencing better things than non-experts are experiencing. The non-experts may not be aware of what they’re missing but they’re still missing it.
As the saying goes, if your only tool is a hammer, you treat every problem like a nail. People who are too specialized in a single field of expertise can end up trying to apply it in all situations, even those where it’s not appropriate.
The most sage advice was given by the owner of a pet shop I worked at. I thought my friend/coworker was such an expert at pets and when I told the owner, she said: “It’s only because of what you don’t know.” I’ve applied that advice to any ‘expert’ (especially self-proclaimed), I’ve meet and sure enough, the more I know, the more I find that what they say is sometimes over stated to prevent me from learning about it or outright lies.
But when it comes to food or drink, what’s “better” is entirely subjective. I mean, if we’re talking taste, and not nutrition. People from different areas or raised in different environments (including times) will say different things are better. Rarity often plays a part.
Music and art - even more subjective.
No, of course it’s not entirely subjective (and if it were, how could music and art be “even more subjective”?).
In all of these areas, being an “expert” can help you notice things you’d otherwise miss, thereby genuinely increasing your appreciation.