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Laymen-experts gap

79 bytes added, 02:45, 4 December 2016
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In some arrays of knowledge some members may have more experience. These members can be experts in a field of knowledge. The group may become gain advantage if it will use the expert’s knowledge. But there are some difficulties. Although people may claim they are experts, their knowledge may not be corroborated. For instance, scholars in social sciences may feel they have superior knowledge about how society should work, but their knowledge may have come from theorizing or from very limited scope research, and the knowledge social science scholars may not work in real life. Researchers from natural sciences may have the feeling that if they understand some phenomena in the animal world, it may be applied to the human society. So the group should use experts’ ideas, but should be critical about it. I will suggest using knowledge from people with real life experience, who have done such things in the past, but again with criticism.
Another difficulty with experts is the gap-knowledge problem. It has two variations. One is that experts may have much subtler knowledge, then laymen that they . Laymen also, somtimes, are not aware of their [[ignorance|Ignorance]]. Therfore Experts will have difficulties explaining laymen and educate the laymen enough so the laymen will be able to choose and decide in such field of knowledge. The other challenge is that laymen tend to think that they have enough knowledge to decide, although their knowledge may be lacking.
Due to the superior knowledge experts have, laymen may be unable to check and criticize experts. Therefore, facilitators of deliberation should devise such settings which will promote critical thinking about experts’ knowledge.