No Trespassing
☠️ An Epistemic Warning ☠️
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a narrow field.” -Niels Bohr
“We need to start running this organization like a business.”
Have you ever heard this before?
The employment of this argument in Jewish organizations is, to put it mildly, controversial. In fact, in parking lot conversations, this statement tends to elicit responses ranging from unbridled derision to complete agreement:
Derision: Few comments can evoke eye-rolling like this statement from Jewish leaders who rightfully make the case that our organizations aren’t businesses. And even if they should be run like businesses, Jewish organizations can’t because they aren’t resourced like businesses (see under my recent article about cheapness).1
Agreement: However, beneath this statement is a well-justified frustration that many Jewish organizations don’t follow readily apparent best practices, which can be learned from the business world. Once a person knows to employ best practices, they’re hard to unsee.
I’m not sure where I fall on this spectrum.
On the one hand, I love finding unconventional tools to solve Jewish problems because I believe that resources stare us in the face and can make us more effective. However, I also know that this statement is not always made with the best of intentions and can, at times, be used as the shortest path to making bad decisions without a good process, often by a person who thinks that “running like a business” really means that people must follow their orders.
This week, we will explore why this question reveals such powerful tension.
Epistemic Trespassing
Every week, I write Moneyball Judaism, and I worry that I am repeatedly committing the professional sin of offering expertise on various subjects in which I lack professional training.
Over the past two years, I’ve written about economics,2 social psychology, blockchain technology, and cognitive biases. I’m an expert in none of these topics. To the extent that I have something resembling expertise, my expertise is not in the concepts but something similar to what Lee Shulman calls '“pedagogical content knowledge,” knowing about a subject and possessing the ability to teach it clearly and accurately.3 That said, one might consider this a distinction without a difference.
Perhaps I am engaging in this week’s big idea, epistemic trespassing (ET).
Nathan Ballantyne defines ET as “thinkers who have the competence or expertise to make good judgment in one field but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless.”4
For example, while a medical expert needs to know some chemistry, a chemist should not be making medical diagnoses just because they know one small portion of the knowledge required to be a doctor.
This also works in the opposite direction: Just because a doctor knows some chemistry does not mean they should make claims about chemical interactions or chemical analysis, which require a much deeper understanding of chemistry.
ET can theoretically happen with any expert in any field, but Ballantyne argues that ET is particularly problematic when experts “on a public stage are cast in the role of the ‘public intellectual’ or ‘celebrity academic.’”5 Once a person reaches a level of notoriety, people become interested in things they have to say, even when the subject has nothing to do with how they became notable in the first place.
At first glance, ET appears like exactly the reason why so many roll their eyes when someone says that X or Y Jewish organization should “run like a business.” Jewish organizations are not businesses; a person who thinks they have the magic solution to the problems of an entire field because they are successful in, for example, finance or entrepreneurship does not mean they know how to bring those tools into a Jewish context.
But not so fast…
Examples that qualify as ET can be more complex than they initially appear, especially when the issue concerns what Ballantyne calls “hybrid questions,” where the “experts in one field will not all satisfy the same evidence or skill conditions as the experts in another field.”6 Consider running a synagogue:
Yes, a synagogue’s mission is to bring Judaism to Jewish people.
However, to best achieve that goal, the leaders who run that synagogue must become skilled in budget and finance, governance, security, education, etc.
Since each of these areas requires specific expertise, one person can’t master all of the knowledge necessary to develop high competency.
If we agree that running a synagogue requires hybrid areas of expertise to interact with one another, the question of who is trespassing into what domain becomes more complicated (and might become a source of tension). When the question is far more complex, such as “What is the best model for a twenty-first-century synagogue?” it’s unclear if any one person with a narrow area of expertise could "correctly" answer that question.
As a result, Ballantyne argues that while the risks of ET should “encourage greater intellectual modesty,”7 Ballantyne suspects that “we must trespass to answer most important questions.”8 The trick may be not letting anyone, no matter their expertise, dominate the exploration of complex questions.
Which brings us to Freakonomics.
Freakonomics
Perhaps you’ve read Freakonomics years ago and wonder why a book written fifteen years ago warrants a summary. If so, I get it.
But for those who haven’t, I don’t think any book made a better case for the powerful possibilities of epistemic trespassing when appropriately managed.
If you have yet to read Freakonomics, you should because it shows unconventional ways to ask questions about crime, politics, parenting, and sustainability. Even if an expert disagrees with its conclusions (and many did and do), the process of reaching them is more interesting to me than the conclusions themselves.
Freakonomics came to be when Stephen Dubner, then a writer for The New York Times, was assigned to write a profile of Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago who won the John Bates Clark medal in economics after producing research on, shall we say, unconventional questions. Even in 2003, you can see the kernels of what became Freakonomics in Dubner’s profile of Levitt:
“In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt? And how does a homeless man afford $50 headphones?”9
For those who have read Freakonomics or any subsequent editions or podcasts, many of these questions Levitt pursued became vital case studies in the book. To me, this is what makes Freakonomics a fantastic example of epistemic trespassing done right.
Ultimately, each of the above questions concerns a narrow field of expertise. I suspect that many of those experts were bewildered when they saw Levitt trying to bring economics into the conversation. However, Dubner and Levitt argue in Freakonomics that economics is the study of incentives, and this means it has unique tools to help us understand “how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing,” describing a well-constructed incentive as “a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.”10
If you accept the premise that we can understand complicated problems better if we understand the incentive structures, then one could argue that Levitt is not trespassing. If anything, the people dismissing Levitt and Dubner are off base because they are so stuck inside their field of expertise that they cannot see another pathway, falling guilty to the law of the instrument.11
And this brings me back to a more sympathetic view of our original question.
Sometimes, the only way to solve a complex problem is to approach it through a completely different lens. While the person with that lens needs humility to avoid epistemic trespassing, the experts within the field must realize that, sometimes, solutions to the most complicated problems best come when someone from a seemingly ridiculous outside view sees something other people don’t.
Does this mean that we should run Jewish organizations “like businesses?”
Maybe.
And maybe not.
But should all of us show more epistemic humility?
Absolutely.
The Best of Freakonomics
1.4 Terabytes
The total amount of data per day that the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will send back to earth; read more about the telescope’s mission in this article in The Washington Post.
What I Read This Week
Nobody Wants This Pits Jewish Women Against “Shiksas”: I hate the premise of this series for so many reasons. This is one of many.
Has Social Media Fueled the Teen Suicide Crisis?: “Everyone” agrees that social media is “bad” for teens, but what does that mean, and how severe is the damage? I appreciated this nuanced look at the question by Andrew Solomon in The New Yorker.
“I’m an Evangelical, But I Rarely Go to Church”: What does it mean when someone calls themselves “evangelical” but doesn’t go to church? Probably something similar to what it means to identify as “Orthodox” but rarely go to synagogue, so read more.
Why I Write My Obituary Each Year: A little macabre, but read anyway.
Could Humans Be Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?: Probably…
Because I like sharing mistakes, an economist reader once politely commented that my description of the implications of Richard Thaler’s work was overstated as it pertains to the entire body of economic theory. He was right (he is the expert, not me); I apologized and revised the statement. But maybe that’s too little, too late?
Ibid., 368.
Ibid., 372.
Ibid., 390
Ibid., 389.
