On 12 Oct 2010 at 9:16, peggy miller wrote: > To Nick Thompson re "expertise" > > The ability to memorize and quote things is not, in and of itself, > expertise. It is simple a great ability to memorize.
I don't think Nick said (or meant to say) that the fellow leading the Finnegans Wake group had the work *memorized*; rather, he *remembers* large hunks of it, in the context of its *intended structure*. Many, if not all, people with "a great ability to memorize" are said to do so by *imposing* a structure on (or, just maybe, discovering an "emergent" structure in) an _a priori_ unmemorably structured set of data (like a telephone directory); that's certainly a talent, but not an expertise, as far as I'm concerned. In the case of Finnegans Wake, I gather that the whole point of the work is that its author gave it an immensely complex structure, which some people (not me!) find very intellectually and esthetically satisfying to explore, explicate, tinker with, etc., etc.--thus it is (and becomes more and more) memorable for them. Among that group, some become "experts", and among the "experts" some (probably, on my guess, aided by that intrinsic "memorability") end up memorizing large chunks of it. (Other people may set out to memorize it, but I'm guessing they are very few.) In the senses of the words that I'm struggling to define, no matter *how* much structure can be data-mined out of a phone directory (by a computer program, or by the once-famous monomaniac who used to hang out around the campus of Columbia Univesity handing strangers broadsheets with his latest numerological discoveries about the will of God found in the Manhattan phonebook), no one should properly be called an "expert" on a particular phone directory (I think that there probably is room for expertise on the whole class of phone directories, across space and time); but many people are properly called "experts" on Finnegans Wake. I don't think I'm being coherent. Back to Dublin wit' me. Lee Rudolph ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
