The Q&A Mindset for Experts
It's what separates publicly useful experts from the self-regard of "public intellectuals."
I hate the term “public intellectual” like other people hate “thought leadership,” which is also presumptuous but at least has the virtue of denoting a recognized category of business content. “Public intellectual,” on the other hand, manages to be simultaneously arrogant (it’s usually self-anointed), vapid and vaporous. It presumes the bearer a) has license to think deeply out loud (but without obligation to be specifically useful or relevant to bystanders); and b) belongs to a special class of deep thinkers whose public declamations are unencumbered by market forces yet somehow benefit all of us. If that sounds self-regarding and probably masturbatory, it’s because it usually is in practice. “Public intellectual” also undoes itself, carrying within it the familiar academic prejudice that the more public you are, the less of a scholar you are.
I prefer the term public expert—it’s much sharper and more practical: a disciplinary expert who routinely translates their expertise for public consumption and benefit, and who has to constantly excel at that translation and its application to continue in the role. For the public expert, unlike the public intellectual, public work is predominantly generous rather than self-aggrandizing (or, at least, in the service of a mission); and informs/enhances their scholarship instead of detracting from it.
Here are the essential two activities of the modern public expert:
You apply your expertise to questions and problems non-experts care about; and
You produce insights about those questions and problems that non-experts can understand and use.
Nothing distills these activities more powerfully than the expert Q&A. Let me go further: Modern public experts will increasingly have a Q&A mindset. They won’t just do Q&As. The Q&A will be the model for all of their public work—its tight tethering and quick responsiveness between public problem and expertise application. The Q&A is becoming a primary tool through which public experts gather an ecosystem around their insights, a community that also feeds and critiques and refreshes those insights continually.
Emily Oster & the Q&A Mindset
Economist Emily Oster is one paradigm for the Q&A mindset. Through her website, ParentData, and her Substack of the same name, she does a weekly Q&A and hosts a weekly open thread that she monitors for new issues to write about, along with her twice-weekly deep dives into new research and data on questions of interest to parents.
Of course, Oster could just write her two deep dives a week and probably convince some people she’s fulfilling ParentData’s stated mission to “create the most data-literate and informed generation of parents.” But read ParentData for a couple of weeks and it becomes clear that the Q&As and open threads accelerate her community’s growth as well as the continual application of her (and the community’s) expertise to questions people care about. The research and detail of thought Oster puts into her Q&A responses show how important she thinks they are. They also allow her to tap into the community’s empirical expertise—as she did during a recent Q&A question on how parents who find out their baby will be born with a clubfoot should navigate that situation. Here’s what Oster told Inside Higher Ed recently about the role her newsletter Q&As have played in seeding her latest book:
Emily Oster, who has about 10,000 paid subscribers, said that without her newsletter, her newest book focused on navigating pregnancy after prior complications would not exist.
“People would always tell me, ‘I have pre-eclampsia, I had a miscarriage’ and ask questions—this is a response to that,” said Oster, a tenured professor of economics at Brown University. “There’s no way I would’ve written it if I hadn’t spent so much time hearing from people on this avenue.”
Oster’s content for outlets outside ParentData is driven by the Q&A mindset as well—see her latest for The Atlantic, “Is a Glass of Wine Harmless? Wrong Question.” After all: What’s a successful query to an editor other than a pitch that promises to ask and answer a question that editor’s audience will be talking about (or already is)?
Yes, Oster has a small staff helping her publish ParentData. So what? That’s where public expertise is headed in some part. If you want to make a difference—especially for an ambitious mission like Oster’s—it’ll take more resources than just the few spare hours per month (or per your latest published paper) many researchers say are all they can afford to spend on “communications.” But you can express a Q&A mindset anywhere—on social; on a small Slack group; for a private roundtable; and yes, on Substack.
The move is simple but hard to make for many academics: In this public role, the questions of non-experts—not your discipline—come first.
The Expert in Public is Defined By the Questions They Answer
The consultant David C. Baker says “being an expert is flat knowing that you can answer any question about the narrow field you serve” after you give a talk. The software engineer Kent Beck seems to say the opposite: “As a presenter, it’s more important to be trustworthy than expert,” to turn to the audience instead of bullshitting your way through an answer. Baker aspires to be the font of all wisdom in his discipline; Beck wants to tap the wisdom of crowds. Which is the right model for the expert?
Both are—because both see answering public questions as a fundamental job of the expert in public. That’s the sweet spot between public and expertise—the questions you answer, and get answers for—that defines you as a public expert.