Dreyfus Model

An expert solves a problem differently from a beginner, and the difference is not that the expert knows more rules.

Watch a novice cook following a recipe. They measure every ingredient. They time every step. They follow the instructions as written, because the instructions are the scaffolding that lets them produce something edible. Watch a chef who has been cooking for thirty years. They are barely consulting the recipe. They are looking at the food, smelling it, adjusting as they go, responding to the particular state of this particular pot on this particular stove. They are not ignoring rules. They have absorbed the rules so completely that they have passed through rules into something that looks like intuition. Two researchers named Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus worked out that this progression goes through five stages, from novice who needs explicit rules, through advanced beginner, competent, proficient, up to expert, whose decisions are often faster than they can explain.

The implication for training is awkward. If you try to teach a skill purely by rules, you can get people up to competence, which is useful but nowhere near mastery. Getting to proficiency and expertise requires something that rules alone cannot produce, which is lots of real situations, lots of feedback, lots of pattern recognition built up over time. Many professional training programmes stop at the rule-following stage and assume the rest will happen automatically on the job. Many AI systems explicitly try to codify expert behaviour into rules, and while this works for beginners, it systematically fails to capture what makes experts actually expert. The best use of technology, in this model, is not to replace the journey from novice to expert, but to accelerate the exposure to real situations that the journey requires. In a skill you have developed over years, what do you now do that you could not possibly explain as a rule?

Last week we walked the climb from beginner to expert with thinking. This week we walk the same climb with the body, and notice how different its timescales really are.