That wouldn't help, I think. The problem is that the more you know, the less you feel like you know. A high school student with an A in his honor's physics class probably feels like he knows more of what there is to know about physics than Michio Kaku feels like he knows.
More interactions between novices, intermediates and experts make it possible to identify experts. The physics student can only believe in their false expertise until "shown up" by someone who knows and/or does physics for a living; likewise those people need to interact with students to realize that they do know something.
It is easiest if a competent guild, association or governing body can set a permission-to-play standard to govern alongside a peer-review system for publishing and a merit-based system or awards for discoveries -- and all in the field should be encouraged to measure themselves against these systems and be rejected or accepted to learn more about themselves and their field.
>More interactions between novices, intermediates and experts make it possible to identify experts.
Is there evidence for this? It seems unlikely to me.
My experience with non-experts with a little knowledge (including myself) is that they massively discount the difference between what they know and what the experts they encounter know. They know that they know less, but they don't have any foundation to understand how much less.
A low-skill/low-knowledge person can still discern the differences between skills in their region of expertise. So, in the presence of a grandmaster, they might make fools of themselves while the merely accomplished take the opportunity to learn something. However, in discussions with an accomplished person, a novice will more easily see their inadequacies. Thus the ability to teach is the ability to communicate expertise further down the ladder than others, and the ability to rapidly learn is the ability to reach further up the ladder and so waste less time on the intermediate steps. People are usually better at learning from certain mediums and types of people as well.
Along these lines, one goal of an expert teaching a novice is to turn a novice into an effective autodidact. An effective autodidact a) knows they are ignorant, b) knows that the ladder of expertise exists, c) knows how to climb the ladder. It is possible to communicate to a novice signposts that will help them understand their progression despite their not having experienced it yet. Again, these extend further depending on the ability of the novice and the expert, but for anyone they will extend further than the knowledge the novice can actually identify as not being known yet. Even very dull people can grasp something as simple as "Bob really understands this job. Follow his advice, even if it doesn't make sense to you yet. It'll be hard at first but stick with it and you'll know twice as much in a month."
Again, I'm not aware of any studies so am happy for you to directly disagree, but I hope this reminds you of interactions you've observed as I do believe these behaviors are common.
True. When you know very little there's a lot of stuff that you don't even know that you know.
But I was replying to comment that suggests a type of knowledge relativism that many times comes attached with words like "ninja" and "rockstar" and that makes my skin crawl. We live in an age of too much networking, not enough deep thought and deliberate practice. It is symptomatic that "you can be an expert just by faking it" philosophies start to pop up. I suspect this is not good in the long term. I'd bet this is how the Roman empire collapsed :)
