It seems to me that we often claim that we want to find someone with expertise but typically hire clerks and laborers. If I'm looking for an investment advisor, I say that I want someone with real expertise in the various investment markets. Similarly, I want a highly skilled carpenter or painter, a dentist familiar with cutting-edge research, and an expert tax accountant.
That's what I say.
In actual reality I usually hire someone who is moderately pleasant to deal with and doesn't lose track of my job, or at least not repeatedly. I pick them because they are familiar with the work and willing to give it full attention, and not because they have special expertise.
I say nothing against the actual skills of my investment advisor, carpenter, painter, and accountant. Even though they may have special expertise, what I ask of them is to do carefully and with attention only as much as I would do myself, if I were regularly performing the task at hand.
As for the dentist, well, there is a slight difference there. I find I have trouble looking inside even my own mouth, and my skills in anatomy are perennially frustrating, so my dentist does perform work that I truly cannot do. That's a kind of special expertise. At the same time, when I pick a dentist from among all the dentists available, the criterion isn't primarily their expertise so much as my comfort.
I look at the completed painting job and I may wonder, do those imperfections really represent the highest level of expertise? Then I say, "Well, it is more consistent than if I had done the job, and it was a lot easier to buy the service." So I pay him -- and hire him again later on.
Similarly, my automotive mechanic may or may not be a true expert, but I select him because he's nearby, he is happy to help me out, and the work he did (whatever it was, I surely have no idea) was done well enough that the same problem doesn't reappear.
I think I want expertise, but I only hire competence.
One reason for this is that I want to be able to judge and evaluate the work that I'm paying someone to do. Too much expertise and I won't have a clue whether they are doing a good job or merely snowing me with plausible hypotheses. I walk away when I can't understand.
A related reason is that in my own ignorance I often don't know whether there is any better expertise than what I'm getting.
Finally, if the truth is to be faced head on, in actual reality I do not always want the very best. The very best costs too much. It isn't just the dollars, which I may be willing to pay. It is also the cost in attention and time on my side. If my tax accountant were to apply his full range of expertise, that would probably require me to maintain fully competent records. And I don't pay that close attention to the flows of my assets. If my mechanic tunes the engine to perfect efficiency, I'm going to drive it at lesser efficiencies anyway. I might get the perfect remodeling job, but the cat is going to live there.
In actual reality the problem is not the level of expertise but the inconsistency in my thinking, the internal contradiction between what I say that I want and what I really want. Those contradictions confuse my playing of the game by encouraging me to look in wrong directions, to make plays which confound my goals, and to miscommunicate with my partners in the actual reality game.