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A Devo earworm at a Sardinian birthday party is the unlikely start of a conversation about what expertise actually is. Lee draws on Collins and Evans's distinction between interactional and contributory expertise, and the two probe whether AI is simply the pinnacle of sounding like it knows what it's doing, and what that means for the hours both of them have put into embodied practices. Simon ends up confessing to late-night vibe coding, somewhere in the murky territory between hating it and loving it.

Mentioned

• Devo's "Whip It" (1980) – new wave song; came up when a community group with the acronym WIP sparked a group singalong at a birthday party in Sardegna
• WIP – community organisation in Sardegna; the acronym's unusual capitalisation convention (only the first letter uppercase) became a topic in itself
• UK Government White Paper on Post-16 Skills – published by DSIT in November; prompted reflection on what specialism and expertise mean in the age of AI
• Rethinking Expertise (Harry Collins and Robert Evans) – academic book introducing the distinction between interactional expertise (talking the talk) and contributory expertise (advancing a field through practice)
• Malcolm Gladwell / 10,000 hours – the idea that mastery requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice; cited and gently questioned
• Lord of the Flies (William Golding) – briefly referenced as a comic false attribution when trying to recall Gladwell's name
• Vibe coding – AI-assisted web development; tried late one night building an interactive front page, with mixed feelings about it
• Claude – AI assistant; mentioned as the tool used for writing template-heavy applications

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)