CONCEPT
Interactional Expertise
The fluency acquired through sustained linguistic engagement with a community of practice — the ability to speak the language of expertise without being able to perform the expertise — and the precise concept that maps the genuine achievement of large language models.
Interactional expertise is Collins's name for the competence he discovered he had developed in gravitational wave physics after two decades of immersion: he could discuss the physics with the fluency of a practitioner, pass as a physicist in conversation, even survive a formal test in which judges could not reliably distinguish his answers from those of actual physicists. But he had never built an instrument, run an experiment, or contributed original data. His expertise was interactional, not contributory. The distinction is the single most useful concept for understanding what large language models do and do not possess.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Collins developed the concept through the peculiar experience of being, effectively, a test case for himself. Over forty years of attending gravitational wave physics conferences, reading every published paper, interviewing hundreds of physicists, he had acquired something real — a genuine fluency in the domain that practitioners