There is virtually no culture, either real or fictional, that does not have experts in different areas of endeavor. In traditional cultures, artisans and craftspeople develop bodies of knowledge that are deeper and better articulated than in the minds of non-experts. In advanced societies such as our own, knowledge specialization has developed to the point that tens of thousands of experts exist in all manner of specialties. In this manner, the divisions of labor lead to corresponding divisions of cognitive labor. What we do for a living doesn’t just define how we spend our time; it also characterizes a very substantial part of our mental lives and capacities.

These divisions of cognitive labor, or areas of expertise, raise a number of interesting questions about both intelligence and expertise. These include:

Many of these questions have only recently been the subject of research and theory in cognitive science; but we are blessed with a large set of “thought experiments” in The Simpsons. In the course of writing episodes that  …