Observation on smart people, with an example from smart fandom

[doc_strange]

Why is it that the same people who are willing to accept their own areas as difficult, structured disciplines are so often unwilling to extend that point of view to the disciplines of others?

• Physicists arguing sociology with people who've actually done studies on millions.
• Archaeologists arguing statistics with mathematics chairs in same.
• Brilliant computer geeks who happily argue with lawyers using arguments that, if they were actually how law worked, would end society in fire.

I realized there's a nice fiction parallel with which we're probably all familiar; I recast this question in its terms, below. The foregoing and the below are subtly different questions, so have at it either way. My comments in the comments.

So, why is it that people who are comfortable accepting in fantasy fiction that, for example:

1. Magic takes decades of study to learn
2. The discipline requires specialized language, and terms that require years of experience to fully appreciate
3. There is always more to learn
4. There are advances in the "knowledge" that young experts in the field tend to find as they go through the process of learning it
5. To (re)create the discipline, it took decades or more of dead-ends, bad ideas, invalidated conclusions, and the development of a whole magical language to get to the point where great magicians engage in intelligent discussion on the subject
6. An untrained exerciser of magic is a great danger because of the lack of discipline, knowledge and training

... that some of these same people in real life commonly:

1. Dismiss expertise gained through decades of study, and years of experience in a structured discipline
2. Mistake the day-to-day meanings of technical terms for the technical jargon terms of such a discipline
3. Argue using the day-to-day meanings, and argue about the meaning of words, without reflection on the purpose of technical jargon
4. Dismiss such learning as ivory tower or worse
5. Treat the discipline as something subject to "common sense" reasoning and the exercise of pure intellect
6. Don't seem to realize it might take weeks or months to reprise all the dead-ends, bad ideas, invalidated conclusions, structured terminology and jargon - in short, a university course or three - to even get to the point where an intelligent discussion could be had
7. Don't seem to wonder why people in the discipline don't want to argue with them
8. Never realize how much they act like the fictional, untrained user of magic at whom they scoff

Comments

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

An excellet piece of writing, sir, and a point I heartily agree with.

May I post a pointer to it my own journal?

[cosinejeremiah.livejournal.com]

It's a locked post!

Really, this post can go far in the unlocked realm. :)

Meanwhile, my assult on the ivory tower of physics shall continue becuase my holy warriors know catapults! They understand trajectories. Calculus is for pencil necks. Big bang theory? Yes, when the flaming ball of debris hits you there will be a big bang!

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Ok, ok, guys. I'll unlock it in a sec. Pointer away.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

So, ah... [unlocks post] ... yes.

[ivy]

I think it's because in the fictional examples, they are imagining themselves the hero, and so have conveniently "already done" all the work in the discipline to get to the high heroic point. It's more difficult to accept that that's not so in real life.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

Of course, in badly written fiction, all that hard painful circumstance requiring great effort is just the backdrop for the characters who mysteriously achieve everything without it...

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

I suppose what concerns me most are the real world examples of experts who fail to recognize the difficulty in becoming (rather than acting like) an expert in another field. The punditry that ensues is often very disturbing to me... and to those in the field the expert plops himself into.

Nevertheless, the way some people can recognize the 'bad to go pundit in someone else's tough discipline' angle in fiction but not in real life strikes me as odd. Willfully blind, or perhaps as some of you have said, they just identify variably with whichever is presented as the good route to take (overcoming entrenched graybeards with one great inspiration pulled out of their left elbow, or overcoming complex difficult subject matter with years of study). I don't see most such readers thinking that with no training they can pick up a sword in real life and do well with it - that point has been hammered home tons in fiction. Why do they think they can just jump into sociology, physics, political science, evolutionary biology, and astronomy?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Physicists actually are socialized to believe that they can step into other peoples' disciplines and, um, improve them.

History contributes to this myth: a fair number of Nobel Prizes in Medicine have gone to physicists, for example. So a certain amount of hubris accompanies the profession.

[greenmansgrove.livejournal.com]

I work as a network consultant for many small companies of differing fields in the Chicago area. I regularly pick up clients who have fired their previous network consultants, not encessarily because they couldn't do the work, but because of personality conflicts between the client and the consultant. And when the subject comes up, my clients almost as one complain about how their previous consultants treat them like low-grade morons.

My response? "I know computers. I know networks. I know what you will need to get done what you need to get done, the most efficient way possible. I DON'T know the inner workings of the law, or marketing, or even of running a small company, even though I work for one. Everything is focus. You've focused on a different sphere of knowledge than I have, and I respect that I don't know nearly as much about it as you do. Let's work together to figure out how to get what you need done, done."

It's amazing the positive responses I get, just from that. I rarely lose customers.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

"Consultantitis" is a horrible and rarely-diagnosed disease.

Constant vigilance is necessary to guard against it.

If I may point out a discipline you skipped. . . .

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Writing. Maybe because everybody "writes" in other senses of the word, plenty of people think they could effortlessly write books and stories, even if they don't read them.

Yes, the language belongs to everyone.

No, you do not need to get a graduate degree in writing to be a good writer.

Yes, plenty of people with no formal training have become huge successes; look at J.K. Rowling. But the lack of formal training just means you need to train yourself.

I'm all in favor of everybody writing down their stories, if they want to. I'm a populist about writing. Nevertheless, I get almost as annoyed with the people who say, "I'm sure I could churn out a best-seller, if I ever sat down and tried," as I do with the people who sneer, "I'm afraid I don't read popular fiction. I'm only interested in Literature."

Re: If I may point out a discipline you skipped. . . .

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Hah! I'm sure I skipped at least hundreds of disciplines! *grin*

A very interesting point. Familiarity - even passing familiarity - may breed contempt. Because one may be able to tackle the small obstacles in an area with no training, one becomes dismissive of the discipline as a difficult one.

[tsiankiio.livejournal.com]

While I'm not an archaeological statistician, I am an archaeological chemist (basically, I do archaeometry and archaeological conservation). I do know a few though. We do a lot of population demographics and artifact analyses that rely on a firm background in stats. For a few archaeologists, though not many, this would put them at a master's level at least in understanding, if not more. What I find really frustrating is two smart people who are discussing the same thing, are both basically right, but can't see it through the terminology. Never ever let an archaeologist and a geologist discuss stratigraphy.

Some fields lend themselves well to picking up knowledge of another field at a professional level, but a writer has to be familiar enough with the field to know which ones are plausible. Any physicist worth her salt will have a high level of familiarity and ability with math. With archaeology goes history and geology. Comp sci usually goes with some sort of engineering, but lots of them have MBAs these days.

Not that I'm saying people don't follow your list, because, well, they totally do. Thought most people who are an expert in one field won't cling to hard to #4.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

I agree and so, yes, many people in a discipline must learn the products and tools of another discipline. Yet, I think you may be conflating a professional utility in an area with professional participation in the area. An anthropologist doesn't just use the tools of the trade, for example - the point of being a professional in a discipline is to test, research, and extend it, including its core methods and principles. Meanwhile the psychologist drawing on Anthropology isn't going to be au courant with the arguments regarding a particular field methodology. I wouldn't expect them to; but I would hope they recognize they're not au courant and may by current accepted standards be misusing a borrowed method.

I have actually seen several high-grade archaeologists torn to shreds in presentations at Chicago because they presented tentative findings using stats with too few data points for the methods employed. Tentative nonsense is still nonsense was the general slam presented.

[motive-nuance.livejournal.com]

I seldom find argumentative discussions to be useful for generating new ideas, which is why I tend to avoid them. But my work spans a pretty wide range of fields, and people need less training to be able to think usefully about some of them than others. When I'm struggling with ideas about high-level cognition, I find it useful to talk to an old friend of mine who's a social psychologist. I find that the training that he has, even though it's pretty unconnected to my research, is enough that I can explain where I'm coming from rapidly enough for a useful discussion to happen. But if I'm fighting with some math, the set of people that are going to be able to usefully discuss it with me is a lot smaller. Some disciplines are flatter, while in some you need much more background before you can get started.

Either way though, arguing is usually pretty useless.