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

[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.