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

[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.