> Academics flat-out refuse to question each other across disciplines, practically as a matter of honour. That's not really true. In fact, it's practically a t

> Academics flat-out refuse to question each other across disciplines, practically as a matter of honour. That's not really true. In fact, it's practically a trope that physicists and economists blithely wade into other fields; there's even an xkcd about it (https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/). However, it often turns out that people in the original field do actually know relevant stuff, which makes it hard to do this well. For COVID, I wanted people outside the field not to shut up entirely, but to tread lightly: before trumpeting a "cubic model" or "quadratic spread" from the rooftops, do some digging to see why this very simple solution hadn't occurred to anyone else.