4 ms·

Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck with me for life… There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’

by dahart 5y ago

Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck with me for life… There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’t know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a belief about where that limit is. When you’re a kid, you already know you don’t know everything, but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off, maybe achievable some day. As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize that you don’t know increases faster and faster, not just multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the dawning realization that we collectively know very little. The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge, the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren’t broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.

achillesheels 5y ago
Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.
- mrbukkake 5y ago
  This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense
  - pc86 5y ago
    Shocking that comment by someone quoting Seneca, in Latin, in their profile would be pretentious!
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      It is normal for many. Learnt at school, met quite often during their studies. It is an implicit part and a normal experience of many curricula of studies: it was of common use until only a few centuries ago. So, no exceptional display: normal like French for old diplomacy and international exchange in general in a not so distant past.
    - achillesheels 5y ago
      What can I say, I try to rise above the illiterate mass shrug.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      And also: yes, some assume that you may have some familiarity with Latin - irregardless of expertise, an attitude that makes you interested and embracing when you meet it (instead of recoiling), because you speak English. You use the language, so it is normal to think you open to what makes its gears. Especially in a forum ("intellectual curiosity" intended) where many are engineers, one will suppose imbecility ("lack of proficiency in the use of the stick": again Latin, of course, as it builds a good share of the language) a countervalue. This place is called 'Hacker's news': you look inside things and not your own language, hacker?!
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    Are you to say that medical school students understand the inherent dielectric and dipole moments in biomolecules and how these interact with pharmacological compounds?
    - mrbukkake 5y ago
      you have no idea what you're talking about mate
- johan_felisaz 5y ago
  I'd advice reading the famous article "More is different" by P. W. Anderson. It takes condensed matter physics as a counter example that knowledge is a pyramid, and that e.g. biology is just applied chemistry, which is just applied physics, which is just applied math and so on. I am glad social science people do not need to know quantum physics, nor medecine does group theory ; their fields are dense enough on their own sake ...
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    Actually, a universal understanding of the natural world would provide necessarily greater intuitive perspectives on what is necessary to be experienced universally by human minds. Create silos does more harm than good.
MayeulC 5y ago
You're alluding to, without naming it, the "Dunning-Kruger" effect: you need to be knowledgeable enough to determine the complexity of a field. Beginners will often overestimate their ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- kkylin 5y ago
  Reminds me of two things that readers of this post may also find interesting: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurely-obsess-on-a-single-big-problem-or-big-theory/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurel... https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of-your-own-work/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of... Tao is specifically speaking to mathematicians, but some of the lessons carry to other fields (and perhaps other areas of life).
- dahart 5y ago
  No no no!! Oh man, I’m really sad my comment invoked DK, I don’t think this is the same thing at all, and I have a strong dislike of this paper because it’s both misrepresented and almost universally misunderstood. (And the authors are complicit in encouraging this misunderstanding, because the paper made them famous.) The paper did not show confidence being inversely proportional to knowledge or skill as many people believe. It shows a positive correlation between confidence and skill. But the paper itself is very hyperbolic and draws invalid conclusions that are unsupported by their own data IMO. You should read the actual paper, it’s enlightening to look at what they actually tested, and compare that to how they wrote about it. They didn’t test high skill tasks. And they didn’t test incompetent people. They tested only Cornell undergrads who were volunteering for extra credit. They didn’t control for this completely skewed population sample in any way. They also didn’t test people’s estimation of themselves either. Not at all. They asked people to rank themselves in a group of others, without knowledge of the others’ skills. This simply means people were guessing, not that they were overestimating themselves!! This is a great post explaining what’s most likely happening with DK: regression to the mean. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
jdonaldson 5y ago
The curse of dimensionality strikes again!

by dahart 5y ago

achillesheels 5y ago

Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.

mrbukkake 5y ago
This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense
- pc86 5y ago
  Shocking that comment by someone quoting Seneca, in Latin, in their profile would be pretentious!
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    It is normal for many. Learnt at school, met quite often during their studies. It is an implicit part and a normal experience of many curricula of studies: it was of common use until only a few centuries ago. So, no exceptional display: normal like French for old diplomacy and international exchange in general in a not so distant past.
  - achillesheels 5y ago
    What can I say, I try to rise above the illiterate mass shrug.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    And also: yes, some assume that you may have some familiarity with Latin - irregardless of expertise, an attitude that makes you interested and embracing when you meet it (instead of recoiling), because you speak English. You use the language, so it is normal to think you open to what makes its gears. Especially in a forum ("intellectual curiosity" intended) where many are engineers, one will suppose imbecility ("lack of proficiency in the use of the stick": again Latin, of course, as it builds a good share of the language) a countervalue. This place is called 'Hacker's news': you look inside things and not your own language, hacker?!
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Are you to say that medical school students understand the inherent dielectric and dipole moments in biomolecules and how these interact with pharmacological compounds?
  - mrbukkake 5y ago
    you have no idea what you're talking about mate
johan_felisaz 5y ago
I'd advice reading the famous article "More is different" by P. W. Anderson. It takes condensed matter physics as a counter example that knowledge is a pyramid, and that e.g. biology is just applied chemistry, which is just applied physics, which is just applied math and so on. I am glad social science people do not need to know quantum physics, nor medecine does group theory ; their fields are dense enough on their own sake ...
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Actually, a universal understanding of the natural world would provide necessarily greater intuitive perspectives on what is necessary to be experienced universally by human minds. Create silos does more harm than good.

MayeulC 5y ago

You're alluding to, without naming it, the "Dunning-Kruger" effect: you need to be knowledgeable enough to determine the complexity of a field. Beginners will often overestimate their ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

kkylin 5y ago
Reminds me of two things that readers of this post may also find interesting: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurely-obsess-on-a-single-big-problem-or-big-theory/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurel... https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of-your-own-work/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of... Tao is specifically speaking to mathematicians, but some of the lessons carry to other fields (and perhaps other areas of life).
dahart 5y ago
No no no!! Oh man, I’m really sad my comment invoked DK, I don’t think this is the same thing at all, and I have a strong dislike of this paper because it’s both misrepresented and almost universally misunderstood. (And the authors are complicit in encouraging this misunderstanding, because the paper made them famous.) The paper did not show confidence being inversely proportional to knowledge or skill as many people believe. It shows a positive correlation between confidence and skill. But the paper itself is very hyperbolic and draws invalid conclusions that are unsupported by their own data IMO. You should read the actual paper, it’s enlightening to look at what they actually tested, and compare that to how they wrote about it. They didn’t test high skill tasks. And they didn’t test incompetent people. They tested only Cornell undergrads who were volunteering for extra credit. They didn’t control for this completely skewed population sample in any way. They also didn’t test people’s estimation of themselves either. Not at all. They asked people to rank themselves in a group of others, without knowledge of the others’ skills. This simply means people were guessing, not that they were overestimating themselves!! This is a great post explaining what’s most likely happening with DK: regression to the mean. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

jdonaldson 5y ago

The curse of dimensionality strikes again!