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Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than th

Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion. It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields. Just because it's common, doesn't make it not arrogant. Individual humans are not free body diagrams. And societies even more so. The study of people and groups of people and the way to understand them, engage them, and influence them (which is what "education" is) is not going to be familiar to an aerospace engineer. That doesn't mean it isn't built on the work and research of thousands of people over centuries.

deleted 4y ago
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rayiner 4y ago
> Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion. What a flimsy and transparent effort to insulate non-rigorous fields from criticism. Ironically, one of the things I do for a living these days, as an attorney, is attack the credibility of credentialed experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard. There is a whole process where attorneys and judges without specific expertise in a field evaluate the reliability of assertions by expert by reference to accepted scientific principles. Because that’s a thing you can do! You don’t need to be an expert in a field to know whether they applied reliable methodologies. More importantly, people will do it. If you tell them to trust stuff that doesn’t seem trustworthy based on what they learned about the scientific method in high school, then it erodes your credibility and the credibility of all authorities. There’s a lot of work out there that’s not rigorous, and we have a moral obligation to call it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science > It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields. Theology, film, German literature, European history, etc., are all “serious fields.” They’re the product of work by thousands of people over decades or centuries. That doesn’t mean they’re rigorous. Their ability to provide truth value is fundamentally limited by the nature of the discipline. And yes, maybe engineers have a big head about it. I suspect that’s because they don’t have to brow beat anyone into recognizing the seriousness of their field or the authority of the expertise it generates. You can go up to a random yokel in a Bangladeshi village and he’ll be impressed at your STEM degree. I’ll posit to you that there is a basis for that. In methodology, the field of education is akin to something like the field of business. It’s based on observation and case studies. It’s not wholly without value, but holding it up as a rigorous discipline that commands deference is disingenuous.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Yes but what is your perspective on the study of individual personal behaviour and societies. Are you saying that all the "serious but not rigorous" fields that do so are A) all doing it wrong, and that you know a better way, B) That there is a better way and noone has tried, Or C) that it is impossible and we shouldn't bother trying. Because if it's A or B, you can see why someone would call you arrogant. And if it's C, is that not defeatist? Seems like trying to understand our fellow humans and the societies we create is a task worth pursuing?
  - haberman 4y ago
    Not the OP, but I would weigh in with D) it's worth trying, and we should learn what we can, but the phenomena being studied are too complex and/or subjective to yield the kinds of rigorous results that we expect from the harder sciences, and the opinions of experts are therefore necessarily more infused with personal opinion and bias. I think it is incumbent on all fields to be exceptionally clear about which of their results are rigorous, and which are outside the realm of rigorous knowledge. For example, as someone with expertise in CS, I can give you very reliable information about computability theory, and pretty reliable information about what is technically feasible to implement using current technology, but my opinion on fair moderation policies for social media are not really buttressed by my CS expertise. I wish public health officials (as just one example) were similarly clear about what they have expertise about (how disease spreads and what interventions will have what outcomes) and what is their personal opinion (cost/benefit analysis of different options, who should get vaccines first, etc).
    - deanCommie 4y ago
      I love that response because I think it gets to the point and the problem. Q1: "What is the worst-case runtime complexity of quick sort" is a question that has a rigorous answer that can be proven with fundamental scientific concepts. Q2: "What is the programming language/framework we should use for this next project" is one that absolutely cannot. Any answer to Q2 will invariably involve some personal opinion and bias, AND YET serious professionals with decades of experience - ones perfectly capable of answering Q1 would also be expected to weigh in on Q2, incorporating their knowledge, context, the skills of the rest of the team, the existing architecture, the requirements, etc, etc. It would be absolutely arrogant to push back against the qualitative analysis of a senior software developer making a recommendation to Q2 with "That's just your own opinion and bias" - ESPECIALLY by someone outside the field who doesn't understand all the considerations being weighed. I sympathize with your desire for health officials, but my theory is that everything about epidemiology, public health, disease spread, etc are all mostly Q2-category questions. You still need a PhD and rigorous understanding of all the Q1 questions but shaping public policy in a pandemic is all Q2. Education is much the same way. Education of mathematics at scale is less about mathematics and more about people.

deleted 4y ago

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rayiner 4y ago

> Arrogance is skimming a PhD thesis in a field wildly different from your own and deciding you are more competent in your ability to evaluate its "rigor" than the dozens or people in that field who evaluated it that had a different conclusion. What a flimsy and transparent effort to insulate non-rigorous fields from criticism. Ironically, one of the things I do for a living these days, as an attorney, is attack the credibility of credentialed experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard. There is a whole process where attorneys and judges without specific expertise in a field evaluate the reliability of assertions by expert by reference to accepted scientific principles. Because that’s a thing you can do! You don’t need to be an expert in a field to know whether they applied reliable methodologies. More importantly, people will do it. If you tell them to trust stuff that doesn’t seem trustworthy based on what they learned about the scientific method in high school, then it erodes your credibility and the credibility of all authorities. There’s a lot of work out there that’s not rigorous, and we have a moral obligation to call it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science > It's not an original arrogance - it's pretty common amongst the STEM educated to basically consider all humanities, philosophy, social sciences to be not "serious" fields. Theology, film, German literature, European history, etc., are all “serious fields.” They’re the product of work by thousands of people over decades or centuries. That doesn’t mean they’re rigorous. Their ability to provide truth value is fundamentally limited by the nature of the discipline. And yes, maybe engineers have a big head about it. I suspect that’s because they don’t have to brow beat anyone into recognizing the seriousness of their field or the authority of the expertise it generates. You can go up to a random yokel in a Bangladeshi village and he’ll be impressed at your STEM degree. I’ll posit to you that there is a basis for that. In methodology, the field of education is akin to something like the field of business. It’s based on observation and case studies. It’s not wholly without value, but holding it up as a rigorous discipline that commands deference is disingenuous.

deanCommie 4y ago
Yes but what is your perspective on the study of individual personal behaviour and societies. Are you saying that all the "serious but not rigorous" fields that do so are A) all doing it wrong, and that you know a better way, B) That there is a better way and noone has tried, Or C) that it is impossible and we shouldn't bother trying. Because if it's A or B, you can see why someone would call you arrogant. And if it's C, is that not defeatist? Seems like trying to understand our fellow humans and the societies we create is a task worth pursuing?
- haberman 4y ago
  Not the OP, but I would weigh in with D) it's worth trying, and we should learn what we can, but the phenomena being studied are too complex and/or subjective to yield the kinds of rigorous results that we expect from the harder sciences, and the opinions of experts are therefore necessarily more infused with personal opinion and bias. I think it is incumbent on all fields to be exceptionally clear about which of their results are rigorous, and which are outside the realm of rigorous knowledge. For example, as someone with expertise in CS, I can give you very reliable information about computability theory, and pretty reliable information about what is technically feasible to implement using current technology, but my opinion on fair moderation policies for social media are not really buttressed by my CS expertise. I wish public health officials (as just one example) were similarly clear about what they have expertise about (how disease spreads and what interventions will have what outcomes) and what is their personal opinion (cost/benefit analysis of different options, who should get vaccines first, etc).
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    I love that response because I think it gets to the point and the problem. Q1: "What is the worst-case runtime complexity of quick sort" is a question that has a rigorous answer that can be proven with fundamental scientific concepts. Q2: "What is the programming language/framework we should use for this next project" is one that absolutely cannot. Any answer to Q2 will invariably involve some personal opinion and bias, AND YET serious professionals with decades of experience - ones perfectly capable of answering Q1 would also be expected to weigh in on Q2, incorporating their knowledge, context, the skills of the rest of the team, the existing architecture, the requirements, etc, etc. It would be absolutely arrogant to push back against the qualitative analysis of a senior software developer making a recommendation to Q2 with "That's just your own opinion and bias" - ESPECIALLY by someone outside the field who doesn't understand all the considerations being weighed. I sympathize with your desire for health officials, but my theory is that everything about epidemiology, public health, disease spread, etc are all mostly Q2-category questions. You still need a PhD and rigorous understanding of all the Q1 questions but shaping public policy in a pandemic is all Q2. Education is much the same way. Education of mathematics at scale is less about mathematics and more about people.