3 ms·

It kind of is a serious background. The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science o

It kind of is a serious background. The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. What the domain specialists have is familiarity with the existing literature, but that is readily remedied as anyone with an interest and motivation can become familiar with literature like nutrition science in short order. All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. I have seen far too much sloppy and motivated reasoning in the soft sciences to trust anything that comes from people that exclusively live in that world. I am sure there are proper scientists in those fields doing good work, but that isn’t the average. I don’t know anything about this particular case, but it is much easier for someone with mastery of the hard sciences to become fluent in the soft sciences out of interest than vice versa. It may not be fair but I have seen so many real world examples of this, where hard science/engineering experts became recognized experts in softer science fields entirely out of interest, but never in the reverse, that it is difficult to ignore.

edanm 3y ago
> The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. That doesn't make them better or worse, just different. > All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. You are, IMO, too dismissive in your language about entire professions. "Shallow, soft sciences". I get where you're coming from - I'm more of a CS/Math/Physics person myself. But I think "our" side of hard sciences is far more dismissive than it should be - leading to implicitly trusting people who wave the right "hard science" credentials around instead of people working on the field for many years.
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  ^ This. CS/Math/Physics people tend to have a massive blind spot in the awareness of just how much complexity exists in the biological sciences. Couple that with a background that makes these people have full confidence in their ability to understand complex systems, and you tend to have a larger issue than if the background and subject matter were reversed.
- ssivark 3y ago
  > I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. Not taking sides here, but I want to point out that there is a distinction between rigor in reasoning and diligence in testing (given feasibility constraints). The true answer need not be in the space of hypotheses that's feasible to test [1]. It's crucial that scientists appreciate that; sloppy reasoning tends to make strong conclusions from weak tests because there's a desire (bias) to emphatically drive outcomes even from weak conclusions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
dekhn 3y ago
So. I have a background in biophysics which is the part of biology where most physics folks go. It's highly quantitative, but still it struggles with the "assume a spherical cow" mental model of many physics and engineering folks. And the biology folks are stuck in a guild mentality (protecting their field by limiting the number of entrants) and very artisanal and resist increased quantitative methods. Over time I've mentally recategorized entire parts of medical science into what I would say is non-science, or at least, a very different approach to science. In particular, nutrition, and many other areas, take extremely limited amounts of data and extrapolate it, making conclusions that far exceed what the data actually supports. And the folks publishing it got really good at convincing the larger press/medical world that they knew what they were talking about, which has led to all sorts of trends. I would love to see more translation of quantitative physics into the medical sciences, but it's truly a challenging problem, especially because we (for good reasons) don't run the sorts of trials that would provide truly convincing evidence for causal mechanims related to disease, or whatever area of biology you care about.

edanm 3y ago

> The standards of intellectual and academic rigor in physics and aerospace engineering is far higher than nutrition science or whatever. I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. That doesn't make them better or worse, just different. > All things being equal, I would probably trust the judgement of someone that went deep in the hard sciences and engineering, and then educated themselves on the literature of some soft science specialty on the side, than the average person whose entire education was in the much less rigorous and more shallow soft sciences. You are, IMO, too dismissive in your language about entire professions. "Shallow, soft sciences". I get where you're coming from - I'm more of a CS/Math/Physics person myself. But I think "our" side of hard sciences is far more dismissive than it should be - leading to implicitly trusting people who wave the right "hard science" credentials around instead of people working on the field for many years.

digdugdirk 3y ago
^ This. CS/Math/Physics people tend to have a massive blind spot in the awareness of just how much complexity exists in the biological sciences. Couple that with a background that makes these people have full confidence in their ability to understand complex systems, and you tend to have a larger issue than if the background and subject matter were reversed.
ssivark 3y ago
> I'm not sure that's justified, at all. The domains are harder to experiment in - so the standards are more fitting for their domain. Not taking sides here, but I want to point out that there is a distinction between rigor in reasoning and diligence in testing (given feasibility constraints). The true answer need not be in the space of hypotheses that's feasible to test [1]. It's crucial that scientists appreciate that; sloppy reasoning tends to make strong conclusions from weak tests because there's a desire (bias) to emphatically drive outcomes even from weak conclusions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

dekhn 3y ago

So. I have a background in biophysics which is the part of biology where most physics folks go. It's highly quantitative, but still it struggles with the "assume a spherical cow" mental model of many physics and engineering folks. And the biology folks are stuck in a guild mentality (protecting their field by limiting the number of entrants) and very artisanal and resist increased quantitative methods. Over time I've mentally recategorized entire parts of medical science into what I would say is non-science, or at least, a very different approach to science. In particular, nutrition, and many other areas, take extremely limited amounts of data and extrapolate it, making conclusions that far exceed what the data actually supports. And the folks publishing it got really good at convincing the larger press/medical world that they knew what they were talking about, which has led to all sorts of trends. I would love to see more translation of quantitative physics into the medical sciences, but it's truly a challenging problem, especially because we (for good reasons) don't run the sorts of trials that would provide truly convincing evidence for causal mechanims related to disease, or whatever area of biology you care about.