Litany of a Bright Dilettante

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

--Alexander Pope

Related xkcd.

Over the last few years I've found that
1) I notice this problem in myself and others more and more
2) Reminding myself of it helps keep my identity small
3) People strongly resist not doing it, people are mistrustful of experts

My formulation: Oh, so you've overturned decades of investigation by professionals with your 30 seconds of poorly worded thoughts, watchout we have a badass over here. (note: I only use one this caustic on myself)

OTOH: there are areas where a cursory investigation reveals that no one has been doing much rigorous work and it's easy to disregard established opinion.

The odds that I find a clever argument contradicting someone who works on this topic for a living, just by reading one or two popular explanations of it are minuscule.

There's different kinds of "works for a living", e.g. I write software for a living and employ statistical methods for a living, and it has to actually work, not merely look plausible, or I will not get paid. I also do art for a living, and here it has to look plausible, and if I do very plausible looking clouds and mountains that doesn't make me much of a meteorology expert or a geophysicist. (It does make me a bit of an expert because human visual system is amazingly sensitive to things being wrong, but only a bit, and its very superficial expertise).

"Somebody says, 'You know, you people always say that space is continuous. How do you know when you get to a small enough dimension that there really are enough points in between, that it isn't just a lot of dots separated by little distances?'

Or they say, 'You know those quantum mechanical amplitudes you told me about, they're so complicated and absurd, what makes you think those are right? Maybe they are not right.'

Such remarks are obvious and are perfectly clear to anybody who is working on this problem. It does not do any good to point this out."

--Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1965)

dealing with some of the comments to my post about time-turners and General Relativity

Next up: The Litany of the Déformation professionnelle.

One of the most robust findings in studies of expertise is that unless the expertise is in callibration itself (eg. gambling) experts are systematically overconfident. In particular they overestimate the relevence of their expertise to things that are not central to their actual professional or academic practice. For example a neurobiologist with no training in information theory may tend to place inordinate trust in their intuition "it is theoretically impossible to recover information from that brain" without realising how different that question is from the fact that they actually do know, "it isn't possible for us to repair that brain to functioning condition in place".

In the case of the time turner thread that motivates this post we have an example of believing that some knowledge of General Relativity is sufficient to make one an expert at solving engineering problems in a counterfactual physical reality rather than merely being necessary. The most insightful comments in that thread don't do anything to challenge the impossibility of mass altering time turner implications. In fact, the point is taken for granted as trivially true and they put the actual (im)practical implications thereof into perspective.

Dear myself from several years ago: Please read this.

Good post. Experts on X are usually right about X. What's worse, if an expert in X and an expert in a closely related Y disagree about Y, the latter is usually right (or has a stronger position).

It's not easy being a small fish in a big intellectual sea, but that's how it is for us all, even the most brilliant.

Man, I didn't even follow the rest of that discussion until now.

I'm going through and systematically upvoting you to bring your accurate, on-point posts back up towards 0. Like, in the thread where we were disagreeing, you were telling me the conventional approach, which is an important thing to know. And now I know where this charge without charge idea is coming from, which is nice! But half of it was at -1. And it's worse with the higher-rated, less comprehensible objections.

I notice that people (including me) are especially prone to this in economics. Everyone feels that they can figure out the correct tax/foreign/monetary/regulatory policy simply by using some trivial demand-supply arguments. Further, they always use a moral axis as well (arguing about fairness/equality/social justice), which always dilutes whatever little insight they might have had.

Worse: economists are highly distrusted as experts. One friend told me that economics as a field has a huge "conservative bias", and you can't trust their methods because of this reason. Chalk it up to politics being the mind-killer.

Any suggestions on how to handle these situations?

If I come up with $flaw in $argument, how I endorse presenting $flaw depends on my goal.

If my goal is to learn more about $argument, I endorse asking a question which prompts others to provide me the information I want. (E.g., "How does $argument address $flaw?") I also endorse doing this if I think others might benefit from that information, even if I won't.

If my goal is to expose weaknesses in $argument for the benefit of others, I endorse asserting that $flaw is a flaw in $argument. I am of course aware that there exists a social pattern whereby in this case people ask a question instead, either to more effectively stage a social attack or to do so with impunity (aka "rhetorical question"). I increasingly reject this pattern, and endorse consistently using question-syntax to request information and statement-syntax to make assertions, in the spirit of clear communication. That said, I do recognize that there are scenarios where making a successful social attack is more valuable than communicating clearly.

If my goal is to manage/signal my own status (e.g., showing off how smart or well-informed or compliant-to-norms or contrarian I am) I'm less clear what I endorse. At a minimum, I endorse being clear in my own head that this is my goal, even if I don't admit it out loud.

For any given assertion by an expert on a situation you are not an expert on, the probability that your criticism is correct is not small. However,

1) this does not mean that the expected value of the criticism is negative, even to the expert. If the expert receives 100 comments, 99 of which are confused and one of which blows apart their argument, then they are probably collectively valuable.

2) if the expert is unusually patient, your comment can present her with an opportunity to correct your confusion.

I would say that the important thing is more humility of presentation than humility of willingness to speak at all.

Instead I may ask politely whether my argument is a valid one, and if not, where the flaw lies.

One should always have respect for one's own ignorance and limitations, and yes, it's highly unlikely you'll come up with an objection in a minute that experts haven't already considered, but I don't know why groveling to your betters is required. Why do I have to preface every statement with "I could be wrong, but...."? Can't we take that as assumed, and discuss the facts?

"You're so much wiser and more experienced than I am, but ...." Why the ego stroking and status games?

If I think you're wrong, I'll let you know, and hopefully, vice versa. I'm fine with that from either end.

We must test our own ideas and arguments. Just because we don't know how to do so doesn't make our ideas any better, but it can make them seem better to the careless.

It's part of why I don't post very often on this site. Even though I know more QM than most people here, I know I don't know enough to argue the validity of the sequence.

Hmm. I'm not sure what to think about this post given that I just made remarkably similar comments on your general relativity/time turner thread in part accusing you of being on the wrong side of this in a way that you don't seem to be acknowledging. I would appreciate your comments on this, shminux, and also to know whether or not you are in a position of expertise regarding GR.

(I made that comment before seeing this thread and would probably have worded things differently if I had.)