alt Hacker NewsCertainly, I'm also aware of how difficult it is to implement open dialogue in practice. Perhaps my hope is that general education could help develop that sort of transversal insight that talented scientists use to naturally understand topics which they are not familiar with, by working with analogies and fundamental principles. I know that knowledge of the nitty gritty generally requires years of actually struggling with the thing, and this cannot be asked of any layman. Still, for example, I'm thinking of times when you deal with a topic that is nominally in the same field as yours, but that is so foreign that the only knowledge relevant to it is something barely above undergraduate, say Newton's laws or thermodynamics. Many scientists have managed to either take some lessons from other fields and bring them into theirs, or contribute despite their relative lack of education in that subfield.
I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.
As for the crackpots, well, I know some people spend time and energy with them, but it is hard to believe their true objective is learning or contributing. It is, fortunately, very obvious when you meet one in the wild.
> I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.
Oh absolutely, I think that people in STEM should receive at least a cursory education in the Arts, and likewise I think people in the Arts should receive at least a cursory education in STEM. It doesn't have to be detailed, but it would be cool to have cross-disciplinary collaboration introduced into the higher learning ecosystem!
An issue I've consistently seen is STEM professionals musing in their own time about Sociology and Psychology, and their musings are almost always wrong — there's this arrogance to it where they think that instead of reading a book on Sociology 101, they think that they can reason about it from first principles, or computational principles. It used to happen a lot in spaces I occupied (notably, the community around 100 rabbits were incredibly fond of this), and I kept interjecting, like- no people have done studies on this, yes they are rigorous studies, this has been investigated in detail for about a hundred years and the answer to all your questions are literally answered in an introductory book on the subject.
Despite that, they used to just ignore me, and instead preferred to muddle on with this broken, strange understanding of the topic. You can see the same kind of strange mix of arrogance and intelligence within the Less Wrong community as a whole. Rational Wiki has a very good page somewhere that covers a number of their efforts to break into other fields, and how, without a willingness to open their minds and submit themselves to the knowledge of others, they have found their ideas and ventures broken in some fundamental way, without understanding why.
I think that without said cross-disciplinary education, there's a risk of CS professionals not understanding how deep and vastly more complex other STEM fields are (CS is entirely human constructions, Molecular Biology however deals with the very messy reality of evolution throwing things at the wall for four billion years). Some of the most notable and influential individuals in Computer Science have initially studied under non-CS fields (Alan Kay, David Knight, Larry Wall), and you can see very clearly (or at least, it feels very clear to me) how this has influenced their work within CS in very positive ways. Learning of ideas that are new and different to your native field of study seem to encourage a kind of creativity that many are searching for. So it seems a complete and utter shame that more people aren't willing to find humility and wide-eyed glee at the prospect of learning other fields from undergraduate material up.