Comment by boxed
3 days ago
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
3 days ago
> Something I've noticed is people who are extremely talented in one field will sometimes think they're extremely talented in every field.
I'm pretty sure Sabine has made this exact statement too.
Probably, kind of funny that the irony is completely lost on her.
I am not in a PhD program anymore and I didn't finish but I was enrolled in one from a good school for a few years. It was for formal methods in computer science, and specifically with regards to functional programming and temporal logic. I probably understand that niche better than most people and I probably could give reasonable educated opinions on it, but that doesn't mean I would be qualified for having strong opinions on biology or physics, or even other fields of computer science really (e.g. data science), even if I had finished my PhD.
A PhD basically means that you were willing and able to work really really hard for a certain amount of time on a very specific subject. Being smart helps but I don't think that's sufficient; I think most people could get a PhD if they were willing to do the work for it. Importantly though, PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
> PhDs are extremely focused; in a strange way saying that you have a PhD in physics sort of makes you less qualified to talk about biology.
It depends, many fields intersect, and there are interdisciplinary approaches to problem-solving. The generalist approach is to be T-shaped, but you’re right that it’s important to know your limits. The T might be shallow on some ends, but deeper on others, so you may even have a prong, trident, or comb. Truly, it depends.
Sure, I don't disagree with that. If you have a PhD in theoretical physics, you're probably in a good enough position to talk about different types of calculus, and maybe some other forms of physics depending on if there's overlap. But I think a lot of people will see "Dr." in front of the name and assume that these people are like the professor from Gilligan's Island and understand everything about everything.
It's entirely possible that a PhD theoretical physicist does know a lot about biology (maybe they got a job in a biophysics or something) but I'm saying it's definitely not implied, and it might even suggest that they don't have expertise in that field.
Exactly she used to say this all the time and now she's weighing in on topics ranging from EVs to nuclear power to 5G causing cancer (yes she did a show on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs and she was peddling to the "sceptic" crowd by saying that "she doesn't have any reason to believe that it's is unsafe, but ..." and pointing to doctors saying smoking was save in the 50s).
Yeah, I remember the 5G one and it kind of upset me.
Obviously people can have opinions on anything, and of course you can't be an expert on everything, but I feel like what Sabine does goes beyond "having an opinion"; she seems to have pivoted into fear-mongering about academia. I don't love academia either, and I have my criticisms of how it is run in the US, but I think a lot of my complaints can largely be explained by incompetence at the administrative level, not a grand conspiracy to control narratives or suppress questions or anything like that.
Granted, the research I've worked on has been pretty apolitical [1], mostly mathy computer science stuff, so maybe I was never at a risk of my research being suppressed, but I certainly don't think that Eric Weinstein is being censored by no one taking his attempt at Unified Field Theory seriously.
[1] Yes I know everything can be political. You don't need to explain this to me.