Comment by varjag
1 month ago
Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.
As an unfamiliar, I find it interesting how you specifically called out physics grads in the pre-LLM era. Is that just snark or is there some widespread truth / stereotype of that behavior?
Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
As a mathematician, this is far from my experience of actual professional mathematicians, because they encounter people much smarter than them quite often. Maybe more true among graduate students, however.
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From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this.
The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Like, ultimately you can't be a knowledge worker by just waiting for answers and instruction from experts and relaying them back and forth. Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
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I think that's a common trait of tenured academics in the top 100 universities in the US. Don't know about Europe and elsewhere though. Not so much of nontenure track sorts who do all their dirty work.
I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain common, basic misconceptions about my area of expertise to me.
(And it got so much worse once they started using LLMs to aid them in their efforts. Glazing as a service is a hell of a drug.)
So much easier, now that I am a lowly software engineer and can't be held responsible for a certain class of decisions, to just step back and let them be wrong.
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If you are very smart, and/or have an incredibly high tolerance for pain/repetition, you can solve amazingly complex issues, with awful code.
Both of these statements are true for physicists
Not the parent, but it's half joke half truth. Anyone who's done a lot of "first principles" work falls into this trap a bit, it's an issue across stem fields. Most grow out of it, or at least learn to qualify their statements for the audience.
I suspect the person you replied to only happened to see that from physics grads. I have seen it in all sorts of people and I sometimes did it myself when I was young (I am not a physics grad).
Its snark/stereotype, but there is some truth. But my take, is physics sort of took over a lot of chemistry, biology.. and to them its the answer to all questions, because in the end it just molecules. There is some truth to that but..
Obligatory xkcd, everything is math. https://xkcd.com/435/
It’s a very common experience that people in the physics-adjacent sciences have.
It’s so common that there’s an xkcd about it:
https://xkcd.com/793/
It's a widespread stereotype at least: https://xkcd.com/793/
It might be a reference to this: https://xkcd.com/793/
I prefer the SMBC version: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
It's common enough to have an xkcd for it at least (then again, what doesn't?) https://xkcd.com/793/
>arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain
describes nearly every tech attempt at "disruption"
I hypothesize that with more people on a daily basis encountering information and claims that require those skills, there will be a time in the future when those skills are much more enhanced.
There is a reason this exists: https://xkcd.com/793/
I sadly share this as a physicist. To be fair, sometimes this arrogance can be useful. I worked at the boundary between domains my entire career where there aren't "experts" per se. But yeah, barging into an established domain without some humility generally leads to embarrassment - especially Nobel winners (e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/nobel-prize-winner-who-doesnt-belie...)
Hilarious. Do they preface the conversation with "Well, Claude said..."?
With my younger coworkers it's their defence when I push back on them.
Currently, the leader of USA national AI policy (Trump admin and OpenAI) is a history Bachelors with no technical training or advanced training of any kind, Dean Ball.
like a prosthetic dunning-kruger....