On this long Labor Day weekend in the US, we're bringing you a set of opinion pieces from various Ars writers—and we'd love to have you join the conversation in the comments.
One of the most important things that I've learned in my time writing for Ars Technica is how little I know. Look at my back catalogue of stories and you will notice that most of my articles are combinations of quantum mechanics and optics. Every now and again I venture into the fraught territory of cosmology, materials sciences, and climatology. Even more rarely, I head off into the wild and write something about medicine or biology.
I only ever write these articles if the papers on which they are based are written clearly; I want to be reasonably certain that I haven't mangled the research entirely. Yet, if you let yourself be flushed down the intertubes, you will find physicists and engineers like myself expounding on topics that are far outside their field of expertise. These people are often so badly wrong that it is hard to know where to begin in any argument to counter them.
I find it quite frustrating because these are supposedly smart people. So what goes wrong with us physicists?
Just enough knowledge to be dangerous
Part of the problem comes from the idea that physicists and engineers do "hard science" while everyone else does, well, "easy science." We are told that physics is the core science and everything else is, essentially, just an elaboration atop the underlying physics. The implication is that we physicists, if we would only find problems in other fields interesting, could solve the relevant equations and everyone in that field could retire. (Back in the days when nonlinear dynamics was popular, insights based on mathematical physics did have an impact on fields outside of physics—nonlinear equations helped explain the general features of population fluctuations and irregular heart beats, among other things.)
This is compounded by physics being the science that revolutionized society in the 19th and 20th centuries. Chemistry followed suit, and biology is now hitting its stride, but physics made its impression long ago, and it stuck: physics is useful, chemistry is sort of useful, and everything else is just stocking the library.
Then there's the math. Most people are more intimidated by calculus than they are by statistics, and many fields of science make more practical use of statistics than they do of calculus. So, in people's minds—especially in the minds of physicists and engineers who can barely calculate a standard deviation—scientists who use calculus must be truly hard core, and many physicists use lots of math.
All of this has combined to put physics and engineering on a pedestal, at least in many people's minds. But many of us in these fields just don't recognize that the pedestal on which we stand is imaginary, and that we don't really know enough to contribute much at a high level outside of our own field.
I am focusing on physicists and engineers but, in fact, anyone can fall victim to this belief in their own expertise. Research shows that the less expert we are in some field, the more certain we are that our opinions and predictions are correct. The cynical view of this is that we are all stupid and don't hesitate to exhibit our stupidity in public, but it's more likely that we all know a little something about many different things. Unfortunately, what we don't know are all the caveats, exceptions, and oddities that always accompany the general rules of any field.
This lack of truly specialist knowledge makes it difficult to accurately evaluate new facts and opinions--or even to determine if it is possible to evaluate such facts.
That doesn't stop us all from trying. The evidence from psychological experiments indicates that people will go to great lengths to make up a coherent story based around facts. And, if they happen to be invested in the story, they will twist themselves into knots to make the result fit their preconceived notions. This sort of reasoning knows no political boundaries: communists did not blame communism for the failure of their regimes, and free market ideologues never blame the market.
I may be wrong, but I tell a good story
Now, you might think that physicists, engineers, and other highly trained individuals might be the sort of people that you could talk down from the ledge of insanity. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. These people aren't stupid (although it would be wrong to think that they are extraordinary, either), and they have been given extensive training in marshaling arguments to support their positions. In fact, our school system actively encourages this, where we set up debates about arbitrary propositions and decide a winner based on debating techniques—facts need not apply.
So, we have a group of people who have been trained to think nothing of defending absurd positions, have relatively good training in logic, and slightly broader knowledge than the general populace.
The result is some physicists and engineers who argue vehemently, and with little detailed knowledge, that Michael Mann is a moron and that global warming is bunk. We have physicists who don't know their eukaryotes from their prokaryotes arguing that Darwin was daft. We have physicists and engineers who argue that 9/11 was an inside job.
Does it have to be this way?
To be honest, I don't know if human nature is such that this will always be true. But I am more certain that one can train oneself to be open to changing a long-held opinion. For instance, just recently we ran a story about the plague, and one of the authors admitted that he had changed his mind entirely when faced with evidence that undermined his position.
This is notable because of its rarity, sadly. Our educational systems often do a good job teaching people to construct logical and consistent stories, and to develop arguments to support a position. Unfortunately, they haven't always taught us how to recognize that our opinion may have been ill-formed, that our logical tower may be founded on faulty premises, and that, in general, we are all vulnerable to falling victim to smart people who tell a good story--or to becoming those people ourselves.
I've picked on physicists and engineers here, but perhaps I'm simply the victim of confirmation bias. Now it's your turn: tell me about doctors, lawyers, biologists, and ecologists who declaim at length on topics outside of their expertise. Rather like I have just been doing.
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