Re:Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
by heisenzombie on Sunday June 09, 2024 @08:38PM
(#40628870)
Yes, there is certainly an archetype of "Accomplished physicist who has ventured outside their area of expertise and is patronizing the locals with confident proclamations that `this would all be trivial if you knew math better and made these obvious simplifying assumptions`".
Occasionally a figure like that is actually correct — for example, Schrödinger bringing the concept of entropy over to biology and thereby influencing Francis Crick to search for the gene.
But many more are, to put it politely, not Schrödinger.
The bias here is that highly talented people sometimes cannot fathom that the ability to see some truths is broadly distributed. But in the case of human behavior, our ability to see truth is broadly distributed, much more so than the science someone like Freeman Dyson can do. And if that human behavior factor is the key variable, then the broad consensus can be correct.