What insight have you gained from you profession/education that the layman doesn't understand?

Ooh! This topic is at the top of the 'popular topics' list.
Hurrah, I've never spawned one of these before.

@The Pentacle Queen,

Then don't dare click on the "Month" tab there....

@sozobe,

Quote:

With literature, it's getting different levels in some books (the levels have to be there and not all books contain them). I remember writing a paper about a seemingly innocuous passage in a Margaret Atwood book that was chock-full of meaningful symbolism -- before writing that paper I would've skipped right over such things. That was an eye-opener. I'm in a book club now and I've learned to not point out such things unless they're really cool/ important to the story, as it makes peoples' eyes glaze over fast. Very Happy I love that stuff though.

I've heard you post before actually, something about the moment when you suddenly 'saw' what the author was trying to do.
I suppose its too much to ask what the specific piece was and what you 'saw'. I need to get a book and then read an essay on it to educate myself I suppose. Spark notes or something. That would be a fun project. I'll do that when I have time.
That's very interesting about the book club.
You evidently have a knowledge of this subject. Do you find you have to be careful of when you expose the knowledge? At your book club (since a book is essentially for people with an amateur interest) do you have to find a balance between not talking 'at' people, yet still getting your point across.
I struggle with that a lot in everyday life. I want to talk about things, but I know if people don't care, or don't know, or don't 'get it' then I'll just look like I'm being pretentious.
That's probably why I go on here so much.

Quote:

With science writing, it was realizing how much bias and uncritical reporting can go into something seemingly straightforward. I remember a professor absolutely destroying a science article that was credible enough the first time I read it. That's a lesson that really stuck with me, and you've probably seen me do similar things here. It's a general lesson, not just science writing, though it seems to come up a lot in that genre because journalists who are not specialists may not have the time to really figure it out for themselves and so rely on the word of their informants -- who may well have an agenda -- more than they would in other fields that they may understand better.

That's interesting. Is there a 'source' that outlines all these 'problems' with scientific knowledge?
I remember omitting a few anomalies and replacing them with made up figures way back when I did science GCSE, but my friend who does geology said scientists do that all the time, albeit at a much higher level.
Is this true?

Quote:

Re: what Brandon has to say... my husband is a scientist and summarizes it as "knowing how to think." Some non-scientists know how to think, but it's fatal if a scientist doesn't know how to think. Such a person might get a certain distance just on hard work and rote memorization but will eventually hit a brick wall. (He'll comment on a potential grad student as "good test scores but I'm not sure he knows how to think." Etc.)

Gosh. I hope I 'know how to think'.
My flatmate would be a good example, perhaps. It's like, she's intelligent, but her opinion always seems a bit blunt.
It appears like she has knowledge but doesn't see it.
Although maybe I'm wrong.

To brandon, too- how far do you think 'knowing how to think' extends to subjects outside science?

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@Robert Gentel,

Woohoo!
What you put into A2K is what you get out!

Well, most of the time... it really does depend on who you're talking to I suppose.

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@sozobe,

Quote:

... my husband is a scientist and summarizes it as "knowing how to think."

Reminds me of my sister, who has a PhD. She told me a PhD is NOT about knowing facts, but about "learning how to learn."

Love your insightful posts, Soz, as always. Plus, I've really enjoyed this thread, thank you PQ.

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People who go into the sciences and engineering are traditional geeks. They are object oriented and dream about theories and have ideas about things. They tend to be slightly anti-social. They are into the nitty gritty of how things work. The artsy group on the other hand are more into people and their emotions and relati0nships. They are more people oriented. The upper echelons of human society usually of these people as they understand people better and can manipulate them.

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@BorisKitten,

The theory of machines explains the vibrations. The internal combustion engine is a system of levers connected to a crankshaft. The piston jacks up and down from the explosion of the fuel in the combustion chamber. The linkages and flywheel constructed at those angles absorb much of the vibration. But there is such a thing as a natural frequency at which all machine vibrate even more. Have you ever skipped a rope? You are using the natural frequency of the rope length to skip. Tie one end of the rope to a bench or chair and shake one end. If you shake it too fast the rope seems lifeless or too slow it is still limp but at the right frequency it moves like a snake. That is the natural frequency of the rope. The 53 mph is the natural frequency of the engine. Avoid that speed.

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The greatest insight I've gained from my profession is that you don't learn everything you need to learn in school. I work in a mathematical/scientific/medical field and I've seen time and time again that folks coming out of school know which chapter contains certain topics but they don't necessarily know when to apply a particular chapter to the current circumstance. That's where experience comes in and it takes a combination of learning and experience to become a professional in any field.

In my own particular field I've learned that most people have higher expectations of medical professionals/procedures/care-givers than should be expected. I learned to counsel patients to question said professionals/care-givers on the whys and wherefores of what is being prescribed for them. I've also learned that for all the good these caregivers want to do they are human, just like you and me, and sometimes the customer (patient) shouldn't simply give themselves over to the professionals. And, yet, at other times the patient/family should listen to those who advise them on best practices and probable futures. Being ill is not an easy situation on anyone.

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@talk72000,

That's kinda funny to me, talk, since I just made up that 53 mph on the fly!

Still I do know about Sympathetic Vibrations, well, a bit, anyway. Hubby hasn't yet mentioned any speed as being more prone to sympathetic vibrations than any other speed... I'm willing to bet it would depend on the vehicle.

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@The Pentacle Queen,

The Pentacle Queen wrote:

...To brandon, too- how far do you think 'knowing how to think' extends to subjects outside science?

I'm sure sozobe is talking about something valid, but what I'm talking about is much more specific - knowing how to analyze natural phenomena and questions of fact in general. By the 17th century, scientists had finally figured out how to decompose a technical question into pieces, and set up a procedure for solving it. It's unlikely in the extreme that a person could reproduce in his mind what it took mankind so long to figure out. When we hear untrained people speculating about technical matters, it's overwhelmingly clear how unlikely it is. And it applies pretty well to any question of fact, scientific or not.

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@ossobuco,

It's not fear of language. Rather, most of what I did in da law was fact-gathering. You don't gather facts if the barely educated person you're trying to depose doesn't understand your question, or they guess at meaning and they guess wrong. Plus giving translators (I dealt with a lot of Portuguese-speaking folk, but recall deposing people who spoke Mandarin and Farsi, too) more work means you're making the case unnecessarily more expensive.

Yes, complex words aren't bad ones. No argument there. And most of the people in business are perfectly capable of understanding them. If they are the right words, then by all means people should use them. But not to make a memo more flowery -- to make the meaning more precise, yes? Nothing wrong with saying "prior to" and "subsequent to" to fellow college grads. But I have also learned to be very mindful of people's time. More and longer words, when I could get the same ideas across with economy? It really doesn't work in the businesses I've worked in.

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@BorisKitten,

I remember a college buddy who took me to his farm once and had a very old car. It vibrated like hell at 50 or sixty. He was an aggie engineering student and wondered why it vibrated so much. I didn't know either but the experience stuck in my mind. It was only when I read the book on the theory of machines did that memory come back. I used to read these theoretical books and vibrations didn't mean anything to me as a student. Only when you experience something like that do you realize that machines are not perfect and you just have to overlook or live with the minor problems and not be too alarmed.

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@jespah,

No argument. Depends on the clients. We had an extremely successful movie director/producer client... well, more than one. We would never talk to him in 'baby'.

Many of my own solo clients were low income, though knowledgeable enough to look to a designer. Contracts were short and sweet, but I never talked down, geared to whom I was talking with.

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@Brandon9000,

Brandon9000 wrote:

To give one simple example, Einstein wrote:

E = mc^2

Now, if someone suggests to me that Einstein was wrong and that the correct formula should be:

E = mc

I know immediately that he's wrong because the units on the right, kilogram meters per second in the mks system, don't match the units on the left, kilogram meters squared per second squared, so the equation is a priori impossible.

I agree with your (and Sozobe's) general point that having studied physics helps you keep your thinking straight. But I'm not so sure about your specific example. After all, there's an easy, shallow fix to your "someone"'s faulty suggestion: Just rewrite the equation as "E = tau*mc", where "tau" is the "Thomas velocity", a constant that lacks any physically interesting property, but fixes the dimensions. I doubt that keeping track of dimensions is all important to consistent thinking in physics. In fact, particle physicists liberally dump the dimensions altogether by setting all kinds of constants to 1, including c.

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@sozobe,

Having read Sozobe's post, one thing that occurs to me, and that laypeople don't know about the "hard" sciences, is how much a scientist's daily work is devoted to the soft sciences, and how much it helps hard scientists to have a foundation in the liberal arts. This ignorance has dangerous consequences in my old country, where education policies, progressively dismantle the liberal arts education in high schools.

Say you're a physicist, for example. You will spend a good share of your daily work as an amateur librarian, searching for articles in real-life and virtual libraries. Having retrieved your articles, you sit down and read them critically: What are the authors saying? What do they give the appearance of saying, but turn out not to say on a careful parsing of their language? Who are they primarily writing for, what are their interests, and what agendas might they pursue in making the statements they make? Does their story hang together, or are there gaps in it?

That's literary criticism -- stuff your high school taught you, not in its physics classes, but in English and maybe history.

More liberal arts ensue once you write a paper. You've run your experiments. You're looking at a pile of facts and theories in front of you. Now you have to organize them into a story, one that is both logical and interesting. Story telling, like literary criticism, was a subject of your high school's English lessons, not its physics lessons.

Speaking of English: English is a foreign language for most people in the world, including myself. You have to learn it, or you can't make it anywhere in science. Liberal arts again.

And speaking of "interesting": When physicists judge what's interesting and what's boring or even trivial, they don't use any hard science. Instead, they follow a commonly understood sense of aesthetics, not written down anywhere I know of, but nevertheless shared by most of the community. Liberal arts again.

Considering the importance of the humanities for actual work in the hard sciences, I'm not surprised at all that most German Nobel Prize winners in history went to humanist high schools, as opposed to high schools specialized in the natural sciences. And I'm appalled by the short shrift the humanities are getting from ignorant educational policies designed to staff the next Silicon Valley.

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@jespah,

jespah wrote:

Nothing wrong with saying "prior to" and "subsequent to" to fellow college grads.

Then I suppose we can't be friends anymore. For me it's "before" and "after", or nothing.

If Kipling had been a jurist, he would have titled his most famous poem "In The Event That". I shudder at the thought.

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Another quote from Winston Churchill

Quote:

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

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@The Pentacle Queen,

God I wish we had been able to get an A2k Book Club off the ground...because those discussions that Soz references are ones I miss enormously in real life.

Of course, an online book cluh that was working would have people in it with no interest in that kind of analysis...but they can just scroll past.

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@Thomas,

I knew a fellow whose dad was a Professor of Physics at a university and he mentioned that his dad consistently converted many equations to simple multiplication by conversion factors thus creating dimensionless constants.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Brandon9000 wrote:
To give one simple example, Einstein wrote:

E = mc^2

Now, if someone suggests to me that Einstein was wrong and that the correct formula should be:

E = mc

I know immediately that he's wrong because the units on the right, kilogram meters per second in the mks system, don't match the units on the left, kilogram meters squared per second squared, so the equation is a priori impossible.

I agree with your (and Sozobe's) general point that having studied physics helps you keep your thinking straight. But I'm not so sure about your specific example. After all, there's an easy, shallow fix to your "someone"'s faulty suggestion: Just rewrite the equation as "E = tau*mc", where "tau" is the "Thomas velocity", a constant that lacks any physically interesting property, but fixes the dimensions. I doubt that keeping track of dimensions is all important to consistent thinking in physics. In fact, particle physicists liberally dump the dimensions altogether by setting all kinds of constants to 1, including c.

'I guess my point was that untrained people will give you dimensionally incorrect equations because they don't know of the existence of dimensional correctness.

1 Reply

What insight have you gained from you profession/education that the layman doesn't understand?

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