What I learned: an upcoming series
June 20, 2009
One observation about most fields of human endeavor is the impossibility of experiencing any given one completely. You can’t listen to all the music, even in a particular sub-genre; can’t read all the books on a particular topic; and no one knows what science doesn’t know. This raises the existential dilemma of possibly missing out on the most awesome things ever, due to the shortness of life. And it, like so many other silly questions, bothers me.
The standard solution is to consult the market. At any given time, there is a set of ideas the market considers the best. But this is not a general solution. After one has sifted through the “top 10″, examining less popular ideas carries diminishing returns. Alternatively, if 90% of everything is crap and you pick randomly, only 1 in 10 works will be of genuine value. Talk about inefficiency…
A case in point is ScienceBlogs.com. It has lots of good reading, but most of it is, well, standard. Now, I do subscribe to the view that settled science is much better than revolutionary science, in terms of usefulness for public knowledge. But reporting on settled science has a major flaw – its maximum depth.
Consider physics. There are a number of hot topics such as relativity and quantum mechanics, on which popularizations are consistently published. However, any new publication is unlikely to add any additional, unique information its predecessors missed. The more one reads and hears, the more difficult it becomes to find novel insight in popularization, and one’s understanding stagnates.
In the last couple of years, I’ve had the fortune to learn many great ideas which I seldom see in “traditional” channels. They’re neither obscure nor necessarily controversial, but for various reasons are not the consensus or not popularized enough.
In the upcoming series I hope to do them some justice. Not an easy task, since my own understanding is largely superficial. For this reason, I will try to confine myself to just reporting, so if I end up talking nonsense, I can always blame someone else ;-)
June 22, 2009 at 6:47 am
The more you know, the more you want to know.
And the smartest people have the most to learn.
I used to like popular science, until I realized it’s mostly clogging my brain with half intuitive rationalizations.
By the way, my blog has a name.
June 24, 2009 at 12:46 pm
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd. Indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
June 25, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Shai,
In general, I do agree with the view that to truly understand a subject you have to both know the math and practice it to some extent. Popularization doesn’t do magic, but lacking time and desire to do it the hard way, it’s a good investment.
Guy,
We routinely rely on popular opinion in our daily lives. Or, rather, we routinely rely on experts, but it is popular opinion that we *should* rely on them, and so we do. Doctors, weather forecasters, bus drivers, grocery retailers… that we are alive and well is proof that the majority *is* positively correlated with reality, albeit not as strongly as we would like.