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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I am often told that I should keep my nose out of other science domain's business because they know more than I do.

I've only heard such statements coming out of a few fields: math education, labor economics, climate science and psychometrics of race/gender. You should ignore such statements; they are nothing more than an attempt to bully you into accepting received wisdom from activists with a PhD.

As an actual scientist (rather than a political activist with a PhD), I strongly encourage you to stick your nose into any or all of my fields (quantum mechanics, PDEs, medical imaging, complex analysis, prediction markets). If you come up with dumb ideas, I'll even explain why they are dumb, rather than just demanding that you leave things to the experts.

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Such statements also come out of biologists discussing evolution. This is not, however, evidence that they aren't really doing science. Instead it is evidence that they've been burned out explaining basics over and over again to Creationists and want to get on with their lives.

However some do take the energy out for those explanations. One of the results of their energy is http://www.talkorigins.org/.

Hopefully some day someone will take the energy to do the same with climate science. Because as much as there is a lot of politics there, there is some real science there as well.

> Such statements also come out of biologists discussing evolution.

A lot of my friends are scientists, including in a couple biochemists and some other people that do more or less serious research into topics like that. In my experience, you're off on how they deal with stupid people and stupid arguments - instead of "get out of biology" and moving on with their lives, they tend to address and correct errors, debate if necessary, or at least point the person towards a relevant piece that explains things and take new criticisms and arguments and address them if necessary.

The scientists I know always been open to me saying stupid things (and occasionally not stupid things) and correcting me if I'm wrong, or exploring together if I might not be wrong. Good biologists don't say, "Get out of biology".

> Hopefully some day someone will take the energy to do the same with climate science.

Oh, hah, I honestly responded quickly and missed the climate science analogy originally. If you wanted to make an apologia for climate science, then I do understand why you'd want to draw a biology:evolution:creationism to climate science:global warming:deniers parallel.

I was responding to the "want to get on with their lives" part as being wrong based on my experience, as scientists are usually rather encouraging and tolerant of dissent. Climate science is not so much interested in people and data which disagree with them, which is a pretty big problem.

I'm married to a biology PhD, and at one point spent a couple of years watching people, including biologists, deal with a constant stream of Creationists in places like talk.origins.

My experience is that if you're a personal friend, you get more serious conversation. If you're someone they know but not so closely, they'll have the argument if pushed but don't feel the need to actively educate. And if you're a random person spouting on the Internet, it isn't worth their time to get involved. If pushed to be involved, they don't feel the need to be pleasant about it.

After spending time myself explaining the same thing over and over again, I've come to feel the same way. I've also come to realize that there are plenty of smart people who do not wish to be educated. Including in my direct personal experience, at least one PhD in mathematics and another in molecular biology.

Based on this experience I have some sympathy for the position of climate scientists. You spend your life climbing around glaciers in Greenland, and you don't really feel like spending the rest of it convincing people who don't want to bother learning the basics about climate.

> Such statements also come out of biologists discussing evolution

This is only the case when the opposing person is pretending to be a scientist but is really a creationist. Scientists tend to make arguments based upon facts and experiments. They start to get really mad when people don't follow the rules and start bringing non-scientific "evidence" into the argument.

There is plenty of things up for debate about how evolution works, but these are the details of the theory. Due to overwhelming evidence, the debate on if is over, however the debate on how is very much alive.

I've actually never heard that statement coming from biologists. Usually they just say "learn more about biology, look up $SOME_SPECIES on wikipedia."

Education is a lot more complex than most people understand it to be. Even within the field few people actually have any understanding of how the brain and learning interact. Everything from diet, to time of instruction, to setting, to materials, to methods, to testing is all important. A classic example of which is how do you build a useful test? Well if you want to know how much learning took place you need to test them both before and after instruction. But you also need to test people twice without instruction to see if the tests give information away. You need a mix of problem difficulty to find out if someone understands the basics and at the same time, to see if they understood the minor details. etc. You then need to look at the test not just in terms of overall score but also how well they did on each type of problem.

PS: Education might seem like a flaky field and much of the discussions are devoid of good science. At the same time there is a lot of great research that has been which has real and important implications.

On the contrary, I think math ed types want to keep the actual mathematicians out precisely because the mathematicians recognize how complex the field is. Every time I've been told "stay out, you don't know our field", it was because I pointed out complexity or plausible alternative explanations.

For example, a puzzle: why do SAT scores underpredict female performance in Calc 1, and overpredict grades in higher level courses? I suggested girls are more conscientious than boys, and that a study being proposed did not control for such factors. I even suggested a test of this hypothesis: compare grades in classes which are conscientiousness-weighted (25% homework, 10% attendance, tests questions are practice problems with numbers changed) to ability-weighted coursework (50% midterm, 50% final, test questions all new).

I'm not sure my idea was a good one. But rather than explain why either a) this had been tried, and didn't work, or b) why my test wouldn't work, I was simply told to leave the field to experts.

I've come up with plenty of dumb ideas in other areas, e.g., global existence of wave equations. The closest I've ever gotten to "stay out, you aren't an expert" was "Terry tried that and failed, ask him why before spending lots of time on it."

[edit: really confused why you are being downmodded.]

Honestly, SAT scores vs. Performance is the type of (mostly bad) research I am talking about. The SAT is not designed to test math ability. It's focus is on how likely a student is to finish their freshman year of college and it does that fairly well. You can do a lot of useless research in this area and it tells you next to nothing. If you want to predict a highschool students ability in advanced collage math classes you could design a test that did that. But, people have easy access to SAT data so that's what they look at.

If you want to see real and useful research look into how long the optimal study period. There are significant and useful study’s which suggest 2 hours of nonstop instruction is less useful than two one hour periods with a moderate break in-between. Yet how many collage lectures follow this approach.

What makes SAT vs performance bad research? The SAT may be worse than some specialized test, but so what? Breast self exams suck in comparison to mammograms, but that doesn't make studies into breast self exams bad research.

The methodology is what makes research good or bad.

The fewer unknowns the better the data and the more accurate the experiment.

In terms of predicting how likely someone is to finish their freshman year of collage having a test where you can increase your score significantly with moderate levels of preparation is not a bad thing. However, the fact you can easily game the test means it is a less accurate indicator of a student’s innate capability. The fact you can retake the test creates yet another sort of bias. etc.

More generally, it's easy to focus on defects in the test, which are irrelevant in a larger contest and subject to change.

"There are significant and useful study’s which suggest 2 hours of nonstop instruction is less useful than two one hour periods with a moderate break in-between."

The professor of the last class I took was very conscientious about taking a break at the 1 hour mark of an 80 minute lecture.

My wife and I were discussing this recently. She is in an unusual program where she should graduate with both a masters in history and an education certificate with hopes to teach in history at the High School level after that.

This is both second hand an anecodatal, but from what she tells me the education courses she takes are less rigorous and generally easier than the history courses. But the reason for this is that the education course she is taking are vocational. They are trying to teach her how to get teaching done in a modern classroom, not the science behind it.

It is akin to learning to the difference between training to be a mechanic and a mechanical engineer. Both are very hard and important jobs worthy of respect, but they have very different focuses. The education courses are focused on learning the technique of teaching effective, it looks like most of the research on the theory of effective education is done in departments like psychology, sociology, etc.

As another scientist I have to strongly second this. Some things might take real work on your part to understand though. Even within different fields of mathematics there are difficulties in understanding (complaint about this: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion104.html).

http://abstrusegoose.com/211

I agree with the sentiment you express and thank you for pointing it out.

I do think that thinking outsiders should stay out is uncommon in the field of math though. I am currently a math grad student, and while I am only a grad student what I have seen of the mathematical community makes it seem like it is very open to cross fertilization from other sciences and from amateurs.

Admittedly he is historical, but Fermat (professional judge when he did most of his mathematical work) is revered and there are some more recent amateurs that have made genuine contributions. Much of mathematics is inspired by other fields such as physics.

I admit I know some professional mathematicians were tired of finding flaws in amateurs proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem and rebuting supposed refutations of Godel's diagonal proof that the reals are uncountable, but it is very different to be tired of dealing with a constant stream like that than to be hostile towards outsiders in general.

From my limited perspective, I think math is one of the fields most open to outsiders and amateurs coming in and making real contributions, both culturally and in the fact that we rarely need expensive experimental setups so the barrier of entry (in terms of money and equipment) is low.

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