A mathematician I once knew repeated a second hand quote from a
well-known mathematician: "In mathematics, even to be second rate you
have to be pretty smart."
On 7/7/20 2:20 PM, Gary Schiltz wrote:
I think there is envy within and among most professions. When I was at
Bios Group, I felt there was, if not envy, then competition for
recognition, between the scientists and software engineers. Being a
software guy myself, I can only see it from that side of the fence; I
can't speak to how the scientists saw things. I always felt a bit of
an inferiority complex, as well as some hero worship toward the
scientists. Part of this probably has to do with the supply and demand
ratios for complexity scientists and software engineers. Geeks have
always been in demand, and so it is easier to be somewhat mediocre and
still be gainfully employed and well compensated. I suspect that
scientists, particular theoretical physicists and mathematicians, have
to really stand out in their field to be in demand.
On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 2:41 PM ∄ uǝlƃ <geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hm. In these cases, where Firestein talks about quantum mechanics
as an exemplar of how we navigate ignorance and my cancer survivor
friend as a defense mechanism for avoiding nihilism or depression
or whatnot, there is no "I wish I were a physicist". Firestein is
a credentialed neuroscientist and my friend is a graphic artist.
Neither seem to feel inadequate in their disciplines or wish their
disciplines were more like physics. So, I really doubt it's envy.
What it sounds more like is captured well by "There are more
things in heaven and earth ...". Both Firestein and my friend are
using physics to lend some credibility by proxy to their rhetoric.
I just can't warp my way to thinking it's physics envy.
Even in this tangent, the clinicians I've worked with don't
disregard experimentalists or vice versa. It's simply a practical
acceptance. Where large N experiments can be run, GREAT! Where
they can't, we use expert experience and heuristics. [†] In fact,
gathering "raw", private, data from patients is a common practice
and the toolkits used to translate between contexts is diverse.
(We had a meeting about just such a thing yesterday.)
So, I remain unconvinced. It's not physics envy. It's appeal to
authority.
[†] Now, if you instead argued that by "physics envy", you simply
mean "we'd like to have more data, but we don't YET", then
*maybe*. But why call that "physics envy"? That would be a
misleading moniker for having to work with less data than you'd
otherwise prefer.
On 7/7/20 11:53 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Clinicians (therapists, counselors, psychiatrists, etc) use data
that is based on private, highly sensitive personal information,
it's very difficult and often impossible to apply the methods of
experimental psychologists to that data. The clinicians do write
papers but by the experimenters standards the sample sizes are so
tiny as to merit dismissal of the results.
>
> So, imagine you are a clinician. Every case you have ever seen
of a person with paranoid delusions involves significant
grandiosity. (Why would the CIA be focusing on you, Marvin) Your
colleagues have observed the same with few exceptions. Some
clinician writes an article which mentions this. Experimental
psychologists read it and say you need to do a double blind study
to assert that. You realize that's impossible so you learn to
disregard experimentalists just as they disregard you. You both
think, "I wish I were a physicist but I hated math".
--
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