<story><title>What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)</title><url>https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bee_rider</author><text>I also liked:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In some sense, labeling somebody a &amp;quot;crackpot&amp;quot; assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who&amp;#x27;s dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.</text></item><item><author>overthemoon</author><text>Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me--&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this writing often isn&amp;#x27;t for the layperson, it&amp;#x27;s for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it&amp;#x27;s good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>photochemsyn</author><text>For a while I held onto this archaic 1950 textbook on geology, solely because the introductory chapter included something like &amp;quot;the now thoroughly discredited crackpot theory of plate tectonics, which we will not consider here.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists (2016)</title><url>https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-as-a-hired-consultant-for-autodidact-physicists</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bee_rider</author><text>I also liked:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;In some sense, labeling somebody a &amp;quot;crackpot&amp;quot; assigns a sort of malicious wrongness to them. It is interesting to see somebody who&amp;#x27;s dealt with a significant subset of these people and discovered more actual, honest misunderstanding than we (or at least I) would have expected.</text></item><item><author>overthemoon</author><text>Wow, I love this. What a thoughtful, empathetic project. This passage really stuck out to me--&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A typical problem is that, in the absence of equations, they project literal meanings onto words such as ‘grains’ of space-time or particles ‘popping’ in and out of existence. Science writers should be more careful to point out when we are using metaphors. My clients read way too much into pictures, measuring every angle, scrutinising every colour, counting every dash. Illustrators should be more careful to point out what is relevant information and what is artistic freedom. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is that journalists are so successful at making physics seem not so complicated that many readers come away with the impression that they can easily do it themselves. How can we blame them for not knowing what it takes if we never tell them?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this writing often isn&amp;#x27;t for the layperson, it&amp;#x27;s for an audience who can tell the difference between diagram, artistic license, and metaphor, but even so, it&amp;#x27;s good to think about, especially when communicating science to the general public.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnimalMuppet</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure that &amp;quot;crackpot&amp;quot; implies malice.  To me, it implies a totally wrong starting point.  You can&amp;#x27;t build astronomy on a foundation of astrology.  Using Babylonian base-60 mathematics won&amp;#x27;t help you create a unified field theory.  The guy who showed me some random velocity that he had picked, and taken c^2 divided by that velocity, had not shown that faster-than-light travel was possible.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s like cargo-cult physics.  They (try to) do all the things, but the starting point is wrong, so it can&amp;#x27;t work.&lt;p&gt;So showing them &amp;quot;where to even begin&amp;quot; is in fact the solution... if they&amp;#x27;ll listen.</text></comment>