More on the Nobel Disease

Yes, it is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'd like to be more specific. As most people who read blogs know by now, the D-K effect is, essentially, that people with low competence or knowledge in a particular area tend to overrate their capability. People with high competence are generally more accurate, or even underrate their capability to some extent. Another way of putting it is that you don't know what you don't know, unless you know enough that you do know.

 

Nobel prize winners, and other highly accomplished people in a specific field, are told all the time that they're really smart, but they often don't know enough about areas outside their field of expertise to know what they don't know. Okay, that's obvious, but what we typically see is chemists or physicists making warped assertions about biology --  e.g. Linus Pauling and vitamin C, or William Shockley and James Watson and "scientific" racism, or Karry Mullis claiming that HIV is not the cause of AIDS -- or psychology -- e.g. Brian Josephson endorsing mental telepathy and the claim that transcendental meditation can recover suppressed traumatic memories. (The latter may not strike you as preposterous but the current view is that the idea of suppressed memories is a dangerous falsehood.) Richard Dawkins is not a Nobel winner but same idea -- he's a biologist who ventured ineptly into psychology and sociology.

 

There are a few ways of categorizing human knowledge, but the scientific revolution has created a fairly rigorous structure. I don't want to say hierarchical exactly, because the that could imply that some categories of knowledge are superior to others. Think of it more like the structure of a house. It has vertical layers, which rest one upon the other, but they are all equally necessary: Foundation, first story, second story, attic, roof. You have to build them from the ground up, but if you stop before you're finished, the entire structure is unsound and largely useless. 

 

There is another structure for categorizing what Jurgen Habermas calls "criticizeable validity claims," which is also relevant here though orthogonal to the first. The necessary requirements for a habitable and durable house are part of what he calls the "first world," the world of intersubjective reality, that which is testably true, the domain largely of the sciences. The second is the domain of morality, what is right. In this context, perhaps, who should have claim to own, or at least live in, quality housing? (I would say everybody but obviously most of society does not agree with me.) Is it right to build a house on this particular spot? (E.g. zoning regulations.) The third is aesthetics. What makes a house beautiful? 

 Next time, I'll take up the first categorization.