In some contexts, yes; in others—like where they claim it’s extremely important for you to believe, and took them years to get there—it’s quite a high rate of return to convey that information to you in an hour, and eminently reasonable to do so.
Also, I strongly suspect that most people in research positions haven’t truly made their knowledge part of themselves, and so they couldn’t ground it in its ultimate purpose (i.e. show how it relates to the rest of the world and show relevance to a layperson) even if they were given infinite time.
(Yes, I know I link that article a lot, because it’s good.)
If I were wrong, you wouldn’t see people so often fumbling through their explanation of how to use calculus and statistics properly in their fields, and you’d see researchers more often breaking down their problem into a purely mathematical one and hand it off to the experts at that. I remember reading an article recently that showed how ecologists have just now gotten around to using the method of adjacency matrix eigenvectors (i.e. PageRank) to identify crucial species in an ecosystem.
In some contexts, yes; in others—like where they claim it’s extremely important for you to believe, and took them years to get there—it’s quite a high rate of return to convey that information to you in an hour, and eminently reasonable to do so.
Also, I strongly suspect that most people in research positions haven’t truly made their knowledge part of themselves, and so they couldn’t ground it in its ultimate purpose (i.e. show how it relates to the rest of the world and show relevance to a layperson) even if they were given infinite time.
(Yes, I know I link that article a lot, because it’s good.)
If I were wrong, you wouldn’t see people so often fumbling through their explanation of how to use calculus and statistics properly in their fields, and you’d see researchers more often breaking down their problem into a purely mathematical one and hand it off to the experts at that. I remember reading an article recently that showed how ecologists have just now gotten around to using the method of adjacency matrix eigenvectors (i.e. PageRank) to identify crucial species in an ecosystem.