That’s more or less how I felt about Penrose’s The Road to Reality.
The great thing about talking with someone in person (or at least, in real-time one-to-one conversations) is that you can first assess how large the inferential distance is, e.g. “What are you working on?” “Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.” “Do you know what subatomic particles are?” “No.” “Do you know what an atom is?” “Yes.”
Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.”
You just have to hope they won’t Wheatley they way around your questions and try to feign understanding things they don’t, treating knowledge like a status game. That can really put a damper on meaningful communication.
I don’t think that ever happened to me—at worst, they incorrectly believed that the understanding they had got from popularizations was accurate. But pretty much everybody at some point admits “I wish I could understand everything of that, but that sounds cool”, except people who actually understand (as evidenced by the fact that they ask questions too relevant for them to be just parroting stuff to hide ignorance).
(I guess the kind of people who treat everything like a status game would consider knowledge about sciency topics to be nerdy and therefore uncool.)
One way to treat knowledge like a status game is to be a “science fan.” This is a game you play with other “science fans,” and you win by knowing more “mind-blowing facts” about science than other people. It is popular on Quora.
That’s more or less how I felt about Penrose’s The Road to Reality.
The great thing about talking with someone in person (or at least, in real-time one-to-one conversations) is that you can first assess how large the inferential distance is, e.g. “What are you working on?” “Cosmic rays. Do you know what cosmic rays are?” “No.” “Do you know what subatomic particles are?” “No.” “Do you know what an atom is?” “Yes.”
You just have to hope they won’t Wheatley they way around your questions and try to feign understanding things they don’t, treating knowledge like a status game. That can really put a damper on meaningful communication.
I don’t think that ever happened to me—at worst, they incorrectly believed that the understanding they had got from popularizations was accurate. But pretty much everybody at some point admits “I wish I could understand everything of that, but that sounds cool”, except people who actually understand (as evidenced by the fact that they ask questions too relevant for them to be just parroting stuff to hide ignorance).
(I guess the kind of people who treat everything like a status game would consider knowledge about sciency topics to be nerdy and therefore uncool.)
One way to treat knowledge like a status game is to be a “science fan.” This is a game you play with other “science fans,” and you win by knowing more “mind-blowing facts” about science than other people. It is popular on Quora.