Eric Weinstein › Comments

Cool. I'm just making the Python transition myself as it happens. - Matt Leifer

I'd be curious to know what you think Matt, as I went direct without the matlab detour. - Eric Weinstein

There is a need both for dedicated specialists and for "multidisciplinarians" acting as bridges between specialties. Unfortunately, we're better at employing and rewarding the former in science than the latter. I think that will change. - Shirley Wu

I'm always interested in how benign the explanations are for resistance to boundary crossers. Specialists often successfuly seek rent for holding territory. C. Hitchen's technical definition of a warlord is simply "Someone who controls a stretch of road". Food for thought ..... - Eric Weinstein

@Ricardo - iGoogle's quotes of the day include: "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - Thomas H. Huxley -- so, both? - Deborah Fitchett

@Deborah - Mr. Huxley either had a lot of time on his hands or there was a lot less to learn about back then... :-) - Ricardo Vidal

Or divided up "everything" into just a few very large categories. :-) - Deborah Fitchett

My heart is always with the multidisciplinarians, but it always reminds me of a talk I remember reading the transcript of by Richard Feynman. A biophysicist gives a talk to the biologists and they say "boy that biophysicist really knows a lot about physics." The same biophysicists gives a talk to the physicists and they say "boy that biophysicist sure knows a lot about biology." Now what you take away from Feynman's story, _that_ is a different question! - Dave Bacon

Multidiscipline work creates new connections, which increases complexity of management. Specialization is simpler in this regard, which may be why it's so popular. - Geoff Wozniak from iPod

Ever since I started studying, people have been saying that multidisciplinarity is the big thing to come. By now, it has been the big thing to come for almost 20 years. The feedback I get from funding agencies and search committees is that they don't know what I am, lol :-) - Björn Brembs

Industry (corporations) get very hung up on demonstrable productivity, as does academia. Measuring the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary liaison, a good communicator, cross-pollinator, etc, requires metrics that just don't exist... as far as I know. - Naomi Most

It was the initial keynote plea of #singularityu a week ago today that got my gears turning about this. Vital multidisciplinary forces are needed to Save the World (literally). The world is lacking access to the talent in terms of its cultivation in academia and its support in industry. The thrust of Singularity University seems to be to incite students to for-profit entrepreneurial... more... - Naomi Most

So is it just our obsession with "objective" measurement that puts us in this bind? Or is it the timeframes we measure over? The advantage of commercial/entrepreneurial approaches is that because you're pricing in risk/reward and timeframes you can justify the longer term effort as long as the resources are available (e.g. Google can devote teams of people to two year projects on... more... - Cameron Neylon

@ Cameron: As for grants, I think the way to go is http://fundscience.org/ or similar - exposing proposals in public to comments from multiple perspectives (or disciplines) - in combination with stable baseline grants according to transparent (and rather discipline-independent) eligibility criteria. See also http://friendfeed.com/search... . - Daniel Mietchen

Cameron - I don't think it's the measures so much as it is straightforward academic politics. As a concrete example: lots of University physics departments are very keen for quantum computing researchers to be hired... but only if it's into the CS department. Similarly, lots of CS depts are very keen for quantum computing researchers to be hired... but only into the physics department.... more... - Michael Nielsen

I'm not so sure that its pure politics as inability to determine the risks. If I stick with the pricing analogy neither CS nor physics departments can reliably price the risk of making a tenure track appointment in quantum computing (or bioinformatics, or biological modelling, or....) because they have no basis to make the judgement on. I guess I'm wondering whether hiring decisions are... more... - Cameron Neylon

How can we have a knowledge economy without multidisciplinarity? - Ant Beck

Cameron: "I agree that this translates into politics but I guess I'm arguing that even a well meaning and apolitical committee would probably come to the same misguided decision". Very interesting argument. I've never really looked beyond the political argument before - in actual cases that I'm familiar with, it was enough of a factor that I didn't think beyond it - but your argument suggests the problem is quite a bit worse :-( - Michael Nielsen

That was precisely my fear...I can see myself sitting on one of those committees with the best will in the world and coming to the same decision. But the only obvious option is to bring in external committee members to champion specific areas which means you are deliberately biasing your decision (which may not be a bad thing but means you're not necessarily picking out the best balance of risk vs potential) - Cameron Neylon

In the spirit of crazy ideas meant purely as stimulus (i.e., I'm not serious, although I think there's something worth thinking about here): I recall Phil Agre pointing out that the best way to identify emerging areas is to ask the absolute elite undergrad students - the type who sail through Harvard / Caltech / etc with 4+ GPAs, writing sole author papers etc - what they're interested... more... - Michael Nielsen

Interesting idea. And arguably we could test our good our teaching of students is by how good they are getting these kind of things right. - Cameron Neylon

I think it is best if academics are first studying a "pure" subject in depth. Later, after they reach some degree in that subject, they can move into a multidisciplinary field and learn what they need about the other fields. I have not a very good experience with people who studied one of these new mixed subjects, from the start. - Claus Metzner