Discover more from Overcoming Bias
Imagine that you are expert in field A, and a subject in field B comes up at party. You know that there may be others at the party who are expert in field B. How reluctant does this make you to openly speculate about this topic? Do you clam up and only cautiously express safe opinions, or do you toss out the thoughts that pop into your head as if you knew as much about the subject as anyone?
If you are like most people, the relative status of fields A and B will likely influence your choice. If the other field has higher status than yours, you are more likely to be cautious, while if the other field has lower status than yours, you are more likely to speculate freely. In both cases your subconscious will have made good guesses about the likely status consequences to you if an expert in B were to speak up and challenge your speculations. At some level you would know that others at the party are likely to back whomever has the higher status, even if the subject is within the other person’s area of expertise.
But while you are likely to be relatively safe from status losses, you should know that you are not safe from being wrong. When people from different fields argue about something within one of their areas of expertise, that expert is usually right, even when the other field has higher status. Yes people from your field may on average be smarter and harder-working, and your field may have contributed more to human progress. Even so, people who’ve studied more about the details of something usually know more about it.
Beware Status Arrogance
Instead of tossing out speculations, wouldn't the more useful practice be to ask lots of questions? Sure, people often prefer being ignorant to showing it, but isn't that what we should be striving to overcome?
> ...people who’ve studied more about the details of something usually know more about it.
I would add the constraint that the expert in the other field probably knows more about their topic than you if they're confident/clear enough to offer testable predictions (at least conceptually testable, I understand it's often impractical or unethical to actually run the experiments). I've met too many so called "experts" who will twist their claims to the point of unfalsifiability.
This generalizes to "Believe that experts know more about their field than you unless you have excellent reason(s) to believe part of their reasoning is broken."