Yes, that's a failing of science. Reading the early volumes of Nature from the 19th century shows how much more of an open dialogue it was back then: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes

Though education was much more limited, so take "open" with a grain of salt.

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fao_ 6 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the difficulty is we know vastly more, and have experimented with vastly more since the 19th century, that the majority of university learning these days, and the inherent challenge within that learning, is "how do we condense 200+ years of investigation, experimentation, and knowledge building into only a handful of years of learning?"

For a lot of sciences, we are very lucky that it is still possible. But the reason why scientists do not allow such an open dialogue with laypeople is because the majority of answers are going to boil down to either "that question doesn't make any sense, and i would have to spend the entire rest of the session teaching you why" or "we already did these experiments a bunch of times in the last hundred years, and found out the result, but the result is tricky because of so and so mitigating factors, and for me to explain these results and how to even interpret them in the first place (e.g. explaining how it was measured, explaining the theory behind why we chose that method to measure it, explaining what the numbers we get mean, etc.) would take the entire rest of the session"

And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge", and at some point you hit a point where you're stuck between "spending 4 hours drafting a response to someone who has not bothered to put in the time to learn physics, and wouldn't listen to you anyway because they think they know it all", and "getting actual work done in your field". The scientists I know do take time out of their day to answer actual questions from inquisitive folk, but the difficulty is that thanks to the addition of ChatGPT, those questions are getting more and more cramped out by the crackpots armed with a hallucinating dictionary.

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lkm0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Certainly, I'm also aware of how difficult it is to implement open dialogue in practice. Perhaps my hope is that general education could help develop that sort of transversal insight that talented scientists use to naturally understand topics which they are not familiar with, by working with analogies and fundamental principles. I know that knowledge of the nitty gritty generally requires years of actually struggling with the thing, and this cannot be asked of any layman. Still, for example, I'm thinking of times when you deal with a topic that is nominally in the same field as yours, but that is so foreign that the only knowledge relevant to it is something barely above undergraduate, say Newton's laws or thermodynamics. Many scientists have managed to either take some lessons from other fields and bring them into theirs, or contribute despite their relative lack of education in that subfield.

I'd like to believe there is a sort of education that allows people not to understand details, but at least to be able to get the rough shape of the topic at hand and shape their ideas in a way that benefits the other party. Perhaps this is just a matter of language and shouldn't need so much more education than the basics and curiosity. Or perhaps it's a pipe dream.

As for the crackpots, well, I know some people spend time and energy with them, but it is hard to believe their true objective is learning or contributing. It is, fortunately, very obvious when you meet one in the wild.

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SiempreViernes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge"

I think at this point most of these people talk to chatbots instead, anecdotally the crank flow seems to have lessened.

	▲	SauntSolaire an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, until they send over an AI hallucinated manifesto which is 100x longer than the email would have been.