``...That is utter nonsense. Nor all intellectual work has to be about making you an expert in an area, able to carry on with the peoplea t the frontiers of thefield. That is impossible given the amount of knowledge and the range of ideas that exists today. It wasn't even raesonable in Leibniz's time--he aws the last person who was an expert in everything. Most of what PIs do is mke accessible to nonexperts ideas that the expertsa re talking about--and nonexperts includes experts in other fields. Thus, I am expert in philosophy and law, but in physics and biology I am not and never will be, and so I read the likes of Michio Kaku and Stephen Jay Gould....'' jks
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I believe I qualified the thought by saying the best work in a field is done when there is a decreasing separation between its socially constructed roles. That is quite a different thought than making the janitor stand in for the brain surgeon which is what I think you seem to imply.
For instance, what I was implying was that the strict hierarchical division of labor say, between a principle investigator (PI), a post-doc, a technician, and a student often interferes with rather than facilitates the process of doing science. It isn't always question of who knows the most. In some kind of odd way, the ability to grasp what is going on and be able to articulate it in any particular instant arises almost arbitrarily within this rigid division. However, once it does arise, it is automatically re-positioned and implicitly re-evaluated according to the pre-assigned roles of those involved; so that what was a key insight, becomes a minor contribution if it was originally proposed by say the student rather than the PI. On the other hand, a complete triviality issued from the PI, magically becomes a core insight and everybody nods.
In any event, I am not all that convinced that ideas or facts of nature are pre-arranged by or naturally occur in a hierarchy of conceptual difficulty. To maintain that is not the same as saying, some people are better or worse at doing this or that. To me those are different and almost unrelated problems.
We probably also disagree on the idea that there is such a force as progress operating in many realms of human activity--and there is automatically a coupling or ordering between a mere temporal sequence, an accumulation of results, a hierarchy of difficulties, and advancements of the intellect. Just to toss in a possible straw dog, no I don't want to do without indoor plumbing or antibiotics.
On the role of public intellectuals. I am sure you must have noticed that in some area of knowledge where you do feel in command, that the so-called public experts in that field are often quite bad at illucidating its armature, and fail to open its subtleties. In fact it seems to me such public minded experts often obscure the concepts involved with poor choices of metaphors, presuming in advance that nobody but the knowledgeable could possibly grasp the idea or fact of nature in its unadorned state. I think this is a problem that is independent of the one that Posner was criticizing---lack of competition and peer review.
On the other hand as you noted, somebody like Gould or sometimes Feynaman for example is (was) very good at presenting the basic idea without its adornment, and actually helped erase the distance. But I consider people like Gould, Feynaman (sometimes) and say Chomsky, very rare. I even think, part of the reason this particular collection of public experts are considered `controversial' where as their lessers are celebrated, is precisely because the lesser luminaries help maintain barriers rather than break them down. And, particularly these days, these lesser cadres appear to act as propaganda agents who actually mystify what is quite understandable and obvious.
In any event, I don't know how to explain this any other way than by a personal example. I was always fascinated with the strangeness of what was once called `modern' physics, which meant at the time relativity. The quantum world made no sense either, but I'll put that off for later. However, for all the reading I did in even top rated popularized science, I could not understand what they were talking about.
The sun finally started to dawned the day I went out and bought some introductory textbooks and I sat down at a drafting machine and mechanically drew a series of translations of coordinate frames from a formula I looked up and then programmed into my calculator (70s when calculators were the rage). In other words, I had to perform or model a (Galilean) relativistic transformation in order to understand it. Of course I had seen these kind of diagrams before. But there is a vast difference between merely looking at them, and constructing them. Then I programmed a time contraction formula (elementary version) that I also looked up. I made my table of numbers and then graphed the line as a curve which looked like the contour line of a trumpet mouth. What was critical for me at this point was noticing that if I was on the curve and measured out equally partitioned arc lengths and projected these to one rectilinear axis, the projected divisions became shorter and shorter, while on the other they became longer and longer---these were a model of the relativistic effects, a model of relativistic transforms.
So, this is an example of what I mean by decreasing the separation or at least trying to erase as much difference as possible. What it might come down to is that I want to democratize the systems of knowledge that I think are socially maintain as hierarchies, because I believe these have been turned into hierarchies that both mirror and enforce the class system of the political economy we live under.
BTW, I had to look up Michiu Kaku---10d hyperspace, and grand unified theories (GUTs) that demand we postulate the existance of what we can never see or know, in order to explain what we can see and know?
Come on Justin. Do you believe this kind of thing? I mean it's fun, but fun has its limitations.
Chuck Grimes