zlance

zlance t1_j19kjd8 wrote

It's like my dad, an expert mathematician and software engineer has goofy ideas about medical field.

Domain expertise is absolutely necessary in reasoning on a topic with a degree of authority. It's great that one can learn of logic and calculative tools by being in expert in one field, but while thoes skills translate to a large degree, they don't protect one from making an error in setting up the model to reason about.

EG. I read a paper by a PhD in Business that reasoned that vaccines are causing autism. It found that if you take autism and speech disorders and lump them together as one, there is a positive correlation between the two values over some time. Of course it was torn down by subject matter experts who said that you can't reason that the two disorders are in the same class. But hey, this person probably does know math well, and probably business too.

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