Intermediate sci knowledge associated with overconfidence and negative attitudes
As a scientist, I&#x27;ve seen lots of people who are overconfident in both themselves and overconfident in science. IMO, a good PhD science program helps students master a discipline, but also to recognize the limits of the discipline.<p>For example, 23andMe thought they would revolutionize drug development with a huge genetics dataset. In practice, genetic information <i>alone</i> is not sufficient to treat the majority of diseases that affect individuals and society. There is too much environmental variation affecting human biology for purely genetic approaches.<p>Understanding the real limits of knowledge is vital to pushing knowledge forward where we can. As a biologist, one of the things I most appreciate about Sabine Hossenfelder (a physicist) is that she highlights the limits of knowledge in her (and adjacent) fields. She gets a lot of push back (and is sometimes wrong), but having the discussion is vital to science.<p>Acknowledging the limits of science is not a negative attitude about science, but a positive one. A clear idea of the current limits of science (both theoretically and practically) is instrumental to pushing through them. For example, the scholarly papers highlighting the replication crisis (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Replication_crisis" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Replication_crisis</a>) are actually very useful to maintaining the health of science as a human endeavor, not a critique of science. Scientists need a clear understanding of the scientific foundations that they are building on.