I agree, Laurens. Actually it's even more complicated: true experts often like to talk to other true experts and near-experts - this is what conferences are for - but often prefer to be left alone by reporters, floundering beginners, crackpots, etc.
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Replying to @johncarlosbaez
Actually, I meant to be quite precise in my earlier remark. True experts specifically dislike expressing opinions -- partly because they fear that they may unduly bias the thinking of others, but mostly because the formulation of a public opinion is as tiresome as defending it.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez
Most of the understanding of a true expert is inarticulate. It derives from a vast amount of penetrating private reflection and experimentation. The attempt to distill and express the fruit of all this effort is exhausting, and seldom brings the expert any real satisfaction.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez
It is simply more rewarding to exploit than to share one's expert insight. Gauss eloquently acknowledged this. "Procreare jucundum, sed parturire molestum," was his formulation: to conceive is a pleasure, but to give birth is painful. Communicating what one understands is hard.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez
The chore might be less onerous, were expert understanding not so different from ordinary erudition. Not only is it much less readily communicable, but its acquisition demands a devotion to private reflection that subtly isolates and alienates as it enlightens.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez
The trouble, alas, is that a sort of Heisenberg principle seems to apply to the public expression of expert insight: the more precise it is, the less illuminating it is; the more illuminating it is, the less precise it is. And imprecise statements engender tiresome controversy.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez
Newton is perhaps the signal example of a true expert whose aversion to tiresome controversy led him to refrain from attempting to express more than a tiny fraction of what he knew. But he is merely an extreme; most great masters die with most of their music still within them.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Newton is also a great example of an expert who might now be considered a crackpot for his work on alchemy and biblical chronology - the two fields that occupied him most in his later life. But standards change, so I wouldn't say someone into alchemy back then was a crackpot.
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Replying to @johncarlosbaez
It seems to me that Newton always pursued one goal: to expose the plan of the creator of all things. He sought to know the mind of God, and had the (essentially heretical) audacity to imagine that he might succeed. He escaped Galileo's fate mostly by keeping silent.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps
Yes, he would have gotten in serious trouble, possibly executed, for his unitarian beliefs back when Cambridge was repeatedly invaded by Protestants and then Catholics during the religious wars of that era!
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And he had powerful allies, too. Without them, he would never have been able to evade the decidedly anti-unitarian oaths of piety required to be Lucasian professor (let alone all the other even more prominent roles he subsequently played.) Even a super-genius needs some clout.
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