musing

Musings #114516 ----- It occurs to me^^[[1]]^^, that often, what an outsider^^[[2]]^^ gets wrong when dabbling in another field isn’t just the complex cutting edge stuff, or the intermediate complexity stuff, but the absolute basics. It’s not that the basics are necessarily simple^^[[3]]^^, it’s just that everyone^^[[4]]^^ in the field knows them^^[[5]]^^, having absorbed them from colleagues, supervisors and mentors in the first months and years of acquaintance^^[[6]]^^ with the subject, and thus never bothers to write them down or talk about them^^[[7]]^^ except indirectly. They’re the kinds of things that are programmed into all their legacy code^^[[8]]^^ and tools already^^[[9]]^^.

1. Reflecting on the gulf in quality between my critique of the DOE Critical Review and that of the (link: "actual professionals")[(goto-url: 'https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/doe-factcheck/index.html')]. Not to mention (link: "the promised monster")[(goto-url: "https://bsky.app/profile/andrewdessler.com/post/3lxgehu7egk2t")] by Dessler and colleagues. (link: "AMS has a nice overview")[(goto-url: "https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-ams/ams-statements/statements-of-the-ams-in-force/the-practice-and-assessment-of-science-five-foundational-flaws-in-the-department-of-energys-2025-climate-report/")] of… something

2. A relative term. As a physicist by training, I was an outsider when it came to climate science, but climate science is such a massive thing that it’s easy to be both insider and outsider at the same time. I do lots of oceanography-adjacent work[[*|asterisk1]], but oceanographers have a whole way of doing and talking about things which I find frankly baffling. The areas in which I, personally, am not an outsider are vanishingly small. Sadly, these are the areas that I usually find most interesting, like metascience^^[[0|Musings #112345]]^^, linguistics^^[[6]]^^, or (link: "attribution")[(goto-url: 'https://diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/category/attribution/')].

3. As anyone who has been asked to prove them as a simple warmup question in a PhD viva might attest[[**|asterisk2]].

4. (link: "Almost")[(goto-url: "https://xkcd.com/1053/")] everyone.

5. I think of them as basement level knowledge. There’s a lot of important stuff down there and, structurally, its supporting everything above it. At the same time, it needs occasional checks to make sure everything is still working as expected and – figuratively speaking – the boiler hasn’t leaked all over the unpacked boxes from the previous move.

6. Also, I suppose, one doesn’t have quite so many preconceptions at that point and the brain has a greater elasticity[[***|asterisk3]].

7. Indeed, words can completely change meaning from one subdiscipline to the next and in one discipline over time.

8. Which is why software quality is so important.

9. It’s the kind of stuff you can’t track down by reading the literature, because it can only be found at the end of an endless chain of citations which peters out in some obscure conference proceeding written in Russian and only available as a pdf scan of a low quality photocopy. On the other hand, you can ask almost anyone. If you put yourself in a situation where you can’t ask anyone, then you’re probably toast.

*For some reason sea-surface temperature is more often lumped with the atmosphere than the ocean. But not always, so I occasionally find myself among oceanographers who then assume I know what an isopycnal is.

**The day before my viva, I had to pick someone up from the airport. Whilst waiting in the lounge, I thought I would run through some simple theory derivations and found my mind had gone completely blank.

***apropos of which, I was looking up some modern slang recently and realised – thanks to google’s indelible memory – that I had searched for that exact word before. So, first, my memory isn’t what it was, though when I reread the meaning, I got the familiar feeling of knowing I knew it and being reminded rather than it being totally new information. Second, I don’t really have occasion to use the word skibidi and would sound utterly ridiculous if I did. I would sound ridiculous to myself, which is the initial bar to usage, but I would also sound absolutely ridiculous to anyone unfortunate enough to hear me and I don’t want to inflict that on anyone. Third, I’m pretty sure when I was young, I would hear a word used once and feel I had a pretty good idea of its meaning as well as lodging it deep in my long-term memory banks. The instant understanding was probably a lack of metacognitive whatsit (something I am overly burdened with now to the point that I look up words I know just to make sure) but that same mechanism is what gives slang (and all language, I suppose) its wonderful fluidity. And fourth, language sure can change fast. It’s kind of a miracle it doesn’t change completely every generation let alone remain more or less comprehensible over centuries. This time, I found out what skibidi meant by watching a YouTube video in which someone considerably younger than me asked a linguist who was a bit older what it meant. Both of them carried on like it was something to be studied rather than used in everyday conversation. In the background was a head in a toilet saying “skibidi”. There was a TikTok video promising to use the word in a sentence, but TikTok scares me.