What breed of curious scientist are you?

What attracts the curious budding scientist to a social Discussion forum?

Feynman is quoted as saying that if you cannot explain something (simply) you don't understand it. Ergo even the deepest ideas are accessible to those who dare to tread. But Goldstein (of the Boson presumably!) a colleague of him recalls:

"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him:

Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”

Categorising is part of the scientific method and in the following I will use it to try to delineate our various approaches (abilities) to gathering scientific knowledge.

Some of us further down the food chain have to consume on good faith the work of others. We all fail at some level to accommodate the absorption of new scientific knowledge into our worldview. It does beg one to ask for our motivations when applied to trying to comprehend explanations of fundamental (basic) physics.

What category of "quaternary" level scientist are you?

If as a first point of assertion I define the upper three categories of scientists as:

1. Primary- you are producing the original work yourself and jousting with peers in hallowed university halls.
2. Secondary- you are a reader of peer reviewed articles extracting what you can to feed and develop a line of reasoning that you have been following and are pretty near to joining the paper chase.
3. Tertiary- you are a reader of reviews of peer-reviewed articles that do a pretty good job (you think) of encapsulating the nature of the source research article. Perhaps you enjoy comparing their review to how you perceive the paper (in its less than appealing targeted to a difference audience form). Perhaps you resist assimilation, perhaps you accommodate and adjust your interpretation of a concept or two.

What then of the quaternary type that inhabit these forums in their many forms.
Some better names and reclassifications may be in order:

1. "defenders of the faith", a believer in the authority of the above peer-peer-peer reviewed process, whose duty it is to propound the articles of present understanding; perhaps overly self-assured in performing "science's" work;
2. "the hopeful sceptic", a respecter of the authorities but who finds it intriguing that recent empirical leaps are revealing the limitations of sciences' " internal representations"; perhaps also a little sceptical of all the faux circumspection that is being practiced;
3. "a logical negativist", one who finds it less interesting to measure up their ideas to any observational (or cutting edge interpretation of, at least ) reality;
4. "a social deconstructivist", a realiser that science' scope has gotten too big for hugely biased (compromised) humans to piece together a satisfactory explanatory story. That "observation" is no longer merely through some physical apparatus but is processed and parsed through potentially partial, interpretative, contingent modelling (!), the cultivators of which are neither (the best) theorisers or experimentalists. That no man, as Milton Freidmann argues, really even noone knows now how to put together a pencil.

If you haven't connected with these definitions, ask yourself this "Would you find a debate on some scientific explanation with someone of orthodox faith less rewarding than with Edward Witten?

Indeed if you can dare to accommodate that which initially jars, you might accept that the whole education system from middle school, through high school and on to college is the slow revealing of fuller explanations of reality. That tiering of revelation keeps going beyond the school years. We all take on knowledge, process it, parse it and at different speeds with some barely getting off the starting line.

We are compromised humans beings which are capable of being more self-aware and reflective of our present limitations.

Related, I guess as these discussion forums could be taken as allegories for how science interaction might work I think I am becoming more of a "follower" of "social constructivism"' according to which individuals are more inclined to dupe themselves with their entrenched priors "assimilating" not "accommodating" new views.

According to Piaget's constructivism,individuals assimilate new information, splice it into their existing framework unchanged, when those new experiences are aligned with their internal representations of the world. That's ok but this can be because of a failure to change a faulty understanding by (choosing to) misunderstand input from others. More problematic is when that individuals' new data contradicts their internal representations, rather than be discombobulated by it, they change those (experiential) perceptions just to fit their internal representations.

Accommodation should be our aim, being rather the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit those new experiences. This failure to comprehend leads to new learning: that moment of appreciation that we held a false expectation that the world operates in a certain way and that way is actually violated.