alt Hacker NewsNowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".
Replies
For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism
Seems to me it's less about gatekeepers and more whether what you bring to the table is useful to people in that field.
If somebody truly believes they have a useful model then they don't discouraged by academic gatekeeping, they go and build Time Cube.
It's highly unlikely, I think, that another Von Neumann was prevented. He was a singular genius.
However, the gatekeeping you mention definitely occurs to mere mortals who might have an interesting bend on existing ideas.
I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.
The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.