Sean Carroll

Knowledge has become bigger.

There's more things that we know now than we knew a hundred or a thousand years ago.

It is harder for any one person to be a master of all these different areas.

And therefore, specialization occurs.

And specialization means that people in any one area are not paying that much attention to other areas.

So it's not just philosophy.

I think that

Physicists don't pay a lot of attention to economics or biology or politics or art or whatever.

And likewise, chemists don't either, nor do historians, etc.

People don't pay as much attention as maybe they used to to all these other things simply because there's too much of it out there.

Again, I don't know if that's actually true, but I think it's plausible.

And I think the solution is, you know, I don't think that we can demand that every person be an expert in everything.

That's not plausible.

That's not feasible.

What we can do is try to encourage people to talk to each other, right?

To actually engage with people who are experts in different areas to get feelings for what the relevant thoughts might be.

And to take the opinions of experts outside their field seriously.

Like as someone who has been a university professor for many, many years, I'm well aware that people in Department X don't always have very high opinions of people in Department Y for just about any choices of X and Y.

And I think that's a tragedy.

I think that's just terrible.