"Physicists at the Gate: Collaboration and Tribalism in Science"

"as physicists sink their teeth into the data, many are finding that entering another field is not simple. As Bettencourt puts it: “Physicists come at it and say, ‘What’s wrong with these people, biologists and social scientists? There’s all this data … Why don’t you just look at the data and see what it tells you about these systems?’

“People who are in these disciplines and have been educated in them, and have worked in them for a long time, feel like the barbarians are at the gate,” Bettencourt says. “Here come the physicists who don’t understand the concepts that people have been dealing with —  and start saying things nobody asked for.”... 

if the non-physicists are testy about these collaborations, they have their reasons. The patterns that a newcomer uncovers may be ones that people in the field have known about for ages. Lynette Shaw, a sociologist who also trained in physics, notes that without learning about the journey of thought and argument that a field has been through, it’s all too easy for physicists to reinvent the wheel...

“In a sense, physics is the easy science,” says archaeologist Tim Kohler, who is currently working on a border-crossing collaboration. Or as computer scientist and engineer Danny Hillis wrote years ago, “Physicists have learned the lesson that a very simple theory of what is going on is often correct. Biologists have learned the opposite lesson: Simple mathematical theories of biology are usually wrong.”... 

Recognizing the inherent messiness of fields like animal behavior and anthropology is a better foundation for reaching an understanding, and maybe even making progress together. Many scientists say it takes about a year of sincere, humble talks between collaborators — often over beers — to get to the point where work can actually begin."

https://undark.org/article/collaboration-and-tribalism-in-science/?utm_content=buffer81b5a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

FB: "People who have successfully untangled the lunchroom dynamic, and turned it into more of a conference-room dynamic, have ideas about how to make things better. Many of them come down to unpacking this issue of hierarchy. The idea that some sciences are hard or soft, pure or less pure, is tangled up in more than a century of scientific culture. But probably the most important — and difficult to grapple with — part of it is a reverence for elegance."