"reads a lot of wikipedia" is probably rightly a good proxy for "smart curious generalist" but being now having to actually learn a scientific discipline enough to follow current research really makes me see the inadequacies of it

there's an effect I can't quite articulate where I think wiki makes everything seem way more known than it actually is? it heavily favors a style like, coherent consensus narrative followed by famed dichotomous controversies

when hackernews webdevs lecture on physics and chemistry, or people make weird laments about how unlike the 19th/20th century there "so little new science to do" I think this is part of that, wiki really doesn't communicate how contingent and sketchy all this is

it's like, school teaches dangerously oversimplified or useless narratives (mendelian inheritance, totalizing darwinism) and wiki teaches more complex and modern narratives (epigenetics, the hermetic genome/metabolome/proteome/transcriptome system) but

whenever I look at my bio feedly I feel like most of the papers are some variant on "I think I figured out some small facet of this thing we barely understand" or "hey guys guess what I found a new thing we don't understand"