Edmund sez "I just want to call people's attention to this line. Roll this assertion around in your heads a bit. Is it self-evident? Is it well-founded? Is it even true?" SMW sez "I think Matt--if i may take the liberty of attempting to interpret his meaning--meant that a well-written pyramidal tossup *should* be first answerable by someone with specialty (major) in an area, then by someone with less experience (taken a class or two), and finally by someone with passing knowledge (maybe read a book about it). " Uh, no. I agree with Edmund here. I was a history major, but that doesn't mean I believe I should, soley due to my history major status, be the first to answer a history question. Questions are generally about a specific person or event or work, so any overarching knowledge of a subject is often worthless. One book, one class, one anecdote overheard or read, or one question you heard or wrote before is all you need to answer a question, not years of field experience. To me, science majors (there are others--Edmund was talking about economics, but science is the most noticible) tend to whine a lot. When they fail to answer a question remotely involving their field (i.e. physics and the like) they let loose cries of antique heroic proportions--"Ooooh no, a biography question on a scientist!" There's a lot of biography questions that count as history, and the study of "great men" is a part of historical investigation, but what historians actually do a lot is study theory and other historians' works. Historians are not generally asked about, though, and the ones that are part of the "canon"--Gibbon, Thucydides, Einhard, and the like are as much literature as history. Not too many of the French Annales School bigwigs tend to come up--Bloch, Braudel, Legoff, and so forth, and when was the last time you heard a good Edward Said bonus? Simply because you don't answer a question that pertains to your major doesn't mean that question, or others like it, shouldn't be asked or be relegated to "history" since they happened in the past. I have no problem with science questions about specific scientific processes or laws or body parts, and I welcome science questions about "science", but I hope the backlash against scientific biography as a part of science doesn't run amok. Mike Wehrman
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