Units of a Discipline
College disciplines overlap a lot. Imagine you want to answer the question "If there's a cold war with China will it would lead to nuclear war?" We would find papers written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists all addressing this same question. While there might be some hints of a turf war on the internet of who has the most correct framework for answering it. The fact that there is an open debate on which social science is best applied for this question is strong evidence that there's no consensus of who owns this space.
Questions on string theory clearly belong to physics, but it's less clear whether Fermi's paradox would better belong in the college of philosophy, physics or economics.
If disciplines don't have definitive boundaries on which questions they can answer, how do we know if someone's an economist? By simply looking at which memes or paradigms that guide their intuitions. Mapping out these memes would look like a principle components analysis if we ran a high level natural language process on academic papers.
Again these memes will only ever have a soft definition, but I will loosely define them as:
- an idea that is introduced in an entry level course
- has multiple instantiations as you go to advanced courses
- acknowledged as related to the field if introduced elsewhere (e.g. a CS professor introducing GANs and giving context that game theory paradigms come from economics)
Here's my stab at a couple core memes from different fields
Economics/Game Theory
- solve for equilibrium
- Agents choose on the margin
Statistics
- measure your error
Bayesian Statistics
- everything's a distribution
Computer Science
- never rewrite the same three lines of code
- make a new condition (the "if" statement)
- optimize new variables
- "is a" or "has a"
Entrepreneurship
- moat? value prop?
One's that I'm less confident on
Math
- what's the meta pattern
Physics
- Universe is lawful
Philosophy
- assumptions?
Molecular Biology
- Form = Function
Evolutionary Biology
- selfish gene
So unconfident that I'm basically making them up
Engineering
- iterate cuz math ain't enough
Arts/Film/Literature
- capture attention
Finance/Accounting
- no leaks
Design
- meet intuitions
History
- Selection Bias
Political Science
- who are the keys
Chemistry
- What are the bonds
Disciplines that I couldn't even generate fake memes for
Sociology, English, Psychology, Medical School