“Working on a mathematics problem, sometimes for a long time - it’s like a lost animal coming in from the rain. You just wanna say ‘There you are… I was worried about you.’ “. (Cormac McCarthy)
Part of what I like about Cormac McCarthy is that he was interested in everything and dived into whatever he felt like (physics, architecture, whatever), and did not shy away from giving an opinion on it. We should all aspire to be more like this (within reason, of course). Someone who is genuinely interested in the world doesn’t need to worry about coming off as ‘outside their lane’ - the requisite humility and gentleness of assertion come naturally. In any case, how much more in-your-lane does it get than going out of your way to allow those in other areas to teach and inform you? Not to say there aren’t also boring people who consider their being boring morally upright.
It reminds me that what I often find interesting about experts and specialists is much less their expertise, but how they map the domain-specific prejudices and ontology of their field to other areas, which is often exciting and thoughtful and original, if often scientifically inadequate. Trotsky ( Philosophical Notebooks ) and Hegel (the Encyclopedia Logic ) pointed out that specialists sometimes import their worldview into places where it does not belong and cannot make sense of things. Trotsky accused (and he’s not wrong) Mendeleev of being fairly conservative in a particular kind of way on ‘social change’ despite being a brilliant scientist, and correlated the two this way.
This lines up with another Hegelian insight that the right way to study a thing is given by that thing, not from without: methods come from the object. I often try to reason about non-computational phenomena (sociological, political, whatever) in terms of complexity and computability and so on. The metaphors are nice, but they are often not much more than that. Someone who insisted they were deeper would have their work cut out for them and would probably end up embarrassed. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try just for the fun of it - in a lighthearted way, with a low perception of the stakes. Metaphors and analogies are good things to have, and it is good to come to science equipped with many of them.