How do geologists think?
From Dinwar, in the comments:
As for what it means to think like a geologist….it’s complicated. There definitely is a particular way of thinking unique to geologists. I’m convinced that it’s something you’re either born with or not; training just finishes what you started. Engineers and geologists think VERY differently, in nearly incompatible ways, which is fun because we work together all the time.
The main thing is, geologists think in terms of the context of deep time. We view everything from the perspective of millions of years, minimum. When a geologist looks at a stream they see the depositional zones, the erosional zones, the flood plane–and they are thinking both how the local geology affected it and how the stream will look in five million years. (As an aside, you get really strange looks when you discuss this with your eight-year-old son at a park.) And I do mean EVERYTHING. I remember drinking some loose-leaf tea once, adding the tea to the cup then the water, and realizing as the leaves settled that the high surface-area-to-volume ratio combined with cell damage from desiccation made them get water-logged very quickly, allowing for certain flood deposits to form. I’d always been curious about that.
Another thing to remember is that geologists by definition are polymaths. You can’t be a third-rate geologist unless you have a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields. Geology is what you get when those fields overlap. I learned as much about brachiopod anatomy from a structural geologist as I did from any paleontologist, and my minerology class started with "Here’s the nuclear physics of stellar evolution." We’re expected to know drilling and surveying and cartography and…well, pretty much anything that could possibly affect dirt.
Ultimately, since we are dealing with historical sciences, we are detectives. We examine clues, make hypotheses, and look for evidence to support or refute them (for a fantastic discussion of this find the paper "Strong Inference"–that’s held as an ideal for geologic thinking). Like any scientist we look for subtle things, things that have a bearing on our particular field of study. I’m convinced, for example, that the soil in one area I work in has two distinct layers: a loose, fluffy depositional layer of clay, and a more firm layer of clay derived from the limestone bedrock dissolving. This is due to subtle variations in firmness, moisture content, color, whether or not limestone pieces are in the material, etc.–stuff that most people don’t notice. It’s no special ability on my part–my mother notices things about the weave of cloth that are invisible to me, because she makes the stuff. It’s all training. But the desire to look for it? That’s personality.
Field geologists are even worse–we do all that, only in conditions that would make any sane person run screaming. We’re expected to be athletes, MacGyver, scientists, managers, and Les Stroud all rolled into one. On bad days we add combat medic to the list. Hiking on a broken leg isn’t considered an unreasonable expectation (bear in mind I’m talking about the geologists–my safety manager would be VERY cranky to hear about someone doing that!). People who do this sort of thing routinely view the world in slightly different ways from most ordinary people. Most geologists go through a course called Field Camp, which is an introduction to field work. Walk into any geology department that has this and you can tell who’s gone through the class and who hasn’t.
Comments
Can we replace the leadership of the CDC and FDA with geologists?
What are their GRE scores?
Whoever adds these jabs to nearly every one of Tyler’s posts needs to just let it go. Accept the fact that you and Tyler disagree about what "smart" means.
I find talking about GRE scores alone boring. Now combining GREs, UFOs, and Britney is comedy gold, like smashing a watermelon.
Imagine a world in which people weren't forced to read blogs related to things they didn't care about...
I thought a past comment about Britney taking her GREs in a UFO was funny. Imagine a world in which people couldn't find things related to hilarious mental images.
When it comes to smashing watermelons, whether you prefer Letterman or Gallagher is not for me to decide.
As a geologist, the way I feel about anything relating to the study of the human body is similar to how you feel about geology. Good to know generally how the body works to maintain living but outside of that I’m not that interested. I loved your blog post! It was fun to read your thoughts on geology.
I will note that unless it’s for work, I typically try not to think about future depositional environments (but now I can’t stop thinking about how tea leaves do fall in a cup….). I will agree that geologists are very multi faceted and that many have different interests and talents. John Hickenlooper was a geologist, turned beer maker, turned mayor then governor then senator. I know a lot of geologists that have started side gigs in areas completely outside of geology. I also consider myself to have a polymath mindset (one day I’ll be reading about Norse mythology, the next I might be reading about poker even though I don’t play). I feel the context of everything I learn about helps me with my day to day job as a geologist. Also yes, I have had to Macguyver tools in the field in a pinch :)
In engineering i see parallels to chemical engineering: they need to know a little bit of a lot of other areas to make stuff work.
Sort of a generalist engineer.
The claim here is much stronger:
"You can’t be a third-rate geologist unless you have a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields."
And this only makes you third-rate.
I don't buy the "deep understanding" of those seven "and a host of other fields."
A geologist who posted on Brad DeLong's blog 15 years ago when the price of oil was increasing went back to school to get a masters degree in economics and said not one of his geologist colleagues understood Econ 101: supply and demand.
I had the same experience with my first cousin once removed who was a geologist for one of the oil majors. I explained it him that the price meant that people would invest more and boost supply, putting downward pressure on prices. He didn't believe me.
That being said, economics was not on his list of fields to know.
@Possibly If you think "cartels" negate John Hall's point about oil, then you are in a similar category of ignorance to the geologist cousin.
OPEC has a certain amount of influence, but it is far from being able to fully prevent increases in supply in response to price increases--both because they don't control all oil production, and because they have limited control over their own members (the incentives of individual member states are to sell more oil even if the group benefits more from cutting production--a classic tragedy of the commons).
Here is one paper estimating the influence of OPEC as raising the price of oil only 6%:
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2467~c8f35853cc.en.pdf
Rockefeller, the Nobels, the Texas Rail Road Commission - the history of the oil industry is full of people attempting to control prices to their benefit. No question that the oil industry has a real problem with a boom and bust cycle addiction.
But more than that, the swing producer decides where they want the price to be in broad strokes, punishing or rewarding as they see fit. No one remains a swing producer forever, but the Saudis have proven to be masters at the game.
The Saudis don't just raise prices by restricting production, they lower them by increasing production too. As the Soviets found out before their empire, propped up by oil, imploded in the late 80s. It is more than imaginable that the greatest nightmare of the Saudis is a high price of oil leading to an active search for alternatives, as occurred in the 1970s.
It is not just about raising prices, it is about ensuring that oil remains a critical component of our current society.
He was aware of the history of cartels involving oil.
They don't teach about cartels in economics, do they? Everyone in the oil industry is familiar with OPEC.
It would seem to me that the compensation is lacking versus the skills/training/effort required; I know top geologists can make good money but is it a field you'd advise a kid who wants to make great money to go into?
Petroleum geologists are certainly in the top 10% of salaried workers.
Wow, I never realized that geologists are, without a doubt, the world's coolest people, with a possible exception for archaeologists who wear nifty hats.
I can't wait for Tyler Cowen to post about how he doesn't find accounting very interesting (though he's read over thirty books on Mesopotamian accounting methods)
It's a good comment but in some ways I liked even better Dinwar's comment about observing floating scum on an industrial pond and as it broke up, understanding the processes that caused Pangaea to break up.
And in telling that story he conveyed some of that understanding to us readers: absent wind blowing the scum together, then of course the scum super-continent is inherently going to break up under its own weight (plus buoyancy from the water).
The comment has this time stamp in the comments to the geology post: 2022-01-06 15:07:17
That does lead to the opposite question though: wind caused the scum super-continent to form. But what caused Pangaea to form?
Convection currents in the asthenosphere push and pull all the plates around like they're on conveyor belts of basalt (ocean floors which are always opening and closing) constantly. Where did the heat come from? Radioactive materials inside the earth, but also, because when the Earth formed it was very hot, and it's STILL cooling down. Another cool analogue is to simply look at a pot of boiling water and chuck some things that float in. You will see them submerge and bounce against each other and bounce away and back, and it's really pretty close to the same thing! When you bounce things around, it creates cycles of coming together and drifting apart; Pangaea was not the only super-continent in geological history but one of many!
I have a feeling that Prof Cowan will no
Longer say that Geology doesn’t interest him.
Interesting!
So is there a fair bit of overlap with what makes for a good geologist versus a good archeologist? When I read the post i thought a lot of those aspects ( polymath, detective, field work etc ) remind me of archeology types.
What's the definition of an MBA? A person who has the answer to every question but one: if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?
For some reason I thought of that oldie when reading your description of geologists.
The equation of money-making with wisdom and intelligence is a bizarre error that occurs so often in our society that one can only conclude that our society is sick indeeda.
The sickness --equating wealth with wisdom and intelligence--goes back over 2,000 years. Thales (6th century BC) pursued a life of philosophy, science, and mathematics but--so the story goes--was criticized because his knowledge had little practical value. So he used his knowledge of the weather to corner the market on olive presses [economics!] when he predicted the harvest would be bountiful. Wikipedia:
"Aristotle explains that Thales' objective in doing this was not to enrich himself but to prove to his fellow Milesians that philosophy could be useful, contrary to what they thought, or alternatively, Thales had made his foray into enterprise because of a personal challenge put to him by an individual who had asked why, if Thales was an intelligent famous philosopher, he had yet to attain wealth."
That's like saying "size doesn't matter" It may be true, but we can deduce one thing with certainty about anyone who makes that claim.
Geologists (like MBAs) make plenty of money, on average, but it's still better to be on the Forbes 400. Geez. One thing sick about our society is that there is so much damned jealousy!
If any of my kids become geologists, I'd be incredibly proud. That's a great accomplishment. Of course, I'd still rather they be super rich. Come on!
It wasn't all that long ago that geologists rejected the theory of Continental Drift.
The great merit of an undergraduate geology course in my day was that pretty girls were to be found on them, with plenty of opportunities to chat to them on field trips.
The source of supply was a rule that students in the Faculty of Arts had to pass at least one science course if they were to graduate. So little hammers and the Great Outdoors it was!
So much healthier than Grievance Studies.
In the US that class is called "rocks for jocks": the class that fulfills the science requirement but is so easy that the "student athletes" can pass it.
Sometimes a university will create a dumbed-down version of its physics classes to similarly attract students who are merely trying to fulfill a distribution requirement, those classes are called "physics for poets".
For some reason, there don't seem to be similar nicknames for easy-squeezy biology or chemistry courses. I don't know if that's because they don't create such courses, or they just haven't attained notoriety.
What will geology look like when computers and robots take over?
Not much different I suspect. They will be tools to gather information that would need to be analyzed. Computers and robots do what they are told.
Anyone interested in taking a wonderful dive into geology presented by someone who will woo you into thinking like a geologist instead of expect you to already, check out 'Annals of the Former World' by John McPhee. It's an amazing book and captures the kinds of utterly fascinating things geology reveals in a way any curious layman can sink their teeth into. If anyone knows of similar volumes please let me know!
I liked 'The Ends of the World" by Peter Brannen. Also, though the interminable and wholly unfamiliar jargon of geology requires a lot of googling, it makes a road trip more interesting to carry those roadside guides if there's one for your state.
While there are many things that can come alive in the mind's eye sitting in a chair with a book, I don't think geology is one of them. I was thinking of this when T. C. claimed the subject didn't grab him.
I wonder if there are competing versions of those roadside geology guides, they're easy to find in west coast states so they may be sufficiently popular for different authors or publishers to create their own versions.
There's a cool book for California that covers, not geology, but those historical signs that you see by the side of the road. The book is titled "Why stop?" and it purports to contain every single historical market in CA, with a photo and the text of the sign so that you can read the sign and get the historical factoids -- without having to stop.
But as you say, the Why Stop? philosophy works a lot less well for geological as opposed to historical sites (and sights). Sometimes you need to see the actual object or landscape to appreciate it. No photo e.g. can convey the feeling of being at the Grand Canyon (and VR and betta Meta won't do the job either). Or standing behind Ponytail Falls in the Columbia Gorge (for some reason, Oregon has a ton of waterfalls where the rock behind the waterfall has been undercut, so the trailbuilders were able to have the trail literally go right behind the falls, so you're looking at the curtain of water falling, from the inside).
Keegan, I second your recommendation on McPhee's work. I did not expect to be completely captivated by a big, thick book on geology. And thinking about Time in a different, bigger way helps me with perspective on human activities.
It's the difference between what and why. Anyone with eyes to see can determine what, but it takes broad knowledge to determine why. This distinction (what and why) is the basis for the often uneasy relationship between history and economics; according to some economists, economic historian is an oxymoron. According to Dinwar, geologists are dealing with "historical sciences" (sciences that draw their data from records of past events, as opposed to "experimental" or "operational" sciences), examining clues, making inferences, but they are also polymaths with "a deep understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, fluid dynamics, engineering, astronomy, and a host of other fields", they are both historians and scientists, all in the search for why.
I recall my earliest geology/minerology class in early elementary school, field trips with grad students leading them. I think that most of what the author ascribes to born inclination can be taught if it starts early enough; but that the time for fundamental attitude attribution is long past for most readers themselves. Maybe parents would be able to consider whether their children should be trained in a way compatible with geology as a lifestyle.
Geologists telling us how smart they are? I think every profession does this. I find it inspiring, though, because I am working on a geology degree (after a career in statistics).
It sounds a bit like how astronomers and evolutionary ecologists think, only about an inherently less interesting topic.
As an economist who agonized about whether to pursue economics or geology in grad school 40 years ago, I'd add that you can't really fully appreciate the climate issue unless you've studied geology as well. And most economists thinking about climate haven't.
Even though this is a self-interested account, I enjoyed it muchly. Thanks for calling it out TC
"Engineers and geologists think VERY differently, in nearly incompatible ways"
Geologists think conceptually.
Would you care to elaborate?
Geologists develop and apply concepts ie "an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct." Note the words "combining" and "construct".
That is, they think in terms of a mental construction that they then test out by comparing it with reality ie "if the river flowed 'in this particular way' then the gold ought to be over there. Let's see." As Dinwar says, they are detectives.
Engineers, on the other hand, are builders and they don't want stuff to brake. Their process is the reverse of the geologist's. eg "I will make this kind of channel to get the water over there". They fit an abstraction (a model channel) to the reality of a given topography.
My sister is an engineer and has a "measure twice, cut once" mentality.
I analyze data, and sometimes have to enter data, and good data entry means that I don't check to see if I made an error while typing. Instead my mentality is to assume that I made an error in the data that I just typed in, and my job is to go over what I just did and find that error.
That rechecking slows me down, but as I tell my student assistants, we value accuracy over speed.
So it's "type once, check twice" instead of "measure twice, cut once".
At one point I had a task to do to prepare for a dinner party, I forget what it was, maybe writing names on placeholders for the table. I was almost done and had a big pile of finished ones, and my sister came by and swooped them up. She was in a bad mood so I didn't call out "wait I haven't checked those yet". For her, if I'd written on them, that meant that I'd finished them.
Subscribe via Email
Enter your email address to subscribe to updates.
Email Address
Contact Us
Alex Tabarrok
Email Alex
Follow @atabarrok
Tyler Cowen
Email Tyler
Follow @tylercowen
Webmaster
Report an issue
Our Web Pages
Books
