Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

A Case Against Epistemic Trespassing.

There is a moment I have come to dread, and it arrives with almost boring regularity. A journalist calls, or a producer messages, and the ask is some version of: you wrote a book about boys and men, so what do you think about X? Sometimes X is prostate cancer. Sometimes Y is serial killers. Sometimes X is why marriages fail. Once it was whether I would judge a television panel on romance and dating. Every time, I feel a version of what Zizi Kodwa must feel when the cameras find him and the honest answer is simply: I do not know, I just got here. When the prostate cancer request came, I told the journalist plainly that I am not a urologist, not an OBGYN, not a medical practitioner of any kind, and that it would serve their audience far better to speak to someone who is  and I gave them names. When the TV show wanted me as a judge on lasting marriages, I had to ask myself what exactly I know about lasting marriages, given that I failed at mine. I declined that one too, and pointed them elsewhere.

My ignorance, I have realised, is infinite. I am not omniscient. I am not an ‘organic intellectual’. And yet the pressure to have an opinion on everything, immediately, confidently, is relentless. So is the puzzle underneath it: why is it so hard, in public life today, to simply say I do not know? Why has that sentence stopped being acceptable, when it used to be a mark of wisdom?.

There is a name for what happens when people cross that line anyway. The philosopher Nathan Ballantyne calls it epistemic trespassing: what happens when someone with genuine, hard-won competence in one field passes confident judgment on a completely different field, one where they have neither the training nor the evidence to back their certainty.

The Three Conditions
Ballantyne’s 2019 paper sets out three conditions that together make someone a trespasser. It is worth sitting with all three, because most of us only notice the third.
Ballantyne’s Criteria for Epistemic Trespassing
The Evidence Condition — the trespasser lacks the observational data, research background, or foundational facts the second field actually requires.
The Calibration Condition — even if handed the evidence, the trespasser lacks the trained skill to correctly interpret and weigh it.
The Confidence Condition — despite failing both of the above, the trespasser still issues a public, authoritative verdict.

That third condition is the dangerous one, because it is the only one anybody sees. Nobody watches a man being interviewed and thinks: I wonder if he has the calibration condition. They just hear the confidence, and confidence reads as credibility.

Nobel Disease
The starkest examples sit at the very top of human achievement, which tells you this is not a problem of intelligence. It is a problem of boundaries. Linus Pauling won two unshared Nobel Prizes and still spent his later decades insisting, against the medical establishment, that megadoses of vitamin C could cure cancer  and when challenged, accused that establishment of fraud rather than revisit his own claim. He is the case popular science culture reaches for first, and the pattern he set has a name: Nobel Disease, laureates drifting into pseudoscience on the strength of a prize won in an entirely different discipline.
He was not alone.

Laureate. The trespass
James Watson(Physiology or Medicine, 1962)
Co-discovered the structure of DNA, then stepped into sociology and anthropology to argue intelligence is genetically linked to race,  a claim the empirical data of his own field never supported.
Kary Mullis(Chemistry, 1993)
Invented PCR, then used that chemistry credential to pronounce on virology and climatology,  denying that HIV causes AIDS and rejecting the scientific consensus on human-driven climate change.
Luc Montagnier(Physiology or Medicine, 2008)
Co-discovered HIV, then trespassed into homeopathy and water physics, claiming water retains a “memory” that emits electromagnetic DNA signals, later extending the same confidence to unfounded COVID-19 vaccine claims.
Brian Josephson(Physics, 1973)
Won his prize for quantum tunnelling, then leaned on quantum mechanics to assert the validity of telepathy, psychokinesis, and cold fusion.


Why the Trap Is So Easy to Fall Into
Philosophical and psychological analysis of these cases keeps landing on the same four traits, and none of them require malice.
Four Traits of the Trespasser
Intellectual pride — past success blinds a person to the strict boundaries of their own knowledge.
Flawed skill transfer — an expert assumes that abstract mastery in one domain (mathematics, chemistry) automatically transfers to an unrelated complex system (public health, sociology).
Rejection of deference — instead of deferring to the peer-reviewed consensus of the actual domain experts, the trespasser dismisses them as corrupt or closed-minded.
The halo effect — the media and the public do half the damage themselves, pulling laureates and other high-status figures into commenting on subjects entirely outside their specialty, confusing general intelligence with universal authority.

That last one matters more than we admit. It is not only the expert reaching past their lane. It is media houses and comms practitioners who seem to have three names on speed-dial for every topic under the sun, in a country with no shortage of genuine specialists. Is it a time crunch? Laziness? Click-bait, whichever name carries the most rage, anger, hate, or cancelling energy wins the booking? I suspect it is some of each, and none of it is flattering.

The Deeper Reasons We Stop Saying It
Strip away the Nobel laureates and look closer to home, and the same trap catches ordinary people in ordinary rooms,  boardrooms, family group chats, radio phone-ins. A few forces do most of the work.
Power. The Peter Principle says we rise until we reach our level of incompetence, and public life adds a second twist: to get elected or appointed, you often have to sacrifice independent thought for popularity and votes. Certainty becomes the price of admission.
Self-deception. Self-deception loves conformity, because conformity is warmer and safer than truth. Agreeing with the room costs nothing today; admitting ignorance costs status today.

The rise of the bullshitter.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt drew the useful distinction: a liar cares about the truth enough to hide it, but a bullshitter does not care about truth or falsehood at all,  only about the effect of what they say. We now have more bullshitters than liars, and their real damage is quieter than any single false claim: they normalise a general disregard for truth itself.
Vague language. We hide behind platitudes and euphemism the way George Orwell warned we would,  vague language lets a person sound like they have answered without ever committing to a falsifiable claim.
Money. Wealth gets mistaken for wisdom, as if a healthy bank balance were evidence of a healthy epistemology.
Alcohol. In vino veritas is only half right, alcohol does not make a person’s views, it reveals them. It strips the social filter, not the underlying belief.
Intellectual pride and the rise of debate over dialectic. We have swapped dialectic,  the disciplined pursuit of a truth neither side started with,  for debate, which only rewards whoever wins the room.
Overestimation of transferable skills, and indoctrination. Deep training in one field breeds an easy, false confidence that the same rigour transfers elsewhere; and once a person is deeply indoctrinated in one worldview, they reflexively reject alternative beliefs on contact.
Identity and story. At some point the belief stops being a position and becomes an identity and identities defend themselves. We also fall for our own narrative, the story we have come to tell ourselves about who we are and what we must therefore know.
Outsourcing. We let other people do our thinking for us, and drift through public life in something close to a zombie state,  repeating positions we never actually tested.
Courage, mistaken. There is a fine line between courage and stupidity, and a trespasser standing their ground on borrowed authority usually believes they are on the courageous side of it.

Social Media Did Not Invent This.  It Monetised It
Nobel Disease is old. What is new is the machinery around it. The engagement algorithm rewards controversy and high-confidence claims over nuanced, peer-reviewed consensus, so a laureate’s shocking off-field claim gains algorithmic velocity that a quiet domain expert never gets. Audience capture follows close behind: the moment a decorated figure trespasses into a politically charged field, ideological groups flood in with followers and shares, and that metric-driven validation pressures the person to double down just to keep the numbers up. Then there is metric displacement,  a follower count or a verification badge becomes a stand-in for real-time credibility on a subject the badge has nothing to do with. And decontextualised snippets finish the job: a video clip proudly displays “Nobel Prize Winner in Physics” while quietly stripping away the fact that the physicist is now talking about immunology, a field they have never studied a day in their life.

What To Do Instead
None of this is an argument for silence, or for staying inside one narrow lane forever. Curiosity across disciplines is a good thing. The difference is in the posture you bring to someone else’s field.
1. Do not outsource your thinking. Fact check. Read the primary material yourself before you repeat someone else’s confident summary of it.
2. Walk into different disciplines,  but as a visitor asking questions, not an expert issuing verdicts.
3. Introduce yourself to as many falsifying arguments as you can find. 4. Actively hunt the strongest case against your own position, not the weakest.
5.  Allow dissent and debate a real seat at the table, rather than treating disagreement as disloyalty.
6. Borrow from the Aztec decision circle: before a decision is finalised, someone in the circle is formally required to offer dissent,  dissent is not tolerated, it is built into the process.
7. Refuse to illegitimise an opposition just because it is inconvenient. Where there is no dialogue, there is no freedom.

Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
Perhaps this is where Ubuntu actually settles the question the Nobel laureates got wrong. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu does not mean one person must carry all knowledge alone,  it means the opposite. A person is a person through other people, and a community’s wisdom is distributed across its specialists, not concentrated in whichever member has the loudest microphone that week. The urologist knows the prostate. The therapist knows the marriage. I know boys and men, and even there, only some of it. Saying I do not know is not a retreat from expertise. It is the most honest form of respect for it,  for the urologist I recommended instead of guessing, for the discipline I have spent my career in, and for the people who trusted me enough to ask in the first place. The wisest people I have met are not the ones who always have an answer. They are the ones secure enough to hand the question to someone better placed to answer it.

So here is my answer, the one I keep practising until it stops feeling like a small thing to admit:
I do not know. Andazi.
I do not know. Angazi.
I do not know. Ek weet nie.

========================

Dr. Mzamo Masito.

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings.

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.