Congress should define non-partisan as at least 30% Republican & 30% Democrat, and only edu orgs that are non-partisan are eligible for tax exemptions.
Nobody like quotas, but they do work, and nobody has a better idea for Ivy + colleges now.
You are right about incentives, but there is an answer to the grandmother problem, as my old mentor, Bill Brewer, put it. Consider Newton. As I told (I'm retired) my students, if Newton had just said "Objects fall," everyone would have said, "Well, duh." Newton's achievement was showing the exact "how" of falling worked in detail. Is it a function of weight? of distance fallen? Of time? Working out the math so that one could predict events was the real achievement. When challenged that he did not address the why questions of physics (e.g., why do objects travel in a straight line forever unless acted on by a force?) he replied, "I do not propose hypotheses." He equally dispensed with religious angels AND materialist theories like Cartesian materialism. Instead, therefore, of proposing speculative explanations of "duh" findings like "People hold stereotypes," we should answer "how" questions instead. How are stereotypes structured? We can connect them with non-social mental functions such as memory schemas (Bill's specialty) to do so. Early (e.g., 1879-c. 1920) cognitive psychology worked that way. For example, we all intuitively know that we can't grasp everything we see in a moment--a "duh" proposal--but we can quantify how much information can be picked up in brief glances (or listens) and link consciousness to qualities of the stimulus such as time or location of presentation. Or, to take the parent of all psychological research, psychophysics, we can take the "duh" idea that experience of a stimulus such as weight or sound strengthens with increases to the objective mass or acoustic strength of the stimulus, and show that, surprisingly, the function is not linear, but logarithmic, and interestingly maps on to demand curves in economics. These "how" findings are novel, and often counter-intuitive. By the way, folk physics can be unreliable in practice. Pre-Newtonian artillery gunnery was inaccurate; Britain ruled the waves, in part, because a mathematically informed artillery officer worked out artillery tables (a challenging task that spurred the development of the first computers in the US under von Neumann at Princeton) based on proper physical principles. There is a true scientific psychology, but social psych isn't it.
Thanks for the comment. I agree with you. Another answer to the “duh” critique is that your grandmother might have “known” it, but she might be wrong, she might be incomplete in her knowledge, and besides, she might not have the dataset to support her knowledge. (A different question is whether editors or reviewers will be swayed by such arguments.) But yes I broadly agree with you and for sure our intuitions are subject to error, as the ballistics case illustrates. (By the way, To Rule the Waves, by Bruce Jones, is one of my all time favorite books. Just as an aside.) But, yes, all good points, and thanks for adding them!
Lovely essay, Rob! It is especially relevant for evolutionary medicine, where many findings are novel, counterintuitive and, especially important, relevant to people’s lives. The difficulty is that many hypotheses are also false. Articles get attention and citation proportional to their novelty, counterintuitiveness, and relevance, irrespective of whether they are true. We need a name for the false ones that spread fast. I suggest “Meme articles.”
First, thank you. And, that’s a great point. In cases such as power posing and willpower, the counterintuitive ideas spread. (This reminds me of Pascal Boyer’s work on which ideas tend to spread.) I’m less familiar with clinical areas than you are, but my sense is that cases such as The Body Keeps the Score has this quality. It’s a bit counterintuitive—my *body* remembers things??—and spreads everywhere. I agree a label would be good. Meme articles seems like a pretty good one! Maybe we can spread it… More seriously, this point seems crucial is today’s communication environment in which information, true or not, spreads so rapidly and widely.
In his writings on physics, Descartes embraced a form of materialism called corpuscularism, the idea that space was not a void, but filled with tiny material points--corpuscles--whose physical collisions explain the movements of larger, visible, objects such as planets or comets in exactly the way a clock's gears pushing each other explain how the clock's time display works. They regarded action at a distance, such as gravity, to be no proper explanation at all, but merely the substitution of one set of mysteries--spiritual or religious mysteries--with another. Gravity is no more observable than an angel. This got Descartes into some of the notorious problems of his dualism. He could come up with physiological, i.e., materialist, accounts of most "mental" processes, through his dissection of brains and nerves. These were the processes we shared with animals, such as perception and memory. But he could not explain his self-consciousness, the famous "I think, therefore I am," this way, creating the huge challenge of mind-body interaction that haunts psychology today. Newton simply dismissed metaphysics (proposing hypotheses) as unnecessary to doing science, i.e., accounting for the movements of objects in space. When he was challenged that gravity was just another "occult" force like spiritual ones, he added the scholium about not proposing hypotheses to the second ed. of the Principia. As one scholar has pointed out, gravity was, indeed, an occult force, but his mathematical physics was so successful that he got away with it. In one sense, you are right, Descartes' materialism has nothing to do with Newtonian (not Newton's) mechanics, but that's because Newton and his followers won the battle against the materialists.
Okay, thanks. I see now in what sense you mean Descartes was a materialist. His dualism about the mind is decidedly not materialist, which is what was tripping me up.
It might be pretty simple. The public - through the government - distributes most academic funding. Elected politicians could create laws that academic NSF and NIH and DOD (etc.) funding opportunities are 50% replications.
I don't like Trump nor his followers, but I believe that they want to change academia for similar reasons cited above - but they also hate science and the power it can evoke.
Having a nuanced view - that something is in a bad state but worth saving - is not the sort of thing our current culture encourages. And simple things are often the hardest to do.
I think incentives and disincentives account for much behaviour we see in the real world. They tend to work better than conspiracy theories, for example.
The hysteria around Covid and the lockstep actions of different governments point to groupthink and incentive structures built into bureaucracies rather than shadowy cabals pulling levers. Plus the huge amount of cash on offer didn't help.
But incentive structures bore most people. Conspiracies are exciting. So they don;t get much attention. Also, they are unflattering for the incumbents. Academia is a disaster and everyone knows it. I agree with your conclusion; it cannot be salvaged, only replaced.
Good job again Rob. Reminds me of my son saying “everyone knows that mom” about my finding that higher income men are more likely to get married and have kids. Way to disparage your mom’s career!
Heh. I feel your pain. My old friend in grad school used to reply to that with something like, "Yeah, everyone knows that... but everyone once knew the sun goes around the Earth, and besides, even if everyone is right, everyone doesn't have the dataset that I do to prove it." And so it goes :-) And thanks!!
In my opinion - and I am no expert and judging by what I have read - the emphasis on free speech is central. My guess is that this will to some extent broaden the topic scholars will investigate. Many scholars are afriad to work or publish outside the local Overton window. Related, they seem to have a very lean administration. That too will help free scholars' time and breadth of research. And then there is the insistence on meritocracy, as their recent announcements regarding admissions illustrates. But mostly for me it's who is involved. I believe that people like Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, and others are likely to create a genuine place of inquiry, learning, and discovery.
Congress should define non-partisan as at least 30% Republican & 30% Democrat, and only edu orgs that are non-partisan are eligible for tax exemptions.
Nobody like quotas, but they do work, and nobody has a better idea for Ivy + colleges now.
You are right about incentives, but there is an answer to the grandmother problem, as my old mentor, Bill Brewer, put it. Consider Newton. As I told (I'm retired) my students, if Newton had just said "Objects fall," everyone would have said, "Well, duh." Newton's achievement was showing the exact "how" of falling worked in detail. Is it a function of weight? of distance fallen? Of time? Working out the math so that one could predict events was the real achievement. When challenged that he did not address the why questions of physics (e.g., why do objects travel in a straight line forever unless acted on by a force?) he replied, "I do not propose hypotheses." He equally dispensed with religious angels AND materialist theories like Cartesian materialism. Instead, therefore, of proposing speculative explanations of "duh" findings like "People hold stereotypes," we should answer "how" questions instead. How are stereotypes structured? We can connect them with non-social mental functions such as memory schemas (Bill's specialty) to do so. Early (e.g., 1879-c. 1920) cognitive psychology worked that way. For example, we all intuitively know that we can't grasp everything we see in a moment--a "duh" proposal--but we can quantify how much information can be picked up in brief glances (or listens) and link consciousness to qualities of the stimulus such as time or location of presentation. Or, to take the parent of all psychological research, psychophysics, we can take the "duh" idea that experience of a stimulus such as weight or sound strengthens with increases to the objective mass or acoustic strength of the stimulus, and show that, surprisingly, the function is not linear, but logarithmic, and interestingly maps on to demand curves in economics. These "how" findings are novel, and often counter-intuitive. By the way, folk physics can be unreliable in practice. Pre-Newtonian artillery gunnery was inaccurate; Britain ruled the waves, in part, because a mathematically informed artillery officer worked out artillery tables (a challenging task that spurred the development of the first computers in the US under von Neumann at Princeton) based on proper physical principles. There is a true scientific psychology, but social psych isn't it.
Thanks for the comment. I agree with you. Another answer to the “duh” critique is that your grandmother might have “known” it, but she might be wrong, she might be incomplete in her knowledge, and besides, she might not have the dataset to support her knowledge. (A different question is whether editors or reviewers will be swayed by such arguments.) But yes I broadly agree with you and for sure our intuitions are subject to error, as the ballistics case illustrates. (By the way, To Rule the Waves, by Bruce Jones, is one of my all time favorite books. Just as an aside.) But, yes, all good points, and thanks for adding them!
Lovely essay, Rob! It is especially relevant for evolutionary medicine, where many findings are novel, counterintuitive and, especially important, relevant to people’s lives. The difficulty is that many hypotheses are also false. Articles get attention and citation proportional to their novelty, counterintuitiveness, and relevance, irrespective of whether they are true. We need a name for the false ones that spread fast. I suggest “Meme articles.”
First, thank you. And, that’s a great point. In cases such as power posing and willpower, the counterintuitive ideas spread. (This reminds me of Pascal Boyer’s work on which ideas tend to spread.) I’m less familiar with clinical areas than you are, but my sense is that cases such as The Body Keeps the Score has this quality. It’s a bit counterintuitive—my *body* remembers things??—and spreads everywhere. I agree a label would be good. Meme articles seems like a pretty good one! Maybe we can spread it… More seriously, this point seems crucial is today’s communication environment in which information, true or not, spreads so rapidly and widely.
What does Cartesian materialism have to do with Newtonian mechanics? Those seem totally unrelated to me.
In his writings on physics, Descartes embraced a form of materialism called corpuscularism, the idea that space was not a void, but filled with tiny material points--corpuscles--whose physical collisions explain the movements of larger, visible, objects such as planets or comets in exactly the way a clock's gears pushing each other explain how the clock's time display works. They regarded action at a distance, such as gravity, to be no proper explanation at all, but merely the substitution of one set of mysteries--spiritual or religious mysteries--with another. Gravity is no more observable than an angel. This got Descartes into some of the notorious problems of his dualism. He could come up with physiological, i.e., materialist, accounts of most "mental" processes, through his dissection of brains and nerves. These were the processes we shared with animals, such as perception and memory. But he could not explain his self-consciousness, the famous "I think, therefore I am," this way, creating the huge challenge of mind-body interaction that haunts psychology today. Newton simply dismissed metaphysics (proposing hypotheses) as unnecessary to doing science, i.e., accounting for the movements of objects in space. When he was challenged that gravity was just another "occult" force like spiritual ones, he added the scholium about not proposing hypotheses to the second ed. of the Principia. As one scholar has pointed out, gravity was, indeed, an occult force, but his mathematical physics was so successful that he got away with it. In one sense, you are right, Descartes' materialism has nothing to do with Newtonian (not Newton's) mechanics, but that's because Newton and his followers won the battle against the materialists.
Okay, thanks. I see now in what sense you mean Descartes was a materialist. His dualism about the mind is decidedly not materialist, which is what was tripping me up.
It might be pretty simple. The public - through the government - distributes most academic funding. Elected politicians could create laws that academic NSF and NIH and DOD (etc.) funding opportunities are 50% replications.
I don't like Trump nor his followers, but I believe that they want to change academia for similar reasons cited above - but they also hate science and the power it can evoke.
Having a nuanced view - that something is in a bad state but worth saving - is not the sort of thing our current culture encourages. And simple things are often the hardest to do.
I think incentives and disincentives account for much behaviour we see in the real world. They tend to work better than conspiracy theories, for example.
The hysteria around Covid and the lockstep actions of different governments point to groupthink and incentive structures built into bureaucracies rather than shadowy cabals pulling levers. Plus the huge amount of cash on offer didn't help.
But incentive structures bore most people. Conspiracies are exciting. So they don;t get much attention. Also, they are unflattering for the incumbents. Academia is a disaster and everyone knows it. I agree with your conclusion; it cannot be salvaged, only replaced.
Good job again Rob. Reminds me of my son saying “everyone knows that mom” about my finding that higher income men are more likely to get married and have kids. Way to disparage your mom’s career!
Heh. I feel your pain. My old friend in grad school used to reply to that with something like, "Yeah, everyone knows that... but everyone once knew the sun goes around the Earth, and besides, even if everyone is right, everyone doesn't have the dataset that I do to prove it." And so it goes :-) And thanks!!
Thanks.
see also new level of hell in regard to academic LLM "AI" slop:
https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/p/dogmatism-turbocharged-by-generative/comment/105227994
Could you elaborate on why you think UATX is the way? I certainly hope it is.
In my opinion - and I am no expert and judging by what I have read - the emphasis on free speech is central. My guess is that this will to some extent broaden the topic scholars will investigate. Many scholars are afriad to work or publish outside the local Overton window. Related, they seem to have a very lean administration. That too will help free scholars' time and breadth of research. And then there is the insistence on meritocracy, as their recent announcements regarding admissions illustrates. But mostly for me it's who is involved. I believe that people like Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson, and others are likely to create a genuine place of inquiry, learning, and discovery.