It’s striking how much value there is in academia that I didn’t notice, and that a base-level rational person would’ve noticed if they’d asked “what are the main blind spots of the rationality community, and how can I steelman the opposing positions?”.
Well, to bloat my own ego, one of my most consistently banged-on themes has been, “HEY ACADEMIA BASICALLY TELLS US THINGS FOR FREE!”
Well, not for free exactly. Textbooks and the internet can tell us most of the same things, for much cheaper :). (I’m not arguing against academia in general, but I do think that’s a weak argument for it).
I had actually meant that academia provides research to the public more-or-less “for free”, in the sense of “free at point of use”.
Textbooks and the internet are not actually of much use, as well, when most of the knowledge for how they actually go together is tribal-knowledge among university professors, and never gets written down for non-student self-studiers.
I’m not convinced that “free at point of use” is a useful concept—it’s more useful to figure out when and where costs are snuck in, and then decide if the price is worth it and if the right people are paying for it.
In terms of self learning, that hasn’t been my experience as an autodidact. A course catalog and a good textbook are more than enough to provide context for learning, with google filling in the gaps.
I’m not convinced that “free at point of use” is a useful concept—it’s more useful to figure out when and where costs are snuck in, and then decide if the price is worth it and if the right people are paying for it.
Go ahead and object that “nothing is really free”, but “free at point of use”, once we’re being specific, is useful. It means, “This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere.” Of course there are still costs to be paid, but there are a couple of whole fields of study devoted to finding the most socially desirable ways of paying them.
So for instance, we have reason to believe that if, on top of the existing journal-subscription-and-paywall system, we added additional up-front fees for reading academic research papers, this would raise the costs of scientific research, in terms of dollars and labor-hours spent to obtain the outputs we care about.
Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking. If I start with “academia publishes a lot of useful research which can be obtained and read for free by people who know how to do literature searches”, please do not respond with, “Well what is free anyway? Shouldn’t we digress into the entire field of welfare economics?”
Go ahead and object that “nothing is really free”, but “free at point of use”, once we’re being specific, is useful. It means, “This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere.”
Fair point.
Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking.
It wasn’t a “gotcha, you’re technically wrong” comment. It was central to the point we’re arguing, which is that academia is a net benefit. If the comment was meant in a tongue in cheek “I’m not actually making a real argument for academia, just saying something silly” way, it wasn’t clear to me.
If you were actually advancing an argument that academia is useful because it publishes research, you need to prove that the research does enough good to justify the costs it extracts from it’s students. It is a meta point, but it’s not an irrelevant nitpick—it’s central to you’re argument.
If you were actually advancing an argument that academia is useful because it publishes research, you need to prove that the research does enough good to justify the costs it extracts from it’s students.
Ok, there’s a confusion here I feel a need to correct: research is almost entirely not funded by students. Teaching is funded by students. Administration is (gratuitously and copiously, beyond anything necessary) funded by students. Teaching and administration are also often funded by endowments and state block grants. Research is (by and large) funded by research grants, and in fact, the level of research output required to justify each dollar of grant has gone solidly up.
Well, if you’re including “anyone who sells things to schools” in academia- then yes, my argument doesn’t really make much sense.
But, for the sake of steel-manning, let’s pretend that instead of meaning that, I meant academia as the broad collection of things typically associated with it—formal schooling, tenure, teachers, students, classes, etc. Even if you include textbooks as a NARROW part of academia, the point is that you can forgo all that other stuff and JUST take the textbooks, and still be told basically the same things.
Well, to bloat my own ego, one of my most consistently banged-on themes has been, “HEY ACADEMIA BASICALLY TELLS US THINGS FOR FREE!”
Well, not for free exactly. Textbooks and the internet can tell us most of the same things, for much cheaper :). (I’m not arguing against academia in general, but I do think that’s a weak argument for it).
I had actually meant that academia provides research to the public more-or-less “for free”, in the sense of “free at point of use”.
Textbooks and the internet are not actually of much use, as well, when most of the knowledge for how they actually go together is tribal-knowledge among university professors, and never gets written down for non-student self-studiers.
I’m not convinced that “free at point of use” is a useful concept—it’s more useful to figure out when and where costs are snuck in, and then decide if the price is worth it and if the right people are paying for it.
In terms of self learning, that hasn’t been my experience as an autodidact. A course catalog and a good textbook are more than enough to provide context for learning, with google filling in the gaps.
Go ahead and object that “nothing is really free”, but “free at point of use”, once we’re being specific, is useful. It means, “This service is accessible without paying up-front, because the costs are being paid elsewhere.” Of course there are still costs to be paid, but there are a couple of whole fields of study devoted to finding the most socially desirable ways of paying them.
So for instance, we have reason to believe that if, on top of the existing journal-subscription-and-paywall system, we added additional up-front fees for reading academic research papers, this would raise the costs of scientific research, in terms of dollars and labor-hours spent to obtain the outputs we care about.
Also, please, not every LW comment necessitates conceptual nitpicking. If I start with “academia publishes a lot of useful research which can be obtained and read for free by people who know how to do literature searches”, please do not respond with, “Well what is free anyway? Shouldn’t we digress into the entire field of welfare economics?”
Upvoted for the last paragraph.
Fair point.
It wasn’t a “gotcha, you’re technically wrong” comment. It was central to the point we’re arguing, which is that academia is a net benefit. If the comment was meant in a tongue in cheek “I’m not actually making a real argument for academia, just saying something silly” way, it wasn’t clear to me.
If you were actually advancing an argument that academia is useful because it publishes research, you need to prove that the research does enough good to justify the costs it extracts from it’s students. It is a meta point, but it’s not an irrelevant nitpick—it’s central to you’re argument.
Ok, there’s a confusion here I feel a need to correct: research is almost entirely not funded by students. Teaching is funded by students. Administration is (gratuitously and copiously, beyond anything necessary) funded by students. Teaching and administration are also often funded by endowments and state block grants. Research is (by and large) funded by research grants, and in fact, the level of research output required to justify each dollar of grant has gone solidly up.
The word textbook implies an adademic publisher.
Well, if you’re including “anyone who sells things to schools” in academia- then yes, my argument doesn’t really make much sense.
But, for the sake of steel-manning, let’s pretend that instead of meaning that, I meant academia as the broad collection of things typically associated with it—formal schooling, tenure, teachers, students, classes, etc. Even if you include textbooks as a NARROW part of academia, the point is that you can forgo all that other stuff and JUST take the textbooks, and still be told basically the same things.