I mean, there’s a spectrum here. At what point should you avoid joining an institution out of principle. Is it only when the institution is net negative? I think that if your primary goal will be to fix the institution, then it can still be right to join an institution even if it’s net negative. But I think if you find out that your institution has broken its promises and principles, even if it’s mostly moving in a positive direction, especially if it’s crowding out others doing work (indeed, it’s hard to get respect as a scientist in modern society if you don’t have a PhD), then I think that can be the sign to leave in protest and not cooperate with it, even while it’s locally net positive and there isn’t a clear alternative.
(This reminds me of Zvi unilaterally leaving Facebook, even though Facebook has a coordination advantage. I’m glad Zvi left Facebook, and it helped me leave Facebook, but I couldn’t have predicted that very directly at the time, and I don’t think Zvi was in a position to either. Naive consequentialism is very difficult, because modelling the effects of your social decisions is incredibly hard, and is one of key advantages of deontological recommendations is to do the right thing even when you’re not in a position to compute all its effects.)
It seems like a fair hypothesis to me that academia has lied enough about whether it knows the truth, whether it has privileged access to truth, and whether its people are doing good work, that it should not be ‘joined’ but instead ‘quit, and get to work on an alternative’.
Tbc, in the grandparent I was responding to the specific sentence I quoted, which seems to me to be making a bold claim that I think is false. It’s of course possible that the correct action is still “leave academia”, but for a different reason, like the one you gave.
Re:
it should not be ‘joined’ but instead ‘quit, and get to work on an alternative’.
That depends pretty strongly on what the alternative is. Suppose your goal is for more investigation of speculative ideas that may or may not pan out, so that humanity figures out true and useful things about the world. It’s not clear to me that you can do significantly better than current academia, even if you assume that everyone will switch from academia to your new institution.
And of course, people in academia are selected for being good at academic jobs, and may not be good at building institutions. Or they may hate all the politicking that would be required for an alternative. Or they might not particularly care about impact, and just want to do research because it’s fun. All of which are reasons you might join academia rather than quit and work on an alternative, and it’s “morally fine”.
I mean, there’s a spectrum here. At what point should you avoid joining an institution out of principle. Is it only when the institution is net negative? I think that if your primary goal will be to fix the institution, then it can still be right to join an institution even if it’s net negative. But I think if you find out that your institution has broken its promises and principles, even if it’s mostly moving in a positive direction, especially if it’s crowding out others doing work (indeed, it’s hard to get respect as a scientist in modern society if you don’t have a PhD), then I think that can be the sign to leave in protest and not cooperate with it, even while it’s locally net positive and there isn’t a clear alternative.
(This reminds me of Zvi unilaterally leaving Facebook, even though Facebook has a coordination advantage. I’m glad Zvi left Facebook, and it helped me leave Facebook, but I couldn’t have predicted that very directly at the time, and I don’t think Zvi was in a position to either. Naive consequentialism is very difficult, because modelling the effects of your social decisions is incredibly hard, and is one of key advantages of deontological recommendations is to do the right thing even when you’re not in a position to compute all its effects.)
It seems like a fair hypothesis to me that academia has lied enough about whether it knows the truth, whether it has privileged access to truth, and whether its people are doing good work, that it should not be ‘joined’ but instead ‘quit, and get to work on an alternative’.
Tbc, in the grandparent I was responding to the specific sentence I quoted, which seems to me to be making a bold claim that I think is false. It’s of course possible that the correct action is still “leave academia”, but for a different reason, like the one you gave.
Re:
That depends pretty strongly on what the alternative is. Suppose your goal is for more investigation of speculative ideas that may or may not pan out, so that humanity figures out true and useful things about the world. It’s not clear to me that you can do significantly better than current academia, even if you assume that everyone will switch from academia to your new institution.
And of course, people in academia are selected for being good at academic jobs, and may not be good at building institutions. Or they may hate all the politicking that would be required for an alternative. Or they might not particularly care about impact, and just want to do research because it’s fun. All of which are reasons you might join academia rather than quit and work on an alternative, and it’s “morally fine”.