Though you also see cases where people from the outside do get their message across, repeatedly, and fail to make an impact. Something more is going wrong then.
The FDA, in its decision whether to allow a drug on the market, doesn’t do an expected-value computation. They would much rather avoid one person dying from a reaction than save one person’s life. They know this. It’s been pointed out many times, sometimes by people in the FDA. Yet nothing changes.
EDIT: Probably a bad example. The FDA’s motivational structure is usually claimed to be the cause of this.
Maybe when one particular stupidity thrives in a field, it’s because it’s a really robust meme for reasons other than accuracy. There are false memes that can’t be killed, because they’re so appealing to some people. For example, “Al Gore said he invented the Internet”—a lie repeated 3 times by Wired that simply can’t be killed, because Republicans love it. “You only use 1/10th of your brain” - people love to imagine they have tremendous untapped potential. “Einstein was bad at math”—reassures people that being good at math isn’t important for physics, so it’s probably not important for much.
So, for example, NASA keeps trying to get ET’s attention, not because it’s rational, but because they read too many 1950s science fiction novels. The people behind project Hindsight and Factors in the Transfer of Technology wanted to conclude that basic research was ineffective, because they were all about making research efficient and productive, and undirected exploratory research was the enemy of everything they stood for. Saying that humans have a universal grammar is a reassuring story about the unity of humanity, and also about how special and different humans are. And the FDA doesn’t picture themselves as bureaucrats optimizing expected outcome; they picture themselves as knights in armor defending Americans from menacing drugs.
Though you also see cases where people from the outside do get their message across, repeatedly, and fail to make an impact. Something more is going wrong then.
The FDA, in its decision whether to allow a drug on the market, doesn’t do an expected-value computation. They would much rather avoid one person dying from a reaction than save one person’s life. They know this. It’s been pointed out many times, sometimes by people in the FDA. Yet nothing changes.
EDIT: Probably a bad example. The FDA’s motivational structure is usually claimed to be the cause of this.
Maybe when one particular stupidity thrives in a field, it’s because it’s a really robust meme for reasons other than accuracy. There are false memes that can’t be killed, because they’re so appealing to some people. For example, “Al Gore said he invented the Internet”—a lie repeated 3 times by Wired that simply can’t be killed, because Republicans love it. “You only use 1/10th of your brain” - people love to imagine they have tremendous untapped potential. “Einstein was bad at math”—reassures people that being good at math isn’t important for physics, so it’s probably not important for much.
So, for example, NASA keeps trying to get ET’s attention, not because it’s rational, but because they read too many 1950s science fiction novels. The people behind project Hindsight and Factors in the Transfer of Technology wanted to conclude that basic research was ineffective, because they were all about making research efficient and productive, and undirected exploratory research was the enemy of everything they stood for. Saying that humans have a universal grammar is a reassuring story about the unity of humanity, and also about how special and different humans are. And the FDA doesn’t picture themselves as bureaucrats optimizing expected outcome; they picture themselves as knights in armor defending Americans from menacing drugs.