It probably says some mixture of bad things about academia (e.g. fear of looking silly) and bad things about LW (e.g. insufficient money to run randomized controlled trials, insufficient dedication to cite lots of related literature for every post the way lukeprog does).
Academia has flaws, like publication bias, closed access journals, expensive textbooks that don’t allow comments, slower conversations, credentialism, lousy writing and maybe tenure. Less Wrong has flaws, like the fact that all its contributors are part-time, people think we’re weird, it’s not rewarding to write for, and maybe issues with the voting system. A blue sky kind of question to ask is how you might lay the foundation for something that outdoes both. What would academia look like if it was fully optimized for the internet age? (This question will look increasingly relevant if college enrollments continue declining and/or we start moving to a Coursera type online education model.)
One interesting thing to notice about academia is that it’s not monolithic the way Less Wrong is. You’ve got philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. each with their own somewhat disjunct body of knowledge. You could argue that they don’t talk to each other as much as they should, and that this is a problem. But I also see some advantages: mastering a single field is a more manageable job for a grad student than mastering many, and separately evolving bodies of thought might form a kind of system of checks against one another (e.g. if it weren’t for the psychologists, maybe economists would still be acting as though humans were perfectly rational agents).
Crazier proposals might have all the academics making their living off of a heavily subsidized prediction market or a giant Bayesian network of all humanity’s knowledge that papers do updates on (screw confidence intervals). Having Scholarpedia cover the same range of ground as Wikipedia, but with cutting edge info and more rigor, is a tamer suggestion.
I don’t think there should be one system of knowledge creation. It’s okay to have various different system in our society that works with different incentives.
I think an organisation like CFAR, provided it’s well funded is more likely to invent effective techniques for rational thinking then academic psychologists.
GiveWell is also an organisation that creates valuable knowledge. They incentivise nonprofits to do good studies that prove the effectiveness of the nonprofits.
a giant Bayesian network of all humanity’s knowledge
I think there’s room for a crowdsourced version of this that works like Wikipedia.
Having a science replacement grow out of Givewell would be pretty interesting. I’ll bet they’d do a better job of prioritizing research areas than government agencies like the National Science Foundation.
If you talk about “science replacement” you have to think about what science is.
The German word for science is “Wissenschaft”. The creation of knowledge. In particular the creation of reliable knowledge.
GiveWell is engaged in that project.
According to Kuhn part of a scientific revolution is that the questions that get asked change.
It probably says some mixture of bad things about academia (e.g. fear of looking silly) and bad things about LW (e.g. insufficient money to run randomized controlled trials, insufficient dedication to cite lots of related literature for every post the way lukeprog does).
Academia has flaws, like publication bias, closed access journals, expensive textbooks that don’t allow comments, slower conversations, credentialism, lousy writing and maybe tenure. Less Wrong has flaws, like the fact that all its contributors are part-time, people think we’re weird, it’s not rewarding to write for, and maybe issues with the voting system. A blue sky kind of question to ask is how you might lay the foundation for something that outdoes both. What would academia look like if it was fully optimized for the internet age? (This question will look increasingly relevant if college enrollments continue declining and/or we start moving to a Coursera type online education model.)
One interesting thing to notice about academia is that it’s not monolithic the way Less Wrong is. You’ve got philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. each with their own somewhat disjunct body of knowledge. You could argue that they don’t talk to each other as much as they should, and that this is a problem. But I also see some advantages: mastering a single field is a more manageable job for a grad student than mastering many, and separately evolving bodies of thought might form a kind of system of checks against one another (e.g. if it weren’t for the psychologists, maybe economists would still be acting as though humans were perfectly rational agents).
Crazier proposals might have all the academics making their living off of a heavily subsidized prediction market or a giant Bayesian network of all humanity’s knowledge that papers do updates on (screw confidence intervals). Having Scholarpedia cover the same range of ground as Wikipedia, but with cutting edge info and more rigor, is a tamer suggestion.
Interesting recent article
I don’t think there should be one system of knowledge creation. It’s okay to have various different system in our society that works with different incentives.
I think an organisation like CFAR, provided it’s well funded is more likely to invent effective techniques for rational thinking then academic psychologists.
GiveWell is also an organisation that creates valuable knowledge. They incentivise nonprofits to do good studies that prove the effectiveness of the nonprofits.
I think there’s room for a crowdsourced version of this that works like Wikipedia.
Having a science replacement grow out of Givewell would be pretty interesting. I’ll bet they’d do a better job of prioritizing research areas than government agencies like the National Science Foundation.
If you talk about “science replacement” you have to think about what science is. The German word for science is “Wissenschaft”. The creation of knowledge. In particular the creation of reliable knowledge. GiveWell is engaged in that project.
According to Kuhn part of a scientific revolution is that the questions that get asked change.