LW, Eliezer, etc, can’t stay on the “crank” level, not playing by the rules, publishing books and no papers.
Why not? What’s stopping them?
One of the rules is that beginning academics must not publish work like this. They have to publish cutting edge research for a long time before they are allowed to synthesize or popularize.
What’s stopping them is that by not playing by conventional rules, they will not get official kudos in the field. People like Bostrom, etc. who do play by the rules will. One might not care about official kudos per se, but one should—people with official kudos are the ones with actual sway on policy, etc. Important people read Bostrom’s book, no one important reads EY’s stuff.
I think this is the vital thing: not ‘does academia work perfectly’, but ‘can you work more effectively THROUGH academia’. Don’t know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren’t going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they’ll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.
That’s not really true. You can write a review article as one of your first publications and use it to lay out what you intend to work on. People won’t take your review article as seriously as they will one written by Dr. Bigshot et al., but there certainly aren’t any rules against it.
Also, the NSF is thrilled if you’re a beginner and you’re doing any sort of popular outreach. They love pop science blogs.
NSF requires many things that are bad for your career. This may well be the point, to counterbalance other sources of judgement.
Outside of the purview of NSF, here is an essay on how history is not written by a historian who was, at the time, blogging anonymously. She was afraid of her colleagues seeing her blog close to her professional interests while being open about writing essays about manga.
Ok, but before we turn everything upside down, can we think a little about why academia ended up being the way it is? Hanson had some good status-based explanations about the academic career trajectory.
If you haven’t done cutting edge stuff, the worry is you don’t know what you are talking about yet, and shouldn’t be a public-facing part of science.
Also there are well-known popularizers who aren’t significant academics, e.g. Bill Nye. Bill Nye did some engineering stuff, though.
Journalists and scientists that write popular exposition books. The former are generally terrible (journalists tend to have an education that emphasizes writing, not numeracy).
Same reason why milesmathis (google it, have fun) isn’t taken, and shouldn’t be taken seriously by the mainstream. Because “playing by the rules” didn’t work—you usually end up with an unending amount of crackpottery in what is actually not published: books, blogs, etc.
Not publishing in the mainstream while publishing books and self published articles is the crackpott’s artillery, unfortunately.
Think like the mainstream: given the amount of crazy stuff that’s present on the internet that couldn’t be published because it was, indeed, crazy, should I care about this particular guy that doesn’t publish anything but books (or self published articles) ?
The unfortunate answer is no.
Because you wrote one sentence without actually giving the argument. So I went with my prior on your argument. And my prior about arguments that argue for drastically changing the existing order of things is they aren’t right.
Because you wrote one sentence without actually giving the argument. So I went with my prior on your argument.
That’s what I’m suggesting you not do.
Writing out arguments, and in general, making one’s thought processes transparent, is a lot of work. We benefit greatly by not having a norm of only stating conclusions that are a small inferential distance away from public knowledge.
I’m not saying you should (necessarily) believe what I say, just because I say it. You just shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that I don’t have justifications beyond what I have stated or am willing to bother stating.
If I were to restrict myself to making claims that I could substantiate in a mere ~2 hours, that would preclude the possibility of me sharing the vast majority of what I know.
I’m not saying you should (necessarily) believe what I say, just because I say it.
If I’m not going to believe what you say, why even bother saying it in the first place? Isn’t just saying things “a lot of work”, too?
Writing out arguments, and in general, making one’s thought processes transparent, is a lot of work.
Guess what, verifying arguments that haven’t been written out transparently is a lot more work! And it’s often a requirement if what you say is to be useful at all. It is precisely when inferential distances are long that clarifying one’s argument becomes critically important!
Well, if your justifications are truly marvelous but the margin of this post is too narrow to contain them, you are basically asking everyone to trust you that you know what you’re talking about. This makes it an argument by reputation (or, in a slightly more pronounced form, an argument by authority).
I am fairly confident that you have justifications you haven’t bothered stating. But that’s not the question, the question is whether they are good justifications and this is a much more complicated matter.
You don’t seem to be engaging with what I said in the grandparent at all. The claim was:
We benefit greatly by not having a norm of only stating conclusions that are a small inferential distance away from public knowledge
Maybe you disagree with this, but you don’t even explicitly state disagreement; your comment just looks like an attempt to enforce the very norm that I claimed was undesirable.
I have often been bothered by that norm myself, especially on Less Wrong, but it’s not clear what you’re proposing to put in its place. Given the fact that human beings are not even close to the kind of ideal reasoners that Aumann’s theorem applies to, if you state something very far from what other people think, you cannot expect any sudden change in their probability estimate. They are just going to ignore you at best.
If you’re simply saying that people should assume you have reasons, they probably do assume that. But if you say something they think is wrong, they will just assume your reasons are bad ones. It is not clear why or how you can prevent them from doing that, since you probably do the same thing to them.
“Conclusions that are at a huge inferential distance” doesn’t look to me like a useful category. It includes both quantum physics and the lizardmen-are-secretly-ruling-the-Earth theory.
You (and anyone else) can, of course, offer such conclusions. But I don’t know why would you expect them to necessarily be taken seriously. How do you suggest people filter out rank crackpottery?
How do you distinguish claims in advanced physics from claims about lizardmen? There are ways of judging meaningfulness and truth of conclusions that you can’t yet understand or verify. There do exist experts who know things that you don’t yet know, but who you can identify as having expertise about those claims. Having the norm of not mentioning such claims is an arbitrary restriction on the kinds of considerations that can be used to think or argue about a point.
How do you distinguish claims in advanced physics from claims about lizardmen?
I can buy books and read papers about advanced physics that will outline the arguments in support of these claims from first principles. In a pinch, I could even refrain from verifying the claims myself, and simply trust that others have done so competently. None of this is true when a claim is simply unsupported!
Isn’t there an argument that having a million voices synthesising and popularising and ten doing detailed research is much less productive than the opposite? Feels a bit like Aristophanes: ”Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much”
Everyone going around discussing their overarching synthesis of everything sounds like it would produce a lot of talk and little research
Indeed, and I think a case can be made that this is exactly backwards (if we must have such “rules” at all).
It comes down to funding and prestige. Publishing research in high-profile journals makes the department look good and keeps the grant money flowing. The concern is that an academic who spends time popularizing is wasting time he could have spent doing research. A few decades ago, some departments had a culture where young academics could be looked down upon for being too good at teaching for precisely this reason.
At least nowadays many places bother to train TAs. My understanding is that not too long ago, the TA was just handed a syllabus and told to teach a class. Some schools had a reputation for admitting excess graduate students just to serve as TAs for a bit before being shown the door.
However, there are some universities that focus on quality undergraduate education. In those places, teaching ability is a big part of the hiring process and people have been denied tenure over poor teaching. It’s the big research universities that have historically been lax in their teaching standards.
Why not? What’s stopping them?
One of the rules is that beginning academics must not publish work like this. They have to publish cutting edge research for a long time before they are allowed to synthesize or popularize.
What’s stopping them is that by not playing by conventional rules, they will not get official kudos in the field. People like Bostrom, etc. who do play by the rules will. One might not care about official kudos per se, but one should—people with official kudos are the ones with actual sway on policy, etc. Important people read Bostrom’s book, no one important reads EY’s stuff.
I think this is the vital thing: not ‘does academia work perfectly’, but ‘can you work more effectively THROUGH academia’. Don’t know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren’t going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they’ll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.
That’s not really true. You can write a review article as one of your first publications and use it to lay out what you intend to work on. People won’t take your review article as seriously as they will one written by Dr. Bigshot et al., but there certainly aren’t any rules against it.
Also, the NSF is thrilled if you’re a beginner and you’re doing any sort of popular outreach. They love pop science blogs.
NSF requires many things that are bad for your career. This may well be the point, to counterbalance other sources of judgement.
Outside of the purview of NSF, here is an essay on how history is not written by a historian who was, at the time, blogging anonymously. She was afraid of her colleagues seeing her blog close to her professional interests while being open about writing essays about manga.
Indeed, and I think a case can be made that this is exactly backwards (if we must have such “rules” at all).
Ok, but before we turn everything upside down, can we think a little about why academia ended up being the way it is? Hanson had some good status-based explanations about the academic career trajectory.
If you haven’t done cutting edge stuff, the worry is you don’t know what you are talking about yet, and shouldn’t be a public-facing part of science.
Also there are well-known popularizers who aren’t significant academics, e.g. Bill Nye. Bill Nye did some engineering stuff, though.
Aren’t defacto most popularizers of academia journalists who write popular articles about science?
Journalists and scientists that write popular exposition books. The former are generally terrible (journalists tend to have an education that emphasizes writing, not numeracy).
But that doesn’t stop them from doing it or finding an audience.
Yes, but no one important takes them seriously.
I think plenty of politically important people read the science section of the New York Times and of other newspapers.
If important people would only listen to scientists for understanding science we would have different policy on global warming.
Same reason why milesmathis (google it, have fun) isn’t taken, and shouldn’t be taken seriously by the mainstream. Because “playing by the rules” didn’t work—you usually end up with an unending amount of crackpottery in what is actually not published: books, blogs, etc.
Not publishing in the mainstream while publishing books and self published articles is the crackpott’s artillery, unfortunately.
Think like the mainstream: given the amount of crazy stuff that’s present on the internet that couldn’t be published because it was, indeed, crazy, should I care about this particular guy that doesn’t publish anything but books (or self published articles) ? The unfortunate answer is no.
Why do you assume I haven’t?
Stop expecting short inferential distances!
Because you wrote one sentence without actually giving the argument. So I went with my prior on your argument. And my prior about arguments that argue for drastically changing the existing order of things is they aren’t right.
That’s what I’m suggesting you not do.
Writing out arguments, and in general, making one’s thought processes transparent, is a lot of work. We benefit greatly by not having a norm of only stating conclusions that are a small inferential distance away from public knowledge.
I’m not saying you should (necessarily) believe what I say, just because I say it. You just shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that I don’t have justifications beyond what I have stated or am willing to bother stating.
Cf. Jonah’s remark:
If I’m not going to believe what you say, why even bother saying it in the first place? Isn’t just saying things “a lot of work”, too?
Guess what, verifying arguments that haven’t been written out transparently is a lot more work! And it’s often a requirement if what you say is to be useful at all. It is precisely when inferential distances are long that clarifying one’s argument becomes critically important!
Well, if your justifications are truly marvelous but the margin of this post is too narrow to contain them, you are basically asking everyone to trust you that you know what you’re talking about. This makes it an argument by reputation (or, in a slightly more pronounced form, an argument by authority).
I am fairly confident that you have justifications you haven’t bothered stating. But that’s not the question, the question is whether they are good justifications and this is a much more complicated matter.
You don’t seem to be engaging with what I said in the grandparent at all. The claim was:
Maybe you disagree with this, but you don’t even explicitly state disagreement; your comment just looks like an attempt to enforce the very norm that I claimed was undesirable.
I have often been bothered by that norm myself, especially on Less Wrong, but it’s not clear what you’re proposing to put in its place. Given the fact that human beings are not even close to the kind of ideal reasoners that Aumann’s theorem applies to, if you state something very far from what other people think, you cannot expect any sudden change in their probability estimate. They are just going to ignore you at best.
If you’re simply saying that people should assume you have reasons, they probably do assume that. But if you say something they think is wrong, they will just assume your reasons are bad ones. It is not clear why or how you can prevent them from doing that, since you probably do the same thing to them.
“Conclusions that are at a huge inferential distance” doesn’t look to me like a useful category. It includes both quantum physics and the lizardmen-are-secretly-ruling-the-Earth theory.
You (and anyone else) can, of course, offer such conclusions. But I don’t know why would you expect them to necessarily be taken seriously. How do you suggest people filter out rank crackpottery?
How do you distinguish claims in advanced physics from claims about lizardmen? There are ways of judging meaningfulness and truth of conclusions that you can’t yet understand or verify. There do exist experts who know things that you don’t yet know, but who you can identify as having expertise about those claims. Having the norm of not mentioning such claims is an arbitrary restriction on the kinds of considerations that can be used to think or argue about a point.
I can buy books and read papers about advanced physics that will outline the arguments in support of these claims from first principles. In a pinch, I could even refrain from verifying the claims myself, and simply trust that others have done so competently. None of this is true when a claim is simply unsupported!
Isn’t there an argument that having a million voices synthesising and popularising and ten doing detailed research is much less productive than the opposite? Feels a bit like Aristophanes:
”Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much”
Everyone going around discussing their overarching synthesis of everything sounds like it would produce a lot of talk and little research
It comes down to funding and prestige. Publishing research in high-profile journals makes the department look good and keeps the grant money flowing. The concern is that an academic who spends time popularizing is wasting time he could have spent doing research. A few decades ago, some departments had a culture where young academics could be looked down upon for being too good at teaching for precisely this reason.
Curious about the downvote.
Is it or isn’t it true generally in academia that good teaching is considered lower status than good research?
In the US academia it is definitely true. Especially teaching undergrads which is often enough just relegated to TAs.
At least nowadays many places bother to train TAs. My understanding is that not too long ago, the TA was just handed a syllabus and told to teach a class. Some schools had a reputation for admitting excess graduate students just to serve as TAs for a bit before being shown the door.
However, there are some universities that focus on quality undergraduate education. In those places, teaching ability is a big part of the hiring process and people have been denied tenure over poor teaching. It’s the big research universities that have historically been lax in their teaching standards.
Yep. This is a good case to apply the standard heuristic: Look at incentives.