Regardless, you’re missing the point of the essay. The overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. It’s clearly explained that ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all of these ongoing issues.
Hastings is responding to the claim in the title, so if he’s missed the point of the essay, you’ve mistitled it.
I think this would’ve done much better with a more modest title something like “academia is mostly not truthseeking” or something similar. LW is highly suspicious of clickbait titles and inflated claims—the goal to “inform not persuade” is almost the opposite of essay writing elsewhere.
I think you come off as condescending and defensive in the above response, and it probably earned the post an extra downvote or two. I upvoted it, because I think it’s an important topic, and I agree with the spirit if not the literal claim in the title. I think many LWers would roughly agree, they just wouldn’t state it this hyperbolically.
Having been a professional academic for 23 years and considering the epistemology pretty closely, I think the title isn’t far off. As Hastings said, you’d have to quantify what’s academic research, but most of the top-journal stuff I read wouldn’t deserve the commonsense meaning of “fake”. But it is so low-quality as a result of conflicting incentives that calling most of it “confused” or “wrong” wouldn’t be a stretch.
I already know that. I addressed these considerations in greater depth in my sequel essay: https://zerocontradictions.net/epistemology/academia-critique
Regardless, you’re missing the point of the essay. The overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. It’s clearly explained that ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all of these ongoing issues.
Hastings is responding to the claim in the title, so if he’s missed the point of the essay, you’ve mistitled it.
I think this would’ve done much better with a more modest title something like “academia is mostly not truthseeking” or something similar. LW is highly suspicious of clickbait titles and inflated claims—the goal to “inform not persuade” is almost the opposite of essay writing elsewhere.
I think you come off as condescending and defensive in the above response, and it probably earned the post an extra downvote or two. I upvoted it, because I think it’s an important topic, and I agree with the spirit if not the literal claim in the title. I think many LWers would roughly agree, they just wouldn’t state it this hyperbolically.
Having been a professional academic for 23 years and considering the epistemology pretty closely, I think the title isn’t far off. As Hastings said, you’d have to quantify what’s academic research, but most of the top-journal stuff I read wouldn’t deserve the commonsense meaning of “fake”. But it is so low-quality as a result of conflicting incentives that calling most of it “confused” or “wrong” wouldn’t be a stretch.