I think the structure of Alignment Forum vs. academic journals solves a surprising number of the problems you mention. It creates a different structure for both publication and prestige. More on this at the end.
It was kind of cathartic to read this. I’ve spent some time thinking about the inefficiencies of academia, but hadn’t put together a theory this crisp. My 23 years in academic cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience would have been insanely frustrating if I hadn’t been working on lab funding. I resolved going in that I wasn’t going to play the publish-or-perish game and jump through a bunch of strange hoops to do what would be publicly regarded as “good work”.
I think this is a good high-level theory of what’s wrong with academia. I think one problem is that academic fields don’t have a mandate to produce useful progress, just progress. It’s a matter of inmates running the asylum. This all makes some sense, since the routes to making useful progress aren’t obvious, and non-experts shouldn’t be directly in charge of the directions of scientific progress; but there’s clearly something missing when no one along the line has more than a passing motivation to select problems for impact.
Around 2006 I heard Tal Yarkoni, a brilliant young scientist, give a talk on the structural problems of science and its publication model. (He’s now ex-scientist as many brilliant young scientists become these days). The changes he advocated were almost precisely the publication and prestige model of the Alignment Forum. It allows publications of any length and format, and provides a public time stamp for when ideas were contributed and developed. It also provides a public record, in the form of karma scores, for how valuable the scientific community found that publication. This only works in a closed community of experts, which is why I’m mentioning AF and not LW. One’s karma score is publicly visible as a sum-total-of-community-appreciation of that person’s work.
This public record of appreciation breaks an important deadlocking incentive structure in the traditional scientific publication model: If you’re going to find fault with a prominent theory, your publication of it had better be damned good (or rather “good” by the vague aesthetic judgments you discuss). Otherewise you’ve just earned a negative valence from everyone who likes that theory and/or the people that have advocated it, with little to show for it. I think that’s why there’s little market for the type of analysis you mention, in which someone goes through the literature in painstaking detail to resolve a controversy in the litterature, and then finds no publication outlet for their hard work.
This is all downstream of the current scientific model that’s roughly an advocacy model. As in law, it’s considered good and proper to vigorously advocate for a theory even if you don’t personally think it’s likely to be true. This might make sense in law, but in academia it’s the reason we sometimes say that science advances one funeral at a time. The effect of motivated reasoning combined with the advocacy norm cause scientists to advocate their favorite wrong theory unto their deathbed, and be lauded by most of their peers for doing so.
The rationalist stance of asking that people demonstrate their worth by changing their mind in the face of new evidence is present in science, but it seemed to me much less common than the advocacy norm. This rationalist norm provides partial resistance to the effects of motivated reasoning. That is worth it’s own post, but I’m not sure I’ll get around to writing it before the singularity.
These are all reasons that the best science is often done outside of academia.
Yeah, something like the alignment forum would actually be pretty good, and while LW/AF has a lot of problems, lots of it is mostly attributable to the people and culture around here, rather than their merits.
LW/AF tools would be extremely helpful for a lot of scientists, once you divorce the culture from it.
I think the structure of Alignment Forum vs. academic journals solves a surprising number of the problems you mention. It creates a different structure for both publication and prestige. More on this at the end.
It was kind of cathartic to read this. I’ve spent some time thinking about the inefficiencies of academia, but hadn’t put together a theory this crisp. My 23 years in academic cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience would have been insanely frustrating if I hadn’t been working on lab funding. I resolved going in that I wasn’t going to play the publish-or-perish game and jump through a bunch of strange hoops to do what would be publicly regarded as “good work”.
I think this is a good high-level theory of what’s wrong with academia. I think one problem is that academic fields don’t have a mandate to produce useful progress, just progress. It’s a matter of inmates running the asylum. This all makes some sense, since the routes to making useful progress aren’t obvious, and non-experts shouldn’t be directly in charge of the directions of scientific progress; but there’s clearly something missing when no one along the line has more than a passing motivation to select problems for impact.
Around 2006 I heard Tal Yarkoni, a brilliant young scientist, give a talk on the structural problems of science and its publication model. (He’s now ex-scientist as many brilliant young scientists become these days). The changes he advocated were almost precisely the publication and prestige model of the Alignment Forum. It allows publications of any length and format, and provides a public time stamp for when ideas were contributed and developed. It also provides a public record, in the form of karma scores, for how valuable the scientific community found that publication. This only works in a closed community of experts, which is why I’m mentioning AF and not LW. One’s karma score is publicly visible as a sum-total-of-community-appreciation of that person’s work.
This public record of appreciation breaks an important deadlocking incentive structure in the traditional scientific publication model: If you’re going to find fault with a prominent theory, your publication of it had better be damned good (or rather “good” by the vague aesthetic judgments you discuss). Otherewise you’ve just earned a negative valence from everyone who likes that theory and/or the people that have advocated it, with little to show for it. I think that’s why there’s little market for the type of analysis you mention, in which someone goes through the literature in painstaking detail to resolve a controversy in the litterature, and then finds no publication outlet for their hard work.
This is all downstream of the current scientific model that’s roughly an advocacy model. As in law, it’s considered good and proper to vigorously advocate for a theory even if you don’t personally think it’s likely to be true. This might make sense in law, but in academia it’s the reason we sometimes say that science advances one funeral at a time. The effect of motivated reasoning combined with the advocacy norm cause scientists to advocate their favorite wrong theory unto their deathbed, and be lauded by most of their peers for doing so.
The rationalist stance of asking that people demonstrate their worth by changing their mind in the face of new evidence is present in science, but it seemed to me much less common than the advocacy norm. This rationalist norm provides partial resistance to the effects of motivated reasoning. That is worth it’s own post, but I’m not sure I’ll get around to writing it before the singularity.
These are all reasons that the best science is often done outside of academia.
Anyway, nice thought-provoking article.
Yeah, something like the alignment forum would actually be pretty good, and while LW/AF has a lot of problems, lots of it is mostly attributable to the people and culture around here, rather than their merits.
LW/AF tools would be extremely helpful for a lot of scientists, once you divorce the culture from it.