We’re not seeing academia defend itself like that today. I’m not sure if the norms decayed over time, or current political forces are stronger than in the past, but neither is good news.
This is a crux of the issue, in my view. It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia: since 1950 we saw the development of publish or perish culture, a shift towards administrative activities at the expense of instruction and research, and most recently the replication crisis. The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important. That is such a fundamental part of the story of science that even laypeople know about it. I would be extremely surprised if that decay was not at least mirrored in things like principles of political noninterference. STEM is vulnerable to political takeover because the time STEM professors spend defending the spirit of free inquiry is time taken away from churning out the next paper and writing grant applications, just like everyone else.
(unless we figure out how to make sure such norms are strong enough and stay strong enough)
I think this is the mechanism by which movements fade. In order for a norm to work, people have to make continuous, active investments in it. This mostly means doing things that reflect them, spending money on them, or taking time to advocate for them specifically.
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities? From the example you cited for STEM fields, it looks to me like two things: 1) systematically take a hit on the talent-level of its professors (in their areas of expertise); 2) they will redirect some fraction of research dollars in every field to diversity and inclusion. From my other exposure to the rhetoric, I suspect they will cripple genetics research, which is indeed a big deal and also reminiscent of Communism.
It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities?
Aside from what you mentioned, I see:
strengthening of the information bubble for students, making it harder to reverse the mutually-reinforcing ideological takeover of epistemic institutions
redirecting attention/effort of scientists and future politicians (educated under the system) away from x-risks / long-term concerns and towards near-term SJ concerns
if it takes over philosophy departments (which seems to be happening), it will hurt philosophical inquiry, reduce the number/quality of future EA leaders, affect AI alignment in so far as it depends on correctly solving philosophical problems
economics departments will output increasingly bad ideas, causing economic stagnation or collapse, and further ripple effects from that
education departments will output increasingly bad ideas, with obvious consequences
the Right will distrust academia even more than it already does and disregard or oppose even the best ideas coming out from it, making it very difficult for society to coordinate to address current and future problems
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Mostly it looks to me like a series of unrelated changes built up over time, and the unintended consequences were mostly adverse.
An example is the War on Cancer and the changes that came with it to funding. It had long been the case that funding was mostly handed out on a project-by-project basis, but in order to get the funding dedicated to cancer research it was necessary to explain how cancer research would benefit. The obvious first-order impact is an increase in administrative overhead for getting the money.
Alongside this science sort of professionalized. I expect that when the sense of how important something is permeates, professionalization is viewed as a natural consequence, but it seems to have misfired here. Professionalization, like other forms of labor organization, isn’t about maximizing anything but about ensuring a minimum. This means things like more metrics, which is why our civilization formally prefers a lot of crappy scientific papers to a few good ones, and doesn’t want any kind of non-paper presentation of scientific progress at all. Science jobs become subject to Goodharting, because people start thinking that the right way to get more science is just to increase the number of scientists, on account of them all being interchangeable professionals with a reliable minimum output.
The university environment also got leaned on as a lever for progress; the student loan programs all grew over this same period, which seems to have driven a long period of competition for headcount. This shifted universities’ priorities from executing their nominal mission towards signalling desirability among students/parents/etc. I am certain at least part of that came at the expense of faculty, even if only by increasing the administrative burden still further by yet more metrics.
On the fixing side, I am actually pretty optimistic. A few simple things would probably help a lot, two examples being funding and organization. Example: Bell Labs and Xerox PARC have been discussed here a lot. Both cases deviated significantly from the standard university/government system of funding individual projects case by case. Under the project/grant system being a scientist reduces to being able to successfully get funding for a series of projects over time. At Bell and at PARC, they rather made long-term investments on a person-by-person basis. I think this has wide-ranging effects, but not least among them is that there wasn’t a lot of administrative overhead to a given investigation; rather they could all be picked up, put down, or adapted as needed. Another effect, maybe intentional but seemingly happenstance, is that they built a community of researchers in the colloquial sense. This is pretty different from the formal employee relationships that dominate now. Around 7 years ago I listened to a recruiting pitch from Sandia National Laboratories for engineering students, and asked how communication was between different groups in the lab. The representative said that she knew of a case where two labs right across the hall from each other were investigating the same thing for over a year before they realized it, because nobody talks.
This suggests to me that a university that was struggling financially, or maybe just needed to take a gamble on moving up in the world, could cheaply implement what appears to be a superior research-producing apparatus, just by shifting their methods of funding and tracking results.
The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important.
The replication crisis is about scientists finally waking up and thinking replication is important. Psychology never had a culture that valued replication.
This is a crux of the issue, in my view. It’s worth considering that this isn’t happening in independently of other major developments in academia: since 1950 we saw the development of publish or perish culture, a shift towards administrative activities at the expense of instruction and research, and most recently the replication crisis. The great shock of the replication crisis to me was that there was a group of scientists who sincerely believed that replication was not important. That is such a fundamental part of the story of science that even laypeople know about it. I would be extremely surprised if that decay was not at least mirrored in things like principles of political noninterference. STEM is vulnerable to political takeover because the time STEM professors spend defending the spirit of free inquiry is time taken away from churning out the next paper and writing grant applications, just like everyone else.
I think this is the mechanism by which movements fade. In order for a norm to work, people have to make continuous, active investments in it. This mostly means doing things that reflect them, spending money on them, or taking time to advocate for them specifically.
Out of curiosity, what do you think the specific harms are from how the left will administer universities? From the example you cited for STEM fields, it looks to me like two things: 1) systematically take a hit on the talent-level of its professors (in their areas of expertise); 2) they will redirect some fraction of research dollars in every field to diversity and inclusion. From my other exposure to the rhetoric, I suspect they will cripple genetics research, which is indeed a big deal and also reminiscent of Communism.
You make good points here. Any ideas why those other shifts happened and how can we help reverse them or prevent them from happening elsewhere?
Aside from what you mentioned, I see:
strengthening of the information bubble for students, making it harder to reverse the mutually-reinforcing ideological takeover of epistemic institutions
redirecting attention/effort of scientists and future politicians (educated under the system) away from x-risks / long-term concerns and towards near-term SJ concerns
if it takes over philosophy departments (which seems to be happening), it will hurt philosophical inquiry, reduce the number/quality of future EA leaders, affect AI alignment in so far as it depends on correctly solving philosophical problems
economics departments will output increasingly bad ideas, causing economic stagnation or collapse, and further ripple effects from that
education departments will output increasingly bad ideas, with obvious consequences
the Right will distrust academia even more than it already does and disregard or oppose even the best ideas coming out from it, making it very difficult for society to coordinate to address current and future problems
Mostly it looks to me like a series of unrelated changes built up over time, and the unintended consequences were mostly adverse.
An example is the War on Cancer and the changes that came with it to funding. It had long been the case that funding was mostly handed out on a project-by-project basis, but in order to get the funding dedicated to cancer research it was necessary to explain how cancer research would benefit. The obvious first-order impact is an increase in administrative overhead for getting the money.
Alongside this science sort of professionalized. I expect that when the sense of how important something is permeates, professionalization is viewed as a natural consequence, but it seems to have misfired here. Professionalization, like other forms of labor organization, isn’t about maximizing anything but about ensuring a minimum. This means things like more metrics, which is why our civilization formally prefers a lot of crappy scientific papers to a few good ones, and doesn’t want any kind of non-paper presentation of scientific progress at all. Science jobs become subject to Goodharting, because people start thinking that the right way to get more science is just to increase the number of scientists, on account of them all being interchangeable professionals with a reliable minimum output.
The university environment also got leaned on as a lever for progress; the student loan programs all grew over this same period, which seems to have driven a long period of competition for headcount. This shifted universities’ priorities from executing their nominal mission towards signalling desirability among students/parents/etc. I am certain at least part of that came at the expense of faculty, even if only by increasing the administrative burden still further by yet more metrics.
On the fixing side, I am actually pretty optimistic. A few simple things would probably help a lot, two examples being funding and organization. Example: Bell Labs and Xerox PARC have been discussed here a lot. Both cases deviated significantly from the standard university/government system of funding individual projects case by case. Under the project/grant system being a scientist reduces to being able to successfully get funding for a series of projects over time. At Bell and at PARC, they rather made long-term investments on a person-by-person basis. I think this has wide-ranging effects, but not least among them is that there wasn’t a lot of administrative overhead to a given investigation; rather they could all be picked up, put down, or adapted as needed. Another effect, maybe intentional but seemingly happenstance, is that they built a community of researchers in the colloquial sense. This is pretty different from the formal employee relationships that dominate now. Around 7 years ago I listened to a recruiting pitch from Sandia National Laboratories for engineering students, and asked how communication was between different groups in the lab. The representative said that she knew of a case where two labs right across the hall from each other were investigating the same thing for over a year before they realized it, because nobody talks.
This suggests to me that a university that was struggling financially, or maybe just needed to take a gamble on moving up in the world, could cheaply implement what appears to be a superior research-producing apparatus, just by shifting their methods of funding and tracking results.
The replication crisis is about scientists finally waking up and thinking replication is important. Psychology never had a culture that valued replication.