In medicine, John Ioannidis has basically built his career around exposing unpleasant truths that the perverse incentives have led the field away from. He has gotten several of his papers to various top journals, is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and been cited over 30,000 times. Isn’t that evidence that you can make fundamental criticisms of the state of the field without sacrificing your career?
My intuition suggests that both in the case of Ioannidis and other somewhat similar cases—such as the WEIRD paper, which seriously questioned the generalizability of pretty much all existing psychological research, and which has been cited almost 300 times since its publication in 2010 - is that when a field is drifting away from reality, most of the people working within the field are quite aware of the fact. When somebody finally makes a clear and persuasive argument about this being the case, everyone will start citing that argument.
I certainly don’t deny that the self-correcting mechanism you describe has worked to some extent in some fields in recent past. However, it also seems evident that in certain other fields nothing like that is happening, even though their mainstream has long been drifting far from reality, and the only people making cogent fundamental criticism are outsiders completely out of grace with the establishment. I don’t have anything like a complete theory that would explain when correct fundamental criticism will be acclaimed as an important contribution, and when it will trigger a negative career-killing response from the establishment.
Now, of course, one possibility is that I have simply acquired crackpot beliefs on several subjects and I’m completely misdiagnosing the situation. Clearly, I would disagree, but examining the problem further would require getting into a complex discussion of each particular subject in question.
That said, regarding the specific question of fields that have bearing on the global warming controversies, my current positions are (mainly) ones of confusion and indecision. They are not among the examples of clearly pathological fields that I have in mind. In the context of this thread, I merely want to point out that the arguments such as that advanced by Nordhaus aren’t enough to give much certainty about the health of these areas.
This paper looks to me like it accurately criticizes a basic and important methodological flaw in some of the climate change literature; my impression is that the authors haven’t suffered from it, but that they also haven’t been listened to all that much. Note that although Annan disagrees with the more extreme predictions, he also explicitly disagrees with climate skepticism, which helps convince me that skepticism is probably wrong (since he seems pretty reasonable), but which also leaves Vladimir free to argue that an actual skeptic would face greater career risks. Your examples look only questionably relevant to me, because those fields aren’t politicized in the same way that climate change is.
In medicine, John Ioannidis has basically built his career around exposing unpleasant truths that the perverse incentives have led the field away from. He has gotten several of his papers to various top journals, is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and been cited over 30,000 times. Isn’t that evidence that you can make fundamental criticisms of the state of the field without sacrificing your career?
My intuition suggests that both in the case of Ioannidis and other somewhat similar cases—such as the WEIRD paper, which seriously questioned the generalizability of pretty much all existing psychological research, and which has been cited almost 300 times since its publication in 2010 - is that when a field is drifting away from reality, most of the people working within the field are quite aware of the fact. When somebody finally makes a clear and persuasive argument about this being the case, everyone will start citing that argument.
I certainly don’t deny that the self-correcting mechanism you describe has worked to some extent in some fields in recent past. However, it also seems evident that in certain other fields nothing like that is happening, even though their mainstream has long been drifting far from reality, and the only people making cogent fundamental criticism are outsiders completely out of grace with the establishment. I don’t have anything like a complete theory that would explain when correct fundamental criticism will be acclaimed as an important contribution, and when it will trigger a negative career-killing response from the establishment.
Now, of course, one possibility is that I have simply acquired crackpot beliefs on several subjects and I’m completely misdiagnosing the situation. Clearly, I would disagree, but examining the problem further would require getting into a complex discussion of each particular subject in question.
That said, regarding the specific question of fields that have bearing on the global warming controversies, my current positions are (mainly) ones of confusion and indecision. They are not among the examples of clearly pathological fields that I have in mind. In the context of this thread, I merely want to point out that the arguments such as that advanced by Nordhaus aren’t enough to give much certainty about the health of these areas.
This paper looks to me like it accurately criticizes a basic and important methodological flaw in some of the climate change literature; my impression is that the authors haven’t suffered from it, but that they also haven’t been listened to all that much. Note that although Annan disagrees with the more extreme predictions, he also explicitly disagrees with climate skepticism, which helps convince me that skepticism is probably wrong (since he seems pretty reasonable), but which also leaves Vladimir free to argue that an actual skeptic would face greater career risks. Your examples look only questionably relevant to me, because those fields aren’t politicized in the same way that climate change is.