I’m struck by how different people have such different responses to the list. Kaj felt like zir faith in humanity was restored; I rolled my eyes really hard and may have sighed or groaned. This caused me to moderately update in the direction of “I was being uncharitable”.
2 - philosophy of religion; loud angry Twitter arguments
1 - Scientology propaganda
First, some people may have higher expectations than others. Maybe (making up numbers) Kaj and you both now think bioethics is a 5, but previously Kaj expected it to be a 4 while you expected it to be a 5, so he comes away with a happy surprise while you come away exasperated with the social-psych-tier shoddiness.
Second, some people may have higher standards than others. If your standard is ‘better than Twitter’ (say, ‘above 2.5’), then counting up to 5 might feel downright refreshing. If your standard is ‘meeting the bare-minimum level of econoliteracy and quantitativeness to not yield norms and institutions that cause millions of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths or the senseless death and disability of hundreds of infants’, then you’re applying a different test to the papers.
I think there are also different orientations to take here, like ‘bioethics has a job to do; are they getting the job done?’ versus ‘bioethicists are human beings with thoughts and ideas; how interesting do I find the thoughts and ideas?’. I think both frames should be in the mix: even if you come away from this still thinking bioethics is a diseased discipline, seeing the sausage get made makes it clearer how smart, well-intentioned people could end up in a situation like that.
It’s less “othering”; I could imagine friends of mine in philosophy and social science starting a field that ends up causing similar problems in society.
As an aside, I find it bizarre that Economics gets put at 9 - I think a review of what gets done in top econ journals would cause you to update that number down by at least 1. (It’s not usually very bad, but it’s often mostly useless.) And I think it’s clear that lots of Econ does, in fact, have a replication crisis. (But we’ll if see that is true as some of the newer replication projects actually come out with results.)
I guess I was thinking of 9⁄10 as a relatively low bar in the grand scheme of things (“pretty good”), and placing it so far from journalism (etc.) to express my low regard for the latter more so than my high regard for econ. But it sounds like it may belong lower on the scale regardless.
Yeah, I might have spent a bit too much time on Twitter recently so my comparison point was around 2-3.
More specifically, I think I got the reaction while reading abstract #4, comparing commercially-assisted and physician-assisted suicide. What I felt so strongly was the contrast of
1) seeing a paper calmly working through all the relevant facts and concluding that if you think physician-assisted suicide is okay, you should also consider commercially-assisted suicide okay
vs.
2) my mental image of the Twitter mob you might summon if you even considered the possibility that commercially-assisted suicide might be okay
Sounds like we need a social media site where all top-level posts must just be links to papers, and you can only reply to top-level posts, not to other replies. :)
This is a much better response than my comment deserved! I feel embarrassed about the disparity (not your fault; don’t stop leaving great comments just because the OP half-assed it). I think I’m still trying to find the right balance between “volume of comments and posts ~ liveliness of overall discussion” and “bulletproofness of comments and posts ~ quality of overall discussion”.
I’m struck by how different people have such different responses to the list. Kaj felt like zir faith in humanity was restored; I rolled my eyes really hard and may have sighed or groaned. This caused me to moderately update in the direction of “I was being uncharitable”.
There are two sources of variance that make it a bit hard to update on others’ impressions. Imagine a Scholarly Goodness scale like this:
First, some people may have higher expectations than others. Maybe (making up numbers) Kaj and you both now think bioethics is a 5, but previously Kaj expected it to be a 4 while you expected it to be a 5, so he comes away with a happy surprise while you come away exasperated with the social-psych-tier shoddiness.
Second, some people may have higher standards than others. If your standard is ‘better than Twitter’ (say, ‘above 2.5’), then counting up to 5 might feel downright refreshing. If your standard is ‘meeting the bare-minimum level of econoliteracy and quantitativeness to not yield norms and institutions that cause millions of unnecessary COVID-19 deaths or the senseless death and disability of hundreds of infants’, then you’re applying a different test to the papers.
I think there are also different orientations to take here, like ‘bioethics has a job to do; are they getting the job done?’ versus ‘bioethicists are human beings with thoughts and ideas; how interesting do I find the thoughts and ideas?’. I think both frames should be in the mix: even if you come away from this still thinking bioethics is a diseased discipline, seeing the sausage get made makes it clearer how smart, well-intentioned people could end up in a situation like that.
It’s less “othering”; I could imagine friends of mine in philosophy and social science starting a field that ends up causing similar problems in society.
As an aside, I find it bizarre that Economics gets put at 9 - I think a review of what gets done in top econ journals would cause you to update that number down by at least 1. (It’s not usually very bad, but it’s often mostly useless.) And I think it’s clear that lots of Econ does, in fact, have a replication crisis. (But we’ll if see that is true as some of the newer replication projects actually come out with results.)
I guess I was thinking of 9⁄10 as a relatively low bar in the grand scheme of things (“pretty good”), and placing it so far from journalism (etc.) to express my low regard for the latter more so than my high regard for econ. But it sounds like it may belong lower on the scale regardless.
Yeah, I might have spent a bit too much time on Twitter recently so my comparison point was around 2-3.
More specifically, I think I got the reaction while reading abstract #4, comparing commercially-assisted and physician-assisted suicide. What I felt so strongly was the contrast of
1) seeing a paper calmly working through all the relevant facts and concluding that if you think physician-assisted suicide is okay, you should also consider commercially-assisted suicide okay
vs.
2) my mental image of the Twitter mob you might summon if you even considered the possibility that commercially-assisted suicide might be okay
Sounds like we need a social media site where all top-level posts must just be links to papers, and you can only reply to top-level posts, not to other replies. :)
This is a much better response than my comment deserved! I feel embarrassed about the disparity (not your fault; don’t stop leaving great comments just because the OP half-assed it). I think I’m still trying to find the right balance between “volume of comments and posts ~ liveliness of overall discussion” and “bulletproofness of comments and posts ~ quality of overall discussion”.