As far as c) goes, if your intention is to live right next the university you would have to move. Practically, where I live most people don’t move next to university. That in turn means that you also don’t gain the social benefits of having your fellow students live next to you.
It seems that your comment tries to take it apart by looking at whether you like the way the system is designed and not by looking at effects of it. That means instead of trying to see whether what you are seeing is true, you expand on your ideas of how things should be.
It seems that your comment tries to take it apart by looking at whether you like the way the system is designed and not by looking at effects of it. That means instead of trying to see whether what you are seeing is true, you expand on your ideas of how things should be.
What exactly should my reply contain ?
As in, my argument in the original post is basically:
a) Universities evolved to install and provide primary needs (safety and social circle) instead of a more niche need for self-actualization
b) Research is slowing down overall, it could partially be because universities no longer focus on self-actualization and instead focus on providing safety and a social circle.
What I was basically saying is that I’m not sure if a applies to German universities, as in, I agree that they are probably less-so incentivized to focus on providing safety and a social circle.
I have no idea if b applies or not, as in, I’m not sure how well German universities have been doing and it’s hard to measure their progress since the 30s and 40s obviously had a pretty huge negative effect on the whole upper education system.
I do overall think the example of German universities specifically (and Austrian ones, to some extent), because there’s so many of them and many of them are vocation-focused specifically, giving a place to go for people that just want security, not a place in academia, is a good counter to my ideas here.
But also, my knowledge of the German education system is so poor overall, that I can’t really make very specific claims here.
If you believe that overall research slow down is happening to factors that apply in the US but don’t apply in Germany, then the logical conclusion would be that Germany should have a higher research output.
To the extend that you are interested in knowing whether your thesis is true, it would make sense to check. Rationality is not just about making plausible claims but also investigating whether they might be true.
To the extend that you are interested in knowing whether your thesis is true, it would make sense to check.
How would I specifically go about checking this though ? As in, I do have data and knowledge on US and UK universities, I don’t have data on Germany Universities.
If you have data on German university research output, then I think it’s worth looking at, if not, I feel like what you’re basically doing is saying: “Hey, you don’t have data on this specific thing, it might go either way, your hypothesis is null and void”.
Provided data on German universities existed, why not ask for data about every single country with universities.
You could argue “Well, you should become an expert in the field and have all possible data handy before making any claims”, but then that claim would invalidate literally every single original thought on LessWrong that uses facts and even most academic papers.
Also, German Universities constitute a pretty bad example in my opinion, as in:
a) Murdering, exiling or routing out your highest IQ demographic and most public intellectuals
b) Having the rest taken away by the US, Russia and UK
c) Living for dozens of years in a country that’s been morally, geographically and culturally divided ravaged by WW2 (plus 1⁄3 of it living under a brutal~ish communist dictatorship)
Would make for a pretty weird outlier in all of this no matter what.
As in, if we were to compare other rich academic systems I’d rather do Japan, Italy, France, Spain or Switzerland
My complaint is that you don’t look at whether countries that are differently effected by the factors you list actually do differently on research output. If you don’t do that I think it’s hard know whether on of the factors you list is indeed causal for the result.
What exactly do you mean by “the factors I listed” though ?
As in, I think that my basic argument goes:
“There’s reason to think most kids would feel unsafe in a college environment, desire a social circle and job security, not the kind of transcendent self-actualization style goals that fuel research”. I think this generally holds for anyone at the age of 18-22 outside of outlier, hence why I cited the pyramid of needs, because the research behind that basically points to us needing different things in an age-correlated way (few teenagers feel like they need self actualization). I think this is somewhat exaggerated in the US because of debt&distance but should be noticeable everywhere.
Next, there’s reason to believe research inside universities is slowing down in certain areas, I have no reason to believe the lack of people desiring self-actualization is the cause for this though, except for a gut feeling that self-actualization is a better motivation to research nature than, say, wanting your paycheck at the end of the day. Most famous researcher seem to have been slightly crazy and not driven by societal goals but rather by an inner wish to “set things right” in one way or another, or to leave a mark on the world”
So basically, the best I can do to “prove” any of this would be something like:
Take some sort of comparative research output metric, these are hard to find, and are going to be very confounded with country-wealth (some examples: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/Nature%20&%20Science/global/All/score) … “small socialist countries” produce a surprising amount of researcher per capita, but maybe that’s something inherent to being a small rich country, not to have stronger communities and social support.
See if this correlates with % of the population working, quality of social security, some index measuring security, some index measuring happiness. Assume more research will come out of countries that perform well on this.
This will generally be true in terms of research, publications, books… etc (see Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweeden, Norway, Iceland… which seem to have a disproportionate amount of e.g. nature publications in report to the population), but you will also get outliers (see Israel, which produced a lot of research even dozens of years back when professors&students would be called on a yearly basis to fight to death against an out-numbering enemy that wanted to murder them).
However, you can’t **** draw conclusion from numbers of publications, and things such as “security index” and “happiness index” and even “quality of social security” are very hard to measure. Plus, they are confounded by the wealth of the country.
On the other hand, there’s good data on the idea that research is slowing down overall, that is much easier to place on “universities as a whole”, since by all metrics is seems that research is heavily correlated with academia (see, where most researchers work, where the people that get noble prizes work … etc).
So making the general assumption, of “research is slowing down” is much easier than doing the correlation on a per country basis.
If you can claim there is a valid way to measure basic needs that has a per-country statistic, and a various way to measure “research output” on a per country basis… than I’d be very curios in seeing that, I can even run an analysis based on various standard methods to see if there’s a correlation.
So the generic claim “kids are not researcher and don’t want to be researcher, universities can’t do multiple things at once better than doing one thing, thus if universities have to take care of kids they will have less time to focus on actual research” is easy to look at wholistically, but harder to look at on a per-country basis.
Impossible ? I don’t think so
Worthwhile ? I don’t know. As in, this whole article is closer to “here’s an interesting perspective, say, one that might warrant thinking about, when doing research” rather than “here’s a factual claim about how stuff works”. To make it any better, it would have to be elevated to a factual claim, but then I would basically have to trust the kind of analysis mentioned above (which again, I think would be impossible to run and get significant results since all the metrics I can think of are very leaky).
Honestly, it might have been a better perspective to approach this topic, I might even try to see if there’s relevant data on the subject and update the article if there is, barring that, I literally don’t see how this sort of hunch + basic evidence about generic human psychology plus observing a trend opinion piece differs from anything here. Maybe I’ve been misjudging the epistemic strength of the claims being seen in article around here… in which case, ahm… “sorry ?”, but also, I don’t really see your argument here.
Yes, assuming magical data fell out of the sky or our time to gather data was infinite every single piece of human thought could be improved, but I’m not sure why the stopping condition for this article would be “analysis comparing countries”… as opposed to any other random goalpost.
I cited the pyramid of needs, because the research behind that basically points to us needing different things in an age-correlated way
The research behind it says that the pyramid is not how humans work. Maslow created it in a non-data driven way and researchers that did try to support the thesis with data failed.
It can be sometimes used as a decent fake framework but if you treat it as a theory that’s research based you are basing your argument on quicksand.
Viktor Frankl found that the need for self-actualization or meaning was strong in internment which in-turn links to d world war where the basic needs often weren’t fulfilled and decided about who made it out alive.
When it comes to the claim that the hierarchy doesn’t exist, Wikipedia links to the Atlantic which inturn links to Louis Tay et al which says:
In addition, the associations of SWB [subjective well being] with the fulfillment of specific needs were largely independent of whether other needs were fulfilled.
As far as c) goes, if your intention is to live right next the university you would have to move. Practically, where I live most people don’t move next to university. That in turn means that you also don’t gain the social benefits of having your fellow students live next to you.
It seems that your comment tries to take it apart by looking at whether you like the way the system is designed and not by looking at effects of it. That means instead of trying to see whether what you are seeing is true, you expand on your ideas of how things should be.
What exactly should my reply contain ?
As in, my argument in the original post is basically:
a) Universities evolved to install and provide primary needs (safety and social circle) instead of a more niche need for self-actualization
b) Research is slowing down overall, it could partially be because universities no longer focus on self-actualization and instead focus on providing safety and a social circle.
What I was basically saying is that I’m not sure if
aapplies to German universities, as in, I agree that they are probably less-so incentivized to focus on providing safety and a social circle.I have no idea if
bapplies or not, as in, I’m not sure how well German universities have been doing and it’s hard to measure their progress since the 30s and 40s obviously had a pretty huge negative effect on the whole upper education system.I do overall think the example of German universities specifically (and Austrian ones, to some extent), because there’s so many of them and many of them are vocation-focused specifically, giving a place to go for people that just want security, not a place in academia, is a good counter to my ideas here.
But also, my knowledge of the German education system is so poor overall, that I can’t really make very specific claims here.
If you believe that overall research slow down is happening to factors that apply in the US but don’t apply in Germany, then the logical conclusion would be that Germany should have a higher research output.
To the extend that you are interested in knowing whether your thesis is true, it would make sense to check. Rationality is not just about making plausible claims but also investigating whether they might be true.
How would I specifically go about checking this though ? As in, I do have data and knowledge on US and UK universities, I don’t have data on Germany Universities.
If you have data on German university research output, then I think it’s worth looking at, if not, I feel like what you’re basically doing is saying: “Hey, you don’t have data on this specific thing, it might go either way, your hypothesis is null and void”.
Provided data on German universities existed, why not ask for data about every single country with universities.
You could argue “Well, you should become an expert in the field and have all possible data handy before making any claims”, but then that claim would invalidate literally every single original thought on LessWrong that uses facts and even most academic papers.
Also, German Universities constitute a pretty bad example in my opinion, as in:
a) Murdering, exiling or routing out your highest IQ demographic and most public intellectuals
b) Having the rest taken away by the US, Russia and UK
c) Living for dozens of years in a country that’s been morally, geographically and culturally divided ravaged by WW2 (plus 1⁄3 of it living under a brutal~ish communist dictatorship)
Would make for a pretty weird outlier in all of this no matter what.
As in, if we were to compare other rich academic systems I’d rather do Japan, Italy, France, Spain or Switzerland
My complaint is that you don’t look at whether countries that are differently effected by the factors you list actually do differently on research output. If you don’t do that I think it’s hard know whether on of the factors you list is indeed causal for the result.
What exactly do you mean by “the factors I listed” though ?
As in, I think that my basic argument goes:
“There’s reason to think most kids would feel unsafe in a college environment, desire a social circle and job security, not the kind of transcendent self-actualization style goals that fuel research”. I think this generally holds for anyone at the age of 18-22 outside of outlier, hence why I cited the pyramid of needs, because the research behind that basically points to us needing different things in an age-correlated way (few teenagers feel like they need self actualization). I think this is somewhat exaggerated in the US because of debt&distance but should be noticeable everywhere.
Next, there’s reason to believe research inside universities is slowing down in certain areas, I have no reason to believe the lack of people desiring self-actualization is the cause for this though, except for a gut feeling that self-actualization is a better motivation to research nature than, say, wanting your paycheck at the end of the day. Most famous researcher seem to have been slightly crazy and not driven by societal goals but rather by an inner wish to “set things right” in one way or another, or to leave a mark on the world”
So basically, the best I can do to “prove” any of this would be something like:
Take some sort of comparative research output metric, these are hard to find, and are going to be very confounded with country-wealth (some examples: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/Nature%20&%20Science/global/All/score) … “small socialist countries” produce a surprising amount of researcher per capita, but maybe that’s something inherent to being a small rich country, not to have stronger communities and social support.
See if this correlates with % of the population working, quality of social security, some index measuring security, some index measuring happiness. Assume more research will come out of countries that perform well on this.
This will generally be true in terms of research, publications, books… etc (see Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweeden, Norway, Iceland… which seem to have a disproportionate amount of e.g. nature publications in report to the population), but you will also get outliers (see Israel, which produced a lot of research even dozens of years back when professors&students would be called on a yearly basis to fight to death against an out-numbering enemy that wanted to murder them).
However, you can’t **** draw conclusion from numbers of publications, and things such as “security index” and “happiness index” and even “quality of social security” are very hard to measure. Plus, they are confounded by the wealth of the country.
On the other hand, there’s good data on the idea that research is slowing down overall, that is much easier to place on “universities as a whole”, since by all metrics is seems that research is heavily correlated with academia (see, where most researchers work, where the people that get noble prizes work … etc).
So making the general assumption, of “research is slowing down” is much easier than doing the correlation on a per country basis.
If you can claim there is a valid way to measure basic needs that has a per-country statistic, and a various way to measure “research output” on a per country basis… than I’d be very curios in seeing that, I can even run an analysis based on various standard methods to see if there’s a correlation.
So the generic claim “kids are not researcher and don’t want to be researcher, universities can’t do multiple things at once better than doing one thing, thus if universities have to take care of kids they will have less time to focus on actual research” is easy to look at wholistically, but harder to look at on a per-country basis.
Impossible ? I don’t think so
Worthwhile ? I don’t know. As in, this whole article is closer to “here’s an interesting perspective, say, one that might warrant thinking about, when doing research” rather than “here’s a factual claim about how stuff works”. To make it any better, it would have to be elevated to a factual claim, but then I would basically have to trust the kind of analysis mentioned above (which again, I think would be impossible to run and get significant results since all the metrics I can think of are very leaky).
Honestly, it might have been a better perspective to approach this topic, I might even try to see if there’s relevant data on the subject and update the article if there is, barring that, I literally don’t see how this sort of hunch + basic evidence about generic human psychology plus observing a trend opinion piece differs from anything here. Maybe I’ve been misjudging the epistemic strength of the claims being seen in article around here… in which case, ahm… “sorry ?”, but also, I don’t really see your argument here.
Yes, assuming magical data fell out of the sky or our time to gather data was infinite every single piece of human thought could be improved, but I’m not sure why the stopping condition for this article would be “analysis comparing countries”… as opposed to any other random goalpost.
The research behind it says that the pyramid is not how humans work. Maslow created it in a non-data driven way and researchers that did try to support the thesis with data failed.
It can be sometimes used as a decent fake framework but if you treat it as a theory that’s research based you are basing your argument on quicksand.
Can you provide references, specify what’s wrong with Maslow’s hierarchy, and/or supply a superior model?
Viktor Frankl found that the need for self-actualization or meaning was strong in internment which in-turn links to d world war where the basic needs often weren’t fulfilled and decided about who made it out alive.
When it comes to the claim that the hierarchy doesn’t exist, Wikipedia links to the Atlantic which inturn links to Louis Tay et al which says: