When it comes to actually producing valuable work I think it’s important to distinguish amateur work from non-academic work. Academia is not the only knowledge community nor the only professional one. For many questions in the psychological domain I don’t think they are even the people with the most insight. A while ago I was reading Roy Baumeister’s Willpower and the sillyness that went into the reasoning around the nature of willpower was amazing.
Take a paragraph like:
There are also some subjects that may be inherently difficult to study because they require considerable domain-specific knowledge (e.g., high-level athletic performance, hunting or survival skills, extensive meditation practice) which a professional researcher is unlikely to have. Collaboration with amateurs who have special knowledge or abilities could provide unique insights into these areas.
Let’s apply that to the Willpower discourse. There are plenty of people outside of academia that spent a lot of time in practice to motivate themselves and others. Some people even have 24⁄7 glucose monitors. They problem wasn’t that there weren’t experts with special knowledge that could have told people like Roy Baumeister that they weren’t on the right track but that there was little interest to talk to anyone who understands the subject and more interest in p-hacking.
If you see a discourse like this and see the academic blindspots there’s little you can do as an outsider.
If you actually want to create valuable knowledge you have to think about for what the goal of your inquiry is. Do you want to gain knowledge for yourself to act better? Do you want to produce it as part of a knowledge community?
There’s certainly a lot in the blind spots in academia but a lot of it will neither be of value to yourself nor of a knowledge community that you want to contribute to.
When it comes to actually producing valuable work I think it’s important to distinguish amateur work from non-academic work. Academia is not the only knowledge community nor the only professional one. For many questions in the psychological domain I don’t think they are even the people with the most insight. A while ago I was reading Roy Baumeister’s Willpower and the sillyness that went into the reasoning around the nature of willpower was amazing.
Take a paragraph like:
Let’s apply that to the Willpower discourse. There are plenty of people outside of academia that spent a lot of time in practice to motivate themselves and others. Some people even have 24⁄7 glucose monitors. They problem wasn’t that there weren’t experts with special knowledge that could have told people like Roy Baumeister that they weren’t on the right track but that there was little interest to talk to anyone who understands the subject and more interest in p-hacking.
If you see a discourse like this and see the academic blindspots there’s little you can do as an outsider.
If you actually want to create valuable knowledge you have to think about for what the goal of your inquiry is. Do you want to gain knowledge for yourself to act better? Do you want to produce it as part of a knowledge community?
There’s certainly a lot in the blind spots in academia but a lot of it will neither be of value to yourself nor of a knowledge community that you want to contribute to.