SilasBarta comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 05 January 2011 09:08:20PM *  1 point [-]

I don't think any field in which they can produce an essay without being detected is necessarily valueless. At an undergraduate level, students in hard sciences are often assigned essays that could reasonably be written by a layperson who takes the time to properly search through the available peer reviewed articles. That may be an indictment of how the classes are taught and graded, but it's not a demonstration that the fields themselves are lacking worth.

Comment author: SilasBarta 05 January 2011 09:20:29PM *  3 points [-]

All true, but the shadow authors:

  • don't mention doing work for the hard sciences or reading peer-reviewed articles in such fields
  • are able to learn all they need from a day or so of self-study, showing low inferential distance in the fields and thus low knowledge content
  • mention high involvement in graduate level work, where the implications of their success are much more significant.
Comment author: Desrtopa 05 January 2011 09:38:01PM *  3 points [-]

But they do mention googling sources and doing literature review, and "Ed Dante" says he will write about anything that does not require him to do any math (or animal husbandry.) For original research in hard sciences, there's probably not going to be much of anything that doesn't at least require some statistics, but for undergraduate literature review papers, it probably wouldn't be hard to get away with.

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