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Will_Sawin comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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Comments (153)
comments by gwern and Desertopa upvoted, their links read.
How long can this go on before the whole thing* comes crashing down? Those of us who are Americans are ruled mostly by people who were "lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions" and then became lazy rich graduate students getting J.D.s or M.B.A.s from prestigious institutions, having been admitted based on their supposed undergraduate accomplishments.
The only thing to hope for, it seems, is that our supposed leaders are still getting cheat sheets from underpaid, unknown smart people.
* My impression is that higher education in the hard sciences in America is still excellent.
I've complained before about the same thing. My only answer is "it'll pass eventually, the only question is how much we'll have to suffer in the interim".
Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.
(Btw, change your last * to a \*.)
With the caveat that low-level undergraduate assignment substance levels are not the same as cutting-edge research substance levels, though they are related.
See my reply to Desrtopa: A non-lost field should have a large enough inferential distance from a layshadow that the layshadow shouldn't be able to show proficiency from a brief perusal of the topic, even at the undergraduate levels.
I think you've started to identify an empirical test to sort the wheat from the chaff in universities. I've read your post from June, and agree. My guess would be that the proportions would turn out to show a lot of very expensive (and heavily subsidized) chaff for every unit of worthwhile wheat. This is a big issue, and I think you've called it correctly.