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SilasBarta comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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Here's another one: what I call the layshadow heuristic: could an intelligent layperson produce passable, publishable work [1] in that field after a few days of self-study? It's named after the phenomenon in which someone with virtually no knowledge of the field sells the service of writing papers for others who don't want to do the work, and are never discovered, with their clients being granted degrees.
The heuristic works because passing it implies very low inferential distance and therefore very little knowledge accumulation.
[1] specifically, work that unsuspecting "experts" in the field cannot distinguish from that produced by "serious" researchers with real "experience" and "education" in that field.
For how many fields do you think this is possible?
Refer to the linked discussion thread, which links to accounts of actual layshadows -- they describe what fields they did this for in detail. It's as you'd expect: they could pull it off for everything except engineering and the hard sciences.
SilasBarta:
I agree this is indicative of serious pathology of one sort or another, but in fairness, I find it plausible that in many fields there might be a very severe divide between real scholarship done by people on the tenure track and the routine drudgery assigned to students, even graduate students who aren't aiming for the tenure track.
The pathologies of the educational side of the modern academic system are certainly a fascinating topic in its own right.