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Vladimir_M comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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I'm surprised that you don't mention the humanities as a really bad case where there is little low-hanging fruit and high ideological content. Take English literature for example. Barrels of ink have been spilled in writing about Hamlet, and genuinely new insights are quite rare. The methods are also about as unsound as you can imagine. Freud is still heavily cited and applied, and postmodern/poststructuralist/deconstructionist writing seems to be accorded higher status the more impossible to read it is.
Ideological interest is also a big problem. This seems almost inevitable, since the subject of the humanities is human culture, which is naturally bound up with human ideals, beliefs, and opinions. Academic disciplines are social groups, so they have a natural tendency to develop group norms and ideologies. It's unsurprising that this trend is reinforced in those disciplines that have ideologies as their subject matter. The result is that interpretations which do not support the dominant paradigm (often a variation on how certain sympathetic social groups are repressed, marginalized, or "otherized"), are themselves suppressed.
One theory of why the humanities are so bad is that there is no empirical test for whether an answer is right or not. Incorrect science leads to incorrect predictions, and even incorrect macroeconomics leads to suboptimal policy decisions. But it's hard to imagine what an "incorrect" interpretation of Hamlet even looks like, or what the impact of having an incorrect interpretation would be. Hence, there's no pressure towards correct answers that offsets the natural tendency for social communities to develop and enforce social norms.
I wonder if "empirical testability" is a should be included with the low-hanging fruit heuristic.
AShepard:
Well, I have mentioned history. Other humanities can be anywhere from artsy fields where there isn't even a pretense of any sort of objective insight (not that this necessarily makes them worthless for other purposes), to areas that feature very well researched and thought-out scholarship if ideological issues aren't in the way, and if it's an area that hasn't been already done to death for generations (which is basically my first heuristic).
Perhaps surprisingly, it doesn't seem to me that empirical testability is so important. Lousy work can easily be presented with plenty of empirical data carefully arranged and cherry-picked to support it. To recognize the problem in such cases and sort out correct empirical validation from spin and propaganda is often a problem as difficult as sorting out valid from invalid reasoning in less empirically-oriented work.
It does make them, if not worthless, at least worth less for other purposes.
I spent a lot of time in college in the humanities, art (Bachelor of Fine Art degree, eventually), Philosophy, English (beyond the basic Comp and Rhetoric classes) etc.
The less objective the standards applied, the worse the product, the less effort put into it, the less the artist/author (and yes, I'm generalizing here) put into his work.
I had one class at a very anti-objective school where the teacher (and I almost never use that term, especially for instructors at that school) was fairly strict about meeting her standards, and the final critiques were amusing. Kids who skated by in other classes on a modicum of effort, little talent and a tractor load of post-modernist bullshit (mostly regurgitated and badly understood) got hammered for not working to the fairly loose requirements.
Art is not some special case of human effort where intellect and informed taste have bearing. It currently (since the ~50s) a place where intellect and informed taste have been told they aren't welcome so the children could keep playing with their mud. And I don't say this out of bitterness--I have very little talent for the "high" arts, and merely wish the people producing it these days were better at thinking than they are.
I disagree on the "artsy" fields. I feel like art history has reached a dead end because of the structure of the art market. As the area considered "art" for academic purposes has become more concentrated and expensive, scholarship has been undermined and I think we've seen a general unwillingness to engage new topics simply because they don't lend themselves very well to museums or gallery sales.