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Douglas_Knight comments on LW should go into mainstream academia ? - Less Wrong
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Comments (49)
Why not? What's stopping them?
One of the rules is that beginning academics must not publish work like this. They have to publish cutting edge research for a long time before they are allowed to synthesize or popularize.
Indeed, and I think a case can be made that this is exactly backwards (if we must have such "rules" at all).
Ok, but before we turn everything upside down, can we think a little about why academia ended up being the way it is? Hanson had some good status-based explanations about the academic career trajectory.
If you haven't done cutting edge stuff, the worry is you don't know what you are talking about yet, and shouldn't be a public-facing part of science.
Also there are well-known popularizers who aren't significant academics, e.g. Bill Nye. Bill Nye did some engineering stuff, though.
Aren't defacto most popularizers of academia journalists who write popular articles about science?
Journalists and scientists that write popular exposition books. The former are generally terrible (journalists tend to have an education that emphasizes writing, not numeracy).
But that doesn't stop them from doing it or finding an audience.
Yes, but no one important takes them seriously.
I think plenty of politically important people read the science section of the New York Times and of other newspapers.
If important people would only listen to scientists for understanding science we would have different policy on global warming.
Same reason why milesmathis (google it, have fun) isn't taken, and shouldn't be taken seriously by the mainstream. Because "playing by the rules" didn't work - you usually end up with an unending amount of crackpottery in what is actually not published: books, blogs, etc.
Not publishing in the mainstream while publishing books and self published articles is the crackpott's artillery, unfortunately.
Think like the mainstream: given the amount of crazy stuff that's present on the internet that couldn't be published because it was, indeed, crazy, should I care about this particular guy that doesn't publish anything but books (or self published articles) ? The unfortunate answer is no.
Why do you assume I haven't?
Stop expecting short inferential distances!
Because you wrote one sentence without actually giving the argument. So I went with my prior on your argument. And my prior about arguments that argue for drastically changing the existing order of things is they aren't right.
It comes down to funding and prestige. Publishing research in high-profile journals makes the department look good and keeps the grant money flowing. The concern is that an academic who spends time popularizing is wasting time he could have spent doing research. A few decades ago, some departments had a culture where young academics could be looked down upon for being too good at teaching for precisely this reason.
Curious about the downvote.
Is it or isn't it true generally in academia that good teaching is considered lower status than good research?
In the US academia it is definitely true. Especially teaching undergrads which is often enough just relegated to TAs.
At least nowadays many places bother to train TAs. My understanding is that not too long ago, the TA was just handed a syllabus and told to teach a class. Some schools had a reputation for admitting excess graduate students just to serve as TAs for a bit before being shown the door.
However, there are some universities that focus on quality undergraduate education. In those places, teaching ability is a big part of the hiring process and people have been denied tenure over poor teaching. It's the big research universities that have historically been lax in their teaching standards.
Yep. This is a good case to apply the standard heuristic: Look at incentives.
Isn't there an argument that having a million voices synthesising and popularising and ten doing detailed research is much less productive than the opposite? Feels a bit like Aristophanes:
"Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much"
Everyone going around discussing their overarching synthesis of everything sounds like it would produce a lot of talk and little research
What's stopping them is that by not playing by conventional rules, they will not get official kudos in the field. People like Bostrom, etc. who do play by the rules will. One might not care about official kudos per se, but one should -- people with official kudos are the ones with actual sway on policy, etc. Important people read Bostrom's book, no one important reads EY's stuff.
I think this is the vital thing: not 'does academia work perfectly', but 'can you work more effectively THROUGH academia'. Don't know for sure the answer is yes, but it definitely seems like one key way to influence policy. Decision makers in politics and elsewhere aren't going to spend all their time looking at each field in detail, they'll trust whatever systems exist in each field to produce people who seem qualified to give a qualified opinion.
That's not really true. You can write a review article as one of your first publications and use it to lay out what you intend to work on. People won't take your review article as seriously as they will one written by Dr. Bigshot et al., but there certainly aren't any rules against it.
Also, the NSF is thrilled if you're a beginner and you're doing any sort of popular outreach. They love pop science blogs.
NSF requires many things that are bad for your career. This may well be the point, to counterbalance other sources of judgement.
Outside of the purview of NSF, here is an essay on how history is not written by a historian who was, at the time, blogging anonymously. She was afraid of her colleagues seeing her blog close to her professional interests while being open about writing essays about manga.