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komponisto 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