Comments on: Fillers Neglect Framers

By: Rue Des Quatre Vents

Rue Des Quatre Vents — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:45:35 +0000

I can’t quite claim to be in the framer mold, but I left grad school because I saw no value in adding the 10th decimal place to someone else’s research. At any rate, I believe there are major institutional problems, at least in humanities, that occlude the creation of bold new ideas. One of the main problems, as you’ve pointed out, has to do with the patronage and nepotism endemic to the transistion from undergrad to graduate to professorial studies. To my thinking, one proposal might be to prevent members of a department from choosing the entering grad student class. In philosophy for example, I think it terribly quaint to let Kantians cultivate Kantians, Rawlsians Rawlsians and so on. Recommendations, while important, are overrated, largely because they’re prone to confirmation bias: professors will tend to like recommendations that exemplify their own perceived virtues. (Well that’s best case. Worst case, someone will respect a recommendation because they respect or like or are friends with the recommender.) In general, to foster genuine creativity in graduate school and further, academia needs greater fragmenting, separating research interests from professional power.

By: Adrian Tschoegl

Adrian Tschoegl — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:03:52 +0000

I am reminded of a colleague who used to remark “Pioneers get scalped by the Indians”, and “You can always tell a pioneer, they are the ones with arrows in their backs.” I suspect that short tenure clocks select against framers. Getting an article accepted is a process with a large stochastic element and attempting to get a new frame out into the literature would increase the risk of failure to hurdle tenure. Post tenure, the researcher has more freedom, but the persons who are most likely to pass the process are the ones for whom it is least constraining. This line of argument would suggest that extending the tenure clock substantially would increase the number of framers.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:46:47 +0000

Anders, excellent comment and suggestion.

By: Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:00:07 +0000

In Europe it is common that after a postdoc researchers return to their home group, continuing working with their advisor. This is less common in the US. The European system seems to encourage fillers more, both because they have an easier time working in the tiny academic empire of their advisor and that framers might become increasingly fillers out of practical necessity. Meanwhile in the US framers have an easier time forming their own groups, which at least means that their particular frame gets a chance to be tested.

One way of dealing with this might be to make sure grant money (especially for younger researchers) go to the researchers and not to advisors or institutions. They should be able to set up shop at a university that wants them, perhaps cooperatively with other new researchers.

By: Bruce G Charlton

Bruce G Charlton — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 07:48:45 +0000

Reference to my comment above is ‘The future of pure medical science’ at: http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/pure-medsci.html.

By: Bruce G Charlton

Bruce G Charlton — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 05:20:43 +0000

The recommendation I have made (for medical science) is that ‘framers’/ pure scientists/ revolutionary scientists should form a separate, distinct scientific specialty – with different institutions, funding, journals, conferences etc – linked to different evaluation criteria than would be used for ‘fillers’/ applied scientists/ normal scientists.

The key is different evaluation criteria, with credit given to quality and potential importance of work; because fillers can be more productive and reliable over the short term.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 04:39:38 +0000

Framers work from within metaframes – larger worldviews – that are both hard to communicate, and hard to submit directly to the cleansing fire of experiment. Einstein’s SR and GR were both falsifiable, but stemmed from a larger philosophy of invariance that is much more ineffable (the only really good exposition I’ve ever seen of it is Julian Barbour’s).

When framers meet, they tend to clash because their background metaframes are dissimilar. Einstein’s metaframe was substantially more dissimilar from, say, Lorentz’s or Minkowski’s metaframes, than their actual contributions to physics.

Metaframes tend to contain not-easily-testable elements and lofty-sounding methodological prescriptions. Faced with such temptation, it would take a great deal of mental discipline to prevent some nonsense from working its way in. And different nonsenses are likely to disagree, since they have no mutual territory to be consistent with.

When framers meet and sniff each other suspiciously, they have sensitive noses and plenty to take offense at – even if their actual theories look pretty similar. Or to put it another way, I’m a lot more likely to take offense at some would-be framer’s side beliefs about neural networks, compared to a neural network algorithm as innocent symbols on paper. (Though of course this is because *other* people have accumulated nonsensical but hard-to-dispel side ideas about neural networks – my own metaframe is naturally free of such debris.)

No, framers can’t just get rid of the metaframes and work without them. Thank you for asking.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:00:19 +0000

Gustavo, this is as far as I have thought about this subject.

By: Gustavo Lacerda

Gustavo Lacerda — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:17:45 +0000

“The main fix I could imagine is to give framers more publicity and credit for mentoring new framers.”

Robin, can you translate this into a specific recommendation? i.e. if you were in a position of power, what would you do about it? Create awards / professorships for those who mentor framers?

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 18:19:29 +0000

It’s always much more politically expedient to bash the newest framers and laugh at them. . . Until it turns out that they are right.

The problem is, like other institutions before it, academia has become a sinecure for fillers. Being a framer is bad for your career, and the bigger your frame, the more likely that you will be dismissed by the fillers of the previous frames (who are not at all wont to admit that there might be something amiss with the frames they are busy filling).

The existence of this blog is an encouraging step in the right direction, though. . .