Nick T, I have found valuable insights in postmodernist writing.

Does this imply that apparently ridiculous postmodernist writing should be taken more seriously, rather than shrugged off with a vague reference to the Sokal affair? (I’m sorry if this question sounds loaded; it wasn’t meant that way.)

Luke: I’ve found a way to reinterpret the claims you report in a way that makes them less crazy. The idea is that these claims about “truth” are not really about the truth of specific propositions. Instead they are about what we could call the aptness of representations. Consider a group of artists creating drawings of the same model. Suppose that by “truth” we mean “apt and accurate representation”. Then we could say that that there is no one Objective Truth, but instead there may be many different drawings that are all equally “true”. Some depict the model from the side, others from the front; some emphasize certain features, some other features. Some drawings might be worse than others, and have various distortions, yet it would be sophomoric to think that at most one of the artists’ drawings could capture the “real truth” about the subject.

Now, to make up a link so that this is not completely off-topic: if something like the above interpretation of what is meant by “truth” in English departments is correct, then your example might perhaps be viewed as an illustration of what K&L wrote about. From the inside it looks like what the English professors claim just cannot make any sense; yet the outside view suggests that most of the times when it appears to a student as if a consensus among the professors is completely crazy, it is because the student has a misconception rather than the professors.

If we could generalize from this one case, we might also suggest that after one has considered the outside view, there is additional insight to be gained by returning to the inside view and try to understand — from the inside — how the conclusion one has reached from the outside could be true and how one must revise one’s inside perceptions so that they conform better to the outside view. The goal, then, would be not simply to give up on the inside view in favor of the outside view, but to use the outside view to test, calibrate, and improve one’s inside perceptions.

Re Luke G: It’s very interesting to see the questions that come from someone whose experience hasn’t been reaped from quantitative fields. I wonder what he is looking for when he is looking for truth. I imagine he could agree that it is true that the US has a president, a vice president, a Congress… Moreover, he could agree that (100/538) of the Congress is Senators, (3/538) of the Congress are non-voting Representatives, and the rest are simply Representatives. The point I’m trying to make is the he is using an overloaded term, ‘truth’, when he really wants to talk about the existential question of whether or not there are externalities. ‘Truth’ would be his way of verifying that there are.

My inside view is that he should take a statistics course or a design of experiments course, to round out is education.

An interesting example of inside and outside views comes from fantasy baseball. I was extremely successful at the game, which I attribute largely to watching as little actual baseball as possible, paying attention only to the box scores and the injury reports. My fellow team owners, by contrast, would watch constantly and tinker with their lineups obsessively, benching players who “looked bad” or were “cold” or whom the manager had decided to give a day or two off. Sometimes they would ask me for advice, and I would tell them to stop watching baseball. They thought I was kidding.

I succeeded, in essence, by refusing to construct an inside view, so I would not be tempted to consult it. Unfortunately I don’t think this strategy generalizes very well.

Whether anything can be done about this bias is another question, K&L conclude by noting “The adoption of an outside view in such cases violates strong intuitions about the relevance of information. Indeed, the deliberate neglect of the features that make the current problem unique can appear irresponsible.” This is certainly true in law, both in judicial decisions and academic commentary.

My general take on the subject is that with respect to technical education and with respect to the educational content of elite universities there is at least room for doubt, but with respect to the non-technical content of non-elite university curricula one is safe assuming that it’s simply fraud and priesthood.

OTOH, I am a bit concerned that I may have a bias towards excess skepticism of accepted beliefs in general and towards the value of educational institutions (and the information value of academic credentials) in particular.