Comments on: Why Academics Aren’t Bayesian

By: Letters to Doubting Thomas (a review) : The Uncredible Hallq

Letters to Doubting Thomas (a review) : The Uncredible Hallq — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:10:12 +0000

[...] considering are subtle and hard to evaluate (perhaps because this policy helps us know who the impressive minds are). And in a sense the argument I’ve presented is very easy to respond to: all the theist [...]

By: Alexander Kruel · A Guide to Bayes’ Theorem – A few links

Alexander Kruel · A Guide to Bayes’ Theorem – A few links — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 11:32:27 +0000

[...] Almost all economic models assume that human beings are Bayesians, … [but] academic economists are not Bayesians. And they’re proud of it: overcomingbias.com/2009/11/why-academics-are-not-bayesian.html [...]

By: <corruptmemory> » blog » The futility of “direct” religious discussion

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:36:02 +0000

[...] area of psychology and sociology. It turns out that, if we are Bayesian in nature, we’re not very good Bayesians. I tend to agree with Robin Hanson on this particular subject which is to say that most people [...]

By: Why decent philosophers use too much jargon : The Uncredible Hallq

Why decent philosophers use too much jargon : The Uncredible Hallq — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:02:07 +0000

[...] of why things like this happen–not just in philosophy but everywhere. He proposes that academia is really about credentialling impressive minds, so ideas are treated as important if and o… For philosophy, what this means is that since it takes an impressive mind to successfully juggle [...]

By: michael webster

michael webster — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:05:06 +0000

Robin, I thought that your signalling theory was designed to explain why rankings of prestigious institutions doesn’t correlate well with what independent rankings we have of the ability of individuals in those institutions. Am I wrong?

By: anon

anon — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:08:31 +0000

Eliezer, I suspect Wei Dai meant “profit-seeking”, not rent seeking. Generally speaking, rent-seeking behavior does not increase social welfare.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:36:12 +0000

Wei, I disagree that academia primarily harnesses status-seeking to produce knowledge. I think rather that academia is more of a coordination among knowledge seekers to optimize their knowledge-seeking. In other words, I think the credentialing of third party non-academics, etc. is to fund the knowledge-seeking, with some drift towards status driven behavior, like graduation ceremony pomp and circumstance. Faust is the academic archetype, it seems to me, like Midas is for the capitalist and Narcissus for the artist. Academia isn’t the efficient route to status. I think status-games represent a corruption of the academic, or a concession to the non-academic world.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:17:38 +0000

“Rent-seeking” has a particular meaning in economics. Is there a special economic term for ordinary-desire-for-money or do we just say “greed”?

By: Barkley Rosser

Barkley Rosser — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:38:38 +0000

Much of this is simply due to entrenched models of teaching. So, pretty much all intro econometrics courses assume classical frequentism, and the standard BLUE theorems for such workhorse methods as OLS all assume a CF framework. It is only at a much more advanced and specialized level that one is likely to encounter Bayesian methods, particularly in time-series analysis. This is in contrast to medical research, where I understand that Bayesian methods have come close to beating out the CF ones.

Of course, many economists when confronted with the more general arguments will grant that Bayesianism has a lot of appeal in principle. But as they only known CF models, they kind of let it go, sort of a “we are all Bayesians now, but only in theory for most of us” view.

By: Wei Dai

Wei Dai — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:27:13 +0000

It does seem that academic beliefs tracks truth better than most expressed human opinions, even though they’re both about signaling.

Markets (ordinary ones) harness rent-seeking to improve social welfare. Academia seems to harness status-seeking to improve knowledge, but perhaps in a way that we don’t understand (certainly not as well as we understand markets). Prediction markets would harness rent-seeking to improve knowledge, but interest in such institutions seem too low to make them a viable alternative to academia.

Is anyone working on trying to better understand academia and perhaps improving it on the margins, while leaving its signaling function intact?