Comments on: Why Neglect Big Topics

By: Operational art, Omar Bradley, Rommel, aggression in war, aggression as a psychological bulwark, what I’ve been reading on the web « Mike Kenny

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:58:15 +0000

[...] Why Neglect Big Topics? by Robin Hanson [...]

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:28:26 +0000

You should spend some of the energy you spend blaming academics, on blaming the government agencies who provide grants, and on blaming the selective forces that decide who can get into academia. When DARPA puts out a grant solicitation for innovative work, people respond to it. But the vast majority of grant money available is for low-risk engineering problems.

By: Ed

Ed — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:05:15 +0000

But take the case of math. People spend a great deal of effort studying small, technical problems. This is true despite the fact that it is incredibly easy to assess how worthy a paper is (either a proof works or it doesn’t, and it doesn’t usually take long to figure out which), and for this reason outsiders can make a splash (like when Perelman came up with a proof of the poincare conjecture). So the theory you have outlined seems not to really explain this case even though the phenomena to be explained are not that different in any obvious way.

Of course math is open to the charge that the whole thing is a status game, but that sounds like a step too far.

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:46:57 +0000

I don’t know how things work in the humanities, but in the sciences the biggest questions are generally either already well understood* or completely intractable.

* By “understood”, I mean that we have equations that correctly predict the outcomes to twelve decimal places, not necessarily that anyone knows what those equations mean. Quantum mechanics, I’m looking at you.

By: CannibalSmith

CannibalSmith — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:20:38 +0000

These subjects just might be that hard. Or meaningless.

By: ravi hegde

ravi hegde — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:07:16 +0000

survivor bias … hey, the roulette wheel is a great way to win money!!

By: komponisto

komponisto — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:15:25 +0000

And the contrast between what is expected of bloggers and what is expected of academics is why academics have to be careful when blogging.

By: sohaib

sohaib — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:10:19 +0000

Let’s not forget that bloggers are also signallers. They want to signal their high degree of intellectual progress and courageousness in attacking the “big issues” that academics don’t want to touch. Also, let’s keep in mind academics have a career to worry about. Bloggers don’t generally risk their careers with their blog posts.

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:24:55 +0000

I wonder how well an academic “journal” (virtual or otherwise) would work if the author’s names were not published until a year or more later?

Academics seem to be incentivized to view works as impressive that they think their peers will also view as impressive, either now or later down the line (as is often the case with contrarians). Since understanding academic papers is costly, they use heuristics to decide which ones to read, based on the papers perceived impressiveness. Robin seems to criticize this heuristic, but has he offered a viable alternative?

By: richard silliker

richard silliker — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:57:20 +0000

“Neglect of important subjects is remarkable if we assume academics mainly seek intellectual progress.”

All metaphor yearn for implementation in their own way.