Academia’s Abstraction Failure

One of the greatest obstacles to humanity using abstract thought to help on its biggest issues is this: our main professional specialists in abstract though applied to big issues are academics, and they refuse to think abstractly about how they allocate resources.

Academics are divided into an inherited structure of disciplines and subfields, a structure that changes only slowly. The focuses within each subfield fluctuate with changing fashions, the relative size of fields changes as outside funding changes, and sometimes funding allows the creation of new fields.

The (high-dimensional) space of all possible abstract topics, however, is only sparsely populated by this structure. Most of that population is in dense “urban” clusters, with few residents of the vast “rural” tracks outside of those clusters. Most of sources of resources and prestige for academics are tied to those clusters, which discourages them from venturing outside of those clusters.

Academics are so tied to their little “cities” that they have only vague concepts of most of the space outside of it. In fact, only ~2% of academics could give a coherent intelligible (but not necessarily correct) answer to this question: “Why is your particular research nearly the most cost-effective among the options available?” (This has long been my personal experience.)

Few academics can justify their research relative to anything besides other nearby research. The sort that might cite them, and which they might cite. The question of why that whole area is funded is of little interest to them.

A big factor that causes academics to clump strongly in topic space is that they strongly prefer to use the most prestigious methods available in each area. As research is mainly judged for its prestige-potential, not its social value. This heavily favors the topics that better allow one to show of one’s mastery of prestigious methods. Other topics are neglected.

The intrinsic value of topics in this vast space of possible topics is only weakly correlated with the density of academics near them. Which means that most of the important abstract topics are not near the center of clumps. And so even if someone does venture out into the sparsely populated “rural” topic areas, and finds a topic very important to humanity, other academics aren’t much interested in evaluating what they claim to have found. Most likely, there aren’t places to publish it, there aren’t programs to fund it, and there aren’t jobs to hold specialists in it. Why bother?

Yes, if you have gained enough prestige working in the center of an academic city, more academics will listen to you to what you’ve found outside of cities, and may even be willing to stretch the city boundaries in those directions. But the few qualifying academics here usually have many other more rewarding ways to spend their time.

Yes, some kinds of non-academics also specialize in more abstract reasoning. Such as journalists or managers. But when they claim to have found something important out in the academic wilderness areas, their lack of academic credentials is usually suggested as a reason to doubt them. After all, if wouldn’t the nearest academics had said something, if there really was something to be found there?

You might think that outsiders should hold academics accountable, but a major trend of the modern era has been for prestigious professions to wrest control from outsiders. Academics succeeded at this via promoting grants, tenure, and peer review. Today funders primarily buy prestige by association with academics who decide internally who is prestigious.