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.
> 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?”
Your link doesn't establish any such "fact". It's just a Twitter poll, which is not even limited to academic respondents.
The "most relevant evidence" you know of doesn't establish a "fact" in this case. In order to do that, you (or someone else you cited) would actually have to go through the trouble of asking that question to academics.
It sounds like he did ask academics, but it wasn't a random sample. Overgeneralizing from a specific, nonrandom sample is a common sin in academia so not one I would fault Robin for too strongly. Maybe fodder for another post on academia.
Sir great article. Academia will have to lift its game with AI. Many professors etc will no longer be required. AI can teach and research so instead of many professors working an a project, in the future we would only need 1. Maybe not even that 1. Research can be done (hypothesis testing ) digitally and the final outcome will be tested in the lab, probably by a robotic lab assistant. AI is not only coming for administrative positions, doctors, lawyers, judges even politicians can be replaced with AI. Robotic is coming up fast as well powered by AI so carpenters, tradies generally will also need to heed the warnings.
I think you overestimate academia relevance to pursing the boundaries of knowledge over the next century and what you talk about in your post is a part of the reason why.
Academia is only the most recent knowledge seeking institution to face this "abstraction" failure. We used to seek out priests for knowledge, but their priors updated too slowly to the world around them. Hence, scholars will need to migrate again like they did away from religious institutions, if only because the academic incentives force them to operate too slowly for the questions of today. Or not, new scholars will take over freed from such shackles.
There are a few scholars still studying within the confines of religious institutions, but not nearly as much as before. Same will be true of academics, and as it happens, resources will flow away (as people are starting to see now).
Im a programmer, worked for government 21 years before that MIM holdings for 7 years. If the WEF and the technocrats have there way Im not overestimating. In Health I was in a Telly-medicine unit experimenting with AI doctors and getting the general public used to doing things online. In 2010 I talked to some student doctors in the US and they stated that today becoming a doctor is nothing but remembering list upon list of disease, radiography, pathology and chemistry. AI loves nothing better than lists. So match symptoms to possible disease, order radiography or pathology to confirm, issue chemistry or print referral to other specialties. That is something AI can handle now. So there is your digital general practitioner. Some operations today are handled almost entirely by digital surgeons with actual surgeons standing by in-case something goes wrong.
Most languages have AI specific instruction sets today. As creative people learn these techniques AI structurally will grow with the citizen scientists. In other words it incrementally get smarter. At its most basic level AI is a search engine that searches a database of databases (neural networks). The magic comes in the interpretation and presentation of what it finds. At the moment AI is very scripted but each version brings new levels of autonomy. I've read about experimental AI being able to write its own instructions and inject the binary code into the CPU on the fly as needed in real time. Its basically writing its own intelligence. I'd agree a lot you read is smoke and mirrors designed to attract investment. How ever if you look past that at the potential its breath takingly scary.
Why is it the researcher's responsibility to ensure cost effectiveness, as opposed to it being the responsibility of whoever is allocating the funding to that research[er]?
I'm happy to assign responsibility to most everyone related to these actions. But funders are just another player in this game; they mostly buy prestige today.
Fantastic breakdown of the incentive trap. The urban/rural metaphor really nails why breakthrough ideas often comeform outside traditional academic channels. I've noticed how every grant proposal I reviewed had to dance around prestigious methods even when simpler approaches might work better. The 2% stat is brutal but tracks with how few researchers can actualy justify their work beyond "this is what gets funded and cited."
Your argument seems correct for theoretical topics; is that what you mean by abstract thought? But a lot of academics work on applied topics. For example, within psychology and related health professions, grant funding does favor researchers addressing real-world problems. So, regarding abstract thought being applied to big issues-- "applied to big issues" could incorporate real-world problems; researchers and grant funding clusters\ around genuine problems, e.g., mental and physical health; criminal behavior, dangers of fake news, etc. These seem to cover the space of human problems and not clump around high-prestige methods. I therefore conclude you mean theoretical, non-applied topics.
It's only going to get worse as higher education contracts and jobs become (even more) scarce. That scarcity leads people to be conservative and stick close to the urban center where most of their colleagues are.
This is one area where I agree with your hypothesis that declining populations will reduce innovation.
Is there not sometimes great academic prestige in founding a new subfield, which is hence in the rural areas - e.g. Newton & Leibniz founding calculus, or Von Neumann & Morgenstern founding game theory, or Derek Parfit founding population ethics?
Or is your contention this can only be done by those who already have prestige? (I’m not convinced that’s so)
Of these, game theory is the clearest case: AFAIK it lay in an empty region between mathematics, economics, politics, also not so far from psychology and sociology. I assume the prestige came from the fact that it was novel yet so relevant to those fields (eg nuclear strategy in Cold War politics), hence of great interest: ie precisely the fact that it *was* in a rural area, yet ripe for expansion into an important city connected to others.
I don't think most academics have a clue about what the biggest issues are, much less the most cost-effective. Most academics have topics that are personally important that they will pursue after tenure, but again, not necessarily important to anyone else. The incentives of academia, in my experience, do not support thinking about these issues. In fact, they do not support deep thinking about any topic. There's also an unmentioned tension re: the freedom to pursue topics of personal interest vs those that are likely to be important/valued by society at large. After tenure when one could devote more time to thinking about and pursuing more important questions in a cost-effective way, academics are probably less likely to do so for various reasons.
Seems like a plausible picture. I'd like to add, though, that there's a lot of value in some of those prestigious research methods, because humans are not naturally reliable at unstructured thinking. Without prestigious methods, people just use their intelligence to construct post-hoc justifications for opinions that flatter themselves or their in-group. Even high IQ people are not immune from this.
So we have to build systems that are more objectively reliable and don't let us fool ourselves as much. Experiments, falsifiable theories, statistical analysis, mathematical proofs. These prestigious research methods are a very good thing, and we should be rightfully suspicious of thinking that doesn't rely on them.
At least those specific prestigious methods (experiments, falsifiable theories, statistical analysis, mathematical proofs) are more reliable. Numerical simulations are another more-reliable-than-innate-reasoning method. There can be other prestigious methods that aren't more reliable, and here I'm thinking of the Sokal affair.
The point isn't that prestigious methods are always more reliable, but that analysis that does *not* use any prestigious methods, is less reliable than analysis that uses certain prestigious methods. "Innate" reasoning is less reliable than statistical analysis to the extent that in some cases it's worse than useless.
Think about the field of alternative medicine, filled with quack cures. That's what you get when you rely on "innate" reasoning instead of statistics.
This is such a sad analysis. Not one mention of how monopoly government skews scientific research.
Do you honestly suppose that all your criticisms would land the same way if the scientific endeavors of humanity weren’t distorted by funding seized by theft and directed by bureaucrats?
Usually it's the corporate funded research that is more suspect, such as tobacco companies running studies about how their product does not cause lung cancer, or oil and gas companies funding anti-AGW studies.
Corporate funded research is more directed towards the bottom line of the company running it, which in some ways is a good thing. But it also means they won't be doing long-term basic research, or research that could expose harms resulting from their own operations. What private corporation has an interest in studying damage to ecosystems and loss of species? What private corporation has an interest in funding high-energy particle physics? We need the government for those cases.
> 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?”
Your link doesn't establish any such "fact". It's just a Twitter poll, which is not even limited to academic respondents.
It is the most relevant evidence I know of. Do you know of evidence that is more relevant?
The "most relevant evidence" you know of doesn't establish a "fact" in this case. In order to do that, you (or someone else you cited) would actually have to go through the trouble of asking that question to academics.
By citing evidence related to a statment, that act does not claim that such citations establish the statment "as a fact".
If that link didn't, then what does?
Maybe it isn't established "as a fact".
I'd say more than maybe, right now you've only got a guess.
It sounds like he did ask academics, but it wasn't a random sample. Overgeneralizing from a specific, nonrandom sample is a common sin in academia so not one I would fault Robin for too strongly. Maybe fodder for another post on academia.
Sir great article. Academia will have to lift its game with AI. Many professors etc will no longer be required. AI can teach and research so instead of many professors working an a project, in the future we would only need 1. Maybe not even that 1. Research can be done (hypothesis testing ) digitally and the final outcome will be tested in the lab, probably by a robotic lab assistant. AI is not only coming for administrative positions, doctors, lawyers, judges even politicians can be replaced with AI. Robotic is coming up fast as well powered by AI so carpenters, tradies generally will also need to heed the warnings.
I think you overestimate the impact of AI in the next decades.
I think you overestimate academia relevance to pursing the boundaries of knowledge over the next century and what you talk about in your post is a part of the reason why.
Academia is only the most recent knowledge seeking institution to face this "abstraction" failure. We used to seek out priests for knowledge, but their priors updated too slowly to the world around them. Hence, scholars will need to migrate again like they did away from religious institutions, if only because the academic incentives force them to operate too slowly for the questions of today. Or not, new scholars will take over freed from such shackles.
There are a few scholars still studying within the confines of religious institutions, but not nearly as much as before. Same will be true of academics, and as it happens, resources will flow away (as people are starting to see now).
Im a programmer, worked for government 21 years before that MIM holdings for 7 years. If the WEF and the technocrats have there way Im not overestimating. In Health I was in a Telly-medicine unit experimenting with AI doctors and getting the general public used to doing things online. In 2010 I talked to some student doctors in the US and they stated that today becoming a doctor is nothing but remembering list upon list of disease, radiography, pathology and chemistry. AI loves nothing better than lists. So match symptoms to possible disease, order radiography or pathology to confirm, issue chemistry or print referral to other specialties. That is something AI can handle now. So there is your digital general practitioner. Some operations today are handled almost entirely by digital surgeons with actual surgeons standing by in-case something goes wrong.
Most languages have AI specific instruction sets today. As creative people learn these techniques AI structurally will grow with the citizen scientists. In other words it incrementally get smarter. At its most basic level AI is a search engine that searches a database of databases (neural networks). The magic comes in the interpretation and presentation of what it finds. At the moment AI is very scripted but each version brings new levels of autonomy. I've read about experimental AI being able to write its own instructions and inject the binary code into the CPU on the fly as needed in real time. Its basically writing its own intelligence. I'd agree a lot you read is smoke and mirrors designed to attract investment. How ever if you look past that at the potential its breath takingly scary.
Why is it the researcher's responsibility to ensure cost effectiveness, as opposed to it being the responsibility of whoever is allocating the funding to that research[er]?
I'm happy to assign responsibility to most everyone related to these actions. But funders are just another player in this game; they mostly buy prestige today.
Fantastic breakdown of the incentive trap. The urban/rural metaphor really nails why breakthrough ideas often comeform outside traditional academic channels. I've noticed how every grant proposal I reviewed had to dance around prestigious methods even when simpler approaches might work better. The 2% stat is brutal but tracks with how few researchers can actualy justify their work beyond "this is what gets funded and cited."
Your argument seems correct for theoretical topics; is that what you mean by abstract thought? But a lot of academics work on applied topics. For example, within psychology and related health professions, grant funding does favor researchers addressing real-world problems. So, regarding abstract thought being applied to big issues-- "applied to big issues" could incorporate real-world problems; researchers and grant funding clusters\ around genuine problems, e.g., mental and physical health; criminal behavior, dangers of fake news, etc. These seem to cover the space of human problems and not clump around high-prestige methods. I therefore conclude you mean theoretical, non-applied topics.
Simple solution: axe govt funding. All of it.
It's only going to get worse as higher education contracts and jobs become (even more) scarce. That scarcity leads people to be conservative and stick close to the urban center where most of their colleagues are.
This is one area where I agree with your hypothesis that declining populations will reduce innovation.
Is there not sometimes great academic prestige in founding a new subfield, which is hence in the rural areas - e.g. Newton & Leibniz founding calculus, or Von Neumann & Morgenstern founding game theory, or Derek Parfit founding population ethics?
Or is your contention this can only be done by those who already have prestige? (I’m not convinced that’s so)
Of these, game theory is the clearest case: AFAIK it lay in an empty region between mathematics, economics, politics, also not so far from psychology and sociology. I assume the prestige came from the fact that it was novel yet so relevant to those fields (eg nuclear strategy in Cold War politics), hence of great interest: ie precisely the fact that it *was* in a rural area, yet ripe for expansion into an important city connected to others.
Here is a good example of a low prestige, high social value topic area located out of a "city": https://sociobiology.org/api/downloadpdf/qsb-1-6
I don't think most academics have a clue about what the biggest issues are, much less the most cost-effective. Most academics have topics that are personally important that they will pursue after tenure, but again, not necessarily important to anyone else. The incentives of academia, in my experience, do not support thinking about these issues. In fact, they do not support deep thinking about any topic. There's also an unmentioned tension re: the freedom to pursue topics of personal interest vs those that are likely to be important/valued by society at large. After tenure when one could devote more time to thinking about and pursuing more important questions in a cost-effective way, academics are probably less likely to do so for various reasons.
Seems like a plausible picture. I'd like to add, though, that there's a lot of value in some of those prestigious research methods, because humans are not naturally reliable at unstructured thinking. Without prestigious methods, people just use their intelligence to construct post-hoc justifications for opinions that flatter themselves or their in-group. Even high IQ people are not immune from this.
So we have to build systems that are more objectively reliable and don't let us fool ourselves as much. Experiments, falsifiable theories, statistical analysis, mathematical proofs. These prestigious research methods are a very good thing, and we should be rightfully suspicious of thinking that doesn't rely on them.
Prestigious methods aren't necessarily more reliable.
At least those specific prestigious methods (experiments, falsifiable theories, statistical analysis, mathematical proofs) are more reliable. Numerical simulations are another more-reliable-than-innate-reasoning method. There can be other prestigious methods that aren't more reliable, and here I'm thinking of the Sokal affair.
The point isn't that prestigious methods are always more reliable, but that analysis that does *not* use any prestigious methods, is less reliable than analysis that uses certain prestigious methods. "Innate" reasoning is less reliable than statistical analysis to the extent that in some cases it's worse than useless.
Think about the field of alternative medicine, filled with quack cures. That's what you get when you rely on "innate" reasoning instead of statistics.
This is such a sad analysis. Not one mention of how monopoly government skews scientific research.
Do you honestly suppose that all your criticisms would land the same way if the scientific endeavors of humanity weren’t distorted by funding seized by theft and directed by bureaucrats?
Usually it's the corporate funded research that is more suspect, such as tobacco companies running studies about how their product does not cause lung cancer, or oil and gas companies funding anti-AGW studies.
Corporate funded research is more directed towards the bottom line of the company running it, which in some ways is a good thing. But it also means they won't be doing long-term basic research, or research that could expose harms resulting from their own operations. What private corporation has an interest in studying damage to ecosystems and loss of species? What private corporation has an interest in funding high-energy particle physics? We need the government for those cases.
Both of you are stuck on seeing govt or capitalists as the main villains in the world. The professions are another different villain.