Professors Progress Like Ads Advise
A system designed to advise a captive audience about the features and quality of available products would look a lot more like Consumer Reports than the world of advertising we see. But this situation isn’t especially puzzling – we understand that neither those who make ads nor those who watch them have product information as their primary goal. Ad makers want to sell, and ad watchers want to be entertained.
Observers often have trouble, however, understanding how academia could consistently fail to achieve useful intellectual progress. Since academia is such a decentralized competitive system, people figure that any failures to make progress must be the unavoidable error that appears in any system designed to explore the unknown. Since we can’t know what we will discover until we discover it, complaints about progress are compared to second-guessing Monday-morning quarterbacks.
But in fact, academia is no more about making useful intellectual progress than advertising is about informing consumers. Professors seek prestigious careers, while funders and students seek prestige by association. Academics talk and write primarily to signal their impressive mental abilities, such as their mastery of words, math, machines, or vast detail. Yes, contributing to useful intellectual progress can sometimes appear impressive, but the correlation is weak, and it is often hard to see who really contributed how much. Progress happens, but largely as a side effect.
The astronomer Steinn Sigurosson observes:
[Lee Smolin’s] points on groupthink, and the systematic bias which discourages innovation and risk taking by young researchers hits painfully home – it is all too true, and yet it self-perpetuates because the mechanisms which reinforce conservatism in science are there for reasons. The system is flawed, and possibly broken, but the fix is not as simple as Smolin suggests – funding agencies are terrified of funding bad science, since there is so much pretty good science it is safe to fund, and as a community scientists are very harsh when bad science is mistakenly given precious resources.
It is the same market flaw that gives us beautiful flawless large red apples in supermarkets – with no taste.
To get the old intense flavour varieties that everyone loves when they taste, we would have to choose small bruised discoloured apples when we shop, and leave the flawless big red apples with no taste in the bins. But collectively we do not, and the market responds. All for the fear of being the onedepartment headcomsumer to go home with an occasional rotten apple.
The real shame is that the big red shiny tasteless apples are rotten just as often, they just look so good sitting there, waxed and sprayed, in the bin.We will muddle through, progress will be made again, hordes of string theorists will be proven wrong, and some few of them may well be right, but no one will remember which.
Science is self-correcting, which is its great strength, as long as we don’t let the sociology do long term damage to the underlying scientific methodology.
‘Course if you only get to buy one apple every three years you learn to be very conservative in your choice; don’t want a rotten or even tart apple this decade.
Consumers who choose pretty apples do not get especially tasty apples, and funders who choose impressive scientists do not especially promote progress.
Hat tip to Not Even Wrong.
Assumption 1: Tall people end up being "better" than short people.
If you really don't want a height tax, then the best thing to do is to trash this assumption, then there would be no need for height taxation.
For example, tall people could claim that the are being discriminated and hated by other people. Therefore, tall people would have some loss of utility gained by height discrimination that would counter the "beniefts" that being tall would grant.
Tall people could also argue that they may have health problems as a result of being tall, and so a tax on them would be unjustified in that sense.
The best way to knock down Mankiw's argument is to spend tons of money creating scientific experiments and studies that end up proving that "tall" people also have major problems as a result of being tall, that tall people DON'T have a better life than short people. Even if these studiesfail to dispel the belief that tall people have a better life than short people, it would end up making it harder for policymakers to determine the necessary taxation amount needed to counter-balance the utilitarian advantage tall people have, since they have to take these studies into accounts.
The end result would be, at worst, a nominal height tax.
Aaaactually, consumers did revolt against tasteless apples. That's why there are now choices in applesin the supermarket at all. Until 20 years ago you had about two varieties of apples in most supermarkets,um, red and green. Then all the sudden people woke up and figgered out that no crap those apples fromsouth of the equator taste good. Suddenly the apple contingent in WA state went bananas (pardon the phrase)trying to make something other than red delicious. And within the span of no lie about two years the wholecountry had many varieties of apples in the supermarket. Weeelll, the same thing is happening to fundingagencies when they have enough money. If the money is just tight tight tight, we can see that they willalways make the safe bet, look to the overachievers and assign dollars to zero risk projects with assuredpayoffs. Even if the payoffs are puny. When agencies rapidly accelerate, they begin to talk aboutrisk versus reward, and actually try to parse it in the proposals' scores. There is at least some bitof attention toward high risk high payoff. I don't think the premise of the post about progress beinga sideshow to the careerism is necessarily just plain inevitable. Under some conditions it won't be100% inevitable. When fields are highly mature and when funding is not growing much, it probably isinevitable, though.