I recently saw the show Old Jews Telling Jokes, and was reminded of a big change in humor over the last century. The show was full of old-style jokes, i.e., jokes designed to be funny given only a moderate level of showmanship. Once upon a time the jokes we heard were mostly jokes that got passed around because lots of pretty ordinary folks could tell them and get laughs. Today, instead, most jokes we hear are told by professional comics, who mostly tell their own unique jokes integrated with their life story and personality. Few others, even professional comics, can get such laughs from these jokes.
academia should be at risk of suffering the same trend.
It surely was at risk, but a lot of that risk has already played out, already been realized, because the technology to reproduce cheap exact copies of arguments attributed to high-status academics has been around for centuries. How much unrealized risk do you see here? How much worse do you expect it to get, and why hasn't it already gotten that bad?
"If listeners actually care less if claims are true than if claimers are impressive, we should expect that when the audience for intellectuals can get better access to a rich personal display of attempted persuasion, they will lose much of their derived interest in the truth of claims. After all, maybe the audience never really cared that much if the claims were true – they mainly cared about claim truth as evidence of claimer impressiveness."
I think we're seeing exactly the result you're talking about in the form of TED Talks. Take for example the ridiculous string of talks by Jack Andraka. It doesn't matter that his findings are completely non-peer reviewed, or that he simply copied published research from 3 years earlier. "They" don't care. He was given an underdog back story, told to say "sensitivity AND specificity," and turned loose with a head set.
Of course very few people who attend TED conferences actually care about the validity of these claims. They just like that it sounds really persuasive and that they can associate with a product being marketed as a "prodigy."
No discussion can take place without everyone agreeing on what the claim *is*.
And, in fact, I think it comes off slightly dismissive (the opposite of affiliating) when I say "Hanson is claiming X" because it sounds like I'm holding it at arm's length.
Here, interestingly, the discussion is going the way Hanson predicts from the affiliative character of personalized displays: what's Hanson saying rather than what's true. But note, the intellectually unfortunate drift doesn't have to do with promoting specific false ideas but with providing an inefficient incentive structure for intellectual production.
From evolutionary psychology (which, incidentally, is unrepresented in the textbooks I've seen) and from Robin's theorizing, we might conclude that there are two basic drives underlying intellectual production: a) the drive to signal intellectual impressiveness and b) the drive to affiliate with intellectual impressiveness. Although they often cooperate, they are separate: people may derive affiliation gratification by reading Hegel privately. There may be two types of intellectuals (really a continuum of course): signalers and affiliators. Most of us are signalers; the affiliators are at LW, although Yudkowsky himself is a signaler.
In this light, I now think it's misguided to opt for the abolition of departments of the history of philosophy in favor of analytic philosophy. It expresses signaler prejudice. Signalers are apt to contrast the desire to affiliate to the desire to obtain truth, but the actual contrast is between the desire to affiliate versus the desire to signal. Either of these motives can have outcomes closer or further from truthfinding depending on how they're channeled in a mileu.
[Added July 31.] To elaborate on the two drives and evolutionary psychology.: Affiliation with powerful intellectual impressiveness arises from the importance of having "powerful allies"; signaling intellectual impressiveness arises from the importance of being a powerful ally. But are these distinct drives, as opposed to just two sets of arbitrarily different ways of pursuing status? This could depend on whether affiliation carried advantages distinct from signaling in the primeval environment--this in turn depending on whether exercises of power within bands was based on social influence alone or substantially on physical confrontations, where there's use for secret allies.
Also, a third possible motivational basis for intellectual production might be the drive to take sides and form a team, the Greens vs. Blues phenomenon. But whatever the number of drives (or "terminal values"), the search for truth is unlikely to be among them.
[Added Aug. 2]A fourth basis is implicit in Hanson's theorizing: power (as a terminal value) expressed through intellectual influence.
I don't understand why textbooks? Do you mean unadorned, consensus, "stood test of time" views? If so, I'd think age beats textbook. In econ, for example, JB Say over Samuelson and Samuelson over Mankiw.
There's that, too. While textbooks are the ideal way to learn many subjects (college lectures are another waste of time, based on affiliation drives), most actual textbooks (at least in the humanities and social sciences) are failed attempts by specialists to be generalists. Robin, moreover, would have selected from the best textbooks by visiting the Stanford book store. (Also, there are some particularly good economics texts.)
Yeah, lots of punditry is based on the reputation of the speaker, his coalitions, his charisma. That's not improving policy debates.
As per humor and song, that's inherently personal anyway in my book, so it doesn't bother me. I doubt humor and song can increase much off a really good person of any era..
If someone spends his whole life learning to tell jokes, all the while in direct exonomic competition with others to tell better and better jokes, his jokes will be more effective at making people laugh than if a layman tells a joke.
That's simple, has a clear metric for "better," and is probably true.
But robins explanation has a problem: since writing you could associate a joke with an individual, the original writer. "Mark Twain makes a joke book, you say "did you hear the latest one from twain," all your listeners like it because of its associative effect.
In fact, "famous joke writer was not a profession.
I agree. If you can't explain a philosophical idea without referring to the original text you don't really understand it. Of course this brings up the question of what "philosophy" is. Is it the study of thinking (with the principles so universal that you can make up modern forms, possibly superior forms, of the old arguments that will be more helpful to modern readers, or even extraterrestrials), or is it a history of smart sounding things famous dead people said, used to signal sophistication.
I took a many the introductory science classes in college including nutrition, plant pathology, chemistry, biology, physics, oceanology , food science economics sociology and more and still remember a lot of what I was taught. Your recommendation of the introductory text books reminds me of how different pop books on nutrition and pesticides are from what I learned in those introductory classes!
I will put a plug in here for an Idea: IMO the signaling aspect of school makes science much harder than it it needs to be. The principles of the sciences, which are the most useful aspects, are very, simple and require little math but are not pushed to the lower performing students because we use math to purposefully make the subject difficult to strengthen the signal. To me that is a shame.
Philosophy students shouldn't read Locke for the same reason physics students don't read Maxwell's original papers. The textbook shouldn't just be what some academic "thinks" about Locke any more than a textbook on electromagnetism should be about what someone thinks of Maxwell.
The problem is that philosophy is not a field that lends itself to textbook treatment. The only halfway decent "textbooks" available to assign are anthologies. Why read what some academic thinks about Aristotle when you can read Aristotle yourself? Why would I assign a textbook (which provides, say, what some academic thinks about Aristotle or Locke or Heidegger) when I can just assign those things? Students can read them, and - as a professional academic - the textbook industry is a massive scam. In any field where a textbook can be avoided by assigning the original works, students benefit (intellectually, because they have to stretch their minds, and financially, because textbooks are obscenely overpriced).
Videos of TED talks and academic talks given in person let academics display much more impressive detail than do simple journal articles.
academia should be at risk of suffering the same trend.
It surely was at risk, but a lot of that risk has already played out, already been realized, because the technology to reproduce cheap exact copies of arguments attributed to high-status academics has been around for centuries. How much unrealized risk do you see here? How much worse do you expect it to get, and why hasn't it already gotten that bad?
"If listeners actually care less if claims are true than if claimers are impressive, we should expect that when the audience for intellectuals can get better access to a rich personal display of attempted persuasion, they will lose much of their derived interest in the truth of claims. After all, maybe the audience never really cared that much if the claims were true – they mainly cared about claim truth as evidence of claimer impressiveness."
I think we're seeing exactly the result you're talking about in the form of TED Talks. Take for example the ridiculous string of talks by Jack Andraka. It doesn't matter that his findings are completely non-peer reviewed, or that he simply copied published research from 3 years earlier. "They" don't care. He was given an underdog back story, told to say "sensitivity AND specificity," and turned loose with a head set.
Of course very few people who attend TED conferences actually care about the validity of these claims. They just like that it sounds really persuasive and that they can associate with a product being marketed as a "prodigy."
Scott Locklin has more on TED talks: http://scottlocklin.wordpre...
No discussion can take place without everyone agreeing on what the claim *is*.
And, in fact, I think it comes off slightly dismissive (the opposite of affiliating) when I say "Hanson is claiming X" because it sounds like I'm holding it at arm's length.
Here, interestingly, the discussion is going the way Hanson predicts from the affiliative character of personalized displays: what's Hanson saying rather than what's true. But note, the intellectually unfortunate drift doesn't have to do with promoting specific false ideas but with providing an inefficient incentive structure for intellectual production.
From evolutionary psychology (which, incidentally, is unrepresented in the textbooks I've seen) and from Robin's theorizing, we might conclude that there are two basic drives underlying intellectual production: a) the drive to signal intellectual impressiveness and b) the drive to affiliate with intellectual impressiveness. Although they often cooperate, they are separate: people may derive affiliation gratification by reading Hegel privately. There may be two types of intellectuals (really a continuum of course): signalers and affiliators. Most of us are signalers; the affiliators are at LW, although Yudkowsky himself is a signaler.
In this light, I now think it's misguided to opt for the abolition of departments of the history of philosophy in favor of analytic philosophy. It expresses signaler prejudice. Signalers are apt to contrast the desire to affiliate to the desire to obtain truth, but the actual contrast is between the desire to affiliate versus the desire to signal. Either of these motives can have outcomes closer or further from truthfinding depending on how they're channeled in a mileu.
[Added July 31.] To elaborate on the two drives and evolutionary psychology.: Affiliation with powerful intellectual impressiveness arises from the importance of having "powerful allies"; signaling intellectual impressiveness arises from the importance of being a powerful ally. But are these distinct drives, as opposed to just two sets of arbitrarily different ways of pursuing status? This could depend on whether affiliation carried advantages distinct from signaling in the primeval environment--this in turn depending on whether exercises of power within bands was based on social influence alone or substantially on physical confrontations, where there's use for secret allies.
Also, a third possible motivational basis for intellectual production might be the drive to take sides and form a team, the Greens vs. Blues phenomenon. But whatever the number of drives (or "terminal values"), the search for truth is unlikely to be among them.
[Added Aug. 2]A fourth basis is implicit in Hanson's theorizing: power (as a terminal value) expressed through intellectual influence.
I don't understand why textbooks? Do you mean unadorned, consensus, "stood test of time" views? If so, I'd think age beats textbook. In econ, for example, JB Say over Samuelson and Samuelson over Mankiw.
the textbook industry is a massive scam
There's that, too. While textbooks are the ideal way to learn many subjects (college lectures are another waste of time, based on affiliation drives), most actual textbooks (at least in the humanities and social sciences) are failed attempts by specialists to be generalists. Robin, moreover, would have selected from the best textbooks by visiting the Stanford book store. (Also, there are some particularly good economics texts.)
Yeah, lots of punditry is based on the reputation of the speaker, his coalitions, his charisma. That's not improving policy debates.
As per humor and song, that's inherently personal anyway in my book, so it doesn't bother me. I doubt humor and song can increase much off a really good person of any era..
If someone spends his whole life learning to tell jokes, all the while in direct exonomic competition with others to tell better and better jokes, his jokes will be more effective at making people laugh than if a layman tells a joke.
That's simple, has a clear metric for "better," and is probably true.
But robins explanation has a problem: since writing you could associate a joke with an individual, the original writer. "Mark Twain makes a joke book, you say "did you hear the latest one from twain," all your listeners like it because of its associative effect.
In fact, "famous joke writer was not a profession.
Fixed.
"If listeners actually care less if claims are true that if claimers are impressive..."
--"than if"
I agree. If you can't explain a philosophical idea without referring to the original text you don't really understand it. Of course this brings up the question of what "philosophy" is. Is it the study of thinking (with the principles so universal that you can make up modern forms, possibly superior forms, of the old arguments that will be more helpful to modern readers, or even extraterrestrials), or is it a history of smart sounding things famous dead people said, used to signal sophistication.
I took a many the introductory science classes in college including nutrition, plant pathology, chemistry, biology, physics, oceanology , food science economics sociology and more and still remember a lot of what I was taught. Your recommendation of the introductory text books reminds me of how different pop books on nutrition and pesticides are from what I learned in those introductory classes!
I will put a plug in here for an Idea: IMO the signaling aspect of school makes science much harder than it it needs to be. The principles of the sciences, which are the most useful aspects, are very, simple and require little math but are not pushed to the lower performing students because we use math to purposefully make the subject difficult to strengthen the signal. To me that is a shame.
Philosophy students shouldn't read Locke for the same reason physics students don't read Maxwell's original papers. The textbook shouldn't just be what some academic "thinks" about Locke any more than a textbook on electromagnetism should be about what someone thinks of Maxwell.
The problem is that philosophy is not a field that lends itself to textbook treatment. The only halfway decent "textbooks" available to assign are anthologies. Why read what some academic thinks about Aristotle when you can read Aristotle yourself? Why would I assign a textbook (which provides, say, what some academic thinks about Aristotle or Locke or Heidegger) when I can just assign those things? Students can read them, and - as a professional academic - the textbook industry is a massive scam. In any field where a textbook can be avoided by assigning the original works, students benefit (intellectually, because they have to stretch their minds, and financially, because textbooks are obscenely overpriced).