Catherine: And your own research. Harold: Such as it is. C: What’s wrong with it? H: The big ideas aren’t there. C: Well, it’s not about big ideas. It’s… It’s work. You got to chip away at a problem.
> You might think their added freedom would result in amateurs contributing proportionally more to intellectual progress, but in fact they contribute less.
Is this true? A lot of the fundamental breakthroughs in (eg) Physics and Chemistry were found by amateurs.
This might be because those breakthroughs took place in an earlier era when the relevant institutions were less developed.
Which I think is broadly correct. By the time there are big, official institutions working in an area good methodology for that domain has been figured out (if not, you wouldn't be able to have an institution, because you wouldn't be able to assess who's work was good). And once that condition obtains, rigor wins out.
But amateurs are the only people who can win in the domains that are so new as to not have robust methodologies.
Even non-rigorous arguments can provide Bayesian updates. It seems like even if you are dealing with a mass of non-rigorous arguments, you can compile them in to a big pro-con list and build on non-rigorous work that way.
The largest missing piece of your story is access to resources to collect novel data. The benefit of being a professional is that other people provide you with resources to collect data on topics of interest. The cost of being a professional is that the gatekeepers of those resources require those more robust methods. The more successful you are at answering questions, the greater resources you are given in the form of tenure, grants, etc.
When a new field arises, amateurs are well-positioned to make advances in those topics, but they can only grab low-hanging fruit, by aggregating whatever little data is relevant to the topic at hand. After that, further investigation requires resources to gather genuinely novel data and so the field necessarily professionalizes.
I would suspect that the first intellectuals that address a new topic use informal methods even if they are professional academics, because of the limitations on data. They need to make a case for why professional investigation is worth the resources, and informal methods are more effective at aggregating disparate types of data through "narrative" arguments. The first argument for relativity was a gedankenexperiment, and only later was it confirmed via experiment.
I believe there was a dude Socrates who did fairy well for himself in terms of renown...
I see a lot of what you talk about here as hypothesis formation work. Too much experimental work just fishes for results without a model of their domain that is used in hypothesis formation. Or worse concoct their model post hoc and pass it off as a priori. I think it would be massively naive to think that this behaviour isn't widespread.
And why? Because this sort of discourse has little value to the professional academic given their incentive structures. Prestige comes from the published result. And it just remains a fact that one can get away with doing a lot of experimental work in various fields without taking the time to engage in the sort of informal discourse that can do much to clarify logical space before a single experiment is run.
The fact that such discourse is accorded no institutional value has pushed various disciplines to the point of absolute absurdity. Philosophy would be the natural home of this kind of crucible discourse. But instead they chase results just like everyone else... Except they do everything a priori, while occasionally updating their views in light of new empirical research.. For all the professed rigour of analytic metaphysics, it is arguable whether it has made any sort of contribution to human knowledge whatsoever. Rigor itself becomes abberant where it yields so little.
I think institutions and the rigor and heterogeneity they can provide are great things. I'm no radical. But they are so much in need of reform I don't think your claims about are necessarily true in all academic contexts. An academic environment that incentivised this sort of discourse as a precursor to the rigorous application of method would offer the best of both worlds imo
If you're measuring intellectual progress in terms of published papers, then that obviously selects strongly for academic norms of rigor. But I guess I'm not sure how else I'd measure progress.
Social science (of dubious methodology obviously) suggests that speed of progress on a goal affects construal level. So it makes sense that amateurs who have the luxury of rediscovering low hanging fruit and in general doing more breadth first search in an area would be less interested at chipping away at fiddly details in near mode. As you mention, such a construal works better in new areas where a wider variety of imported methods are likely to bear fruit. So I guess I would be less tempted to say that there is a balance point that is optimal and instead say that we should like to fit the correct methods to the current state of a domain which is changing over time. Since people specialize in methods, aiming the wrong people at an area will cause underperformance, even if they are plenty smart.
> You might think their added freedom would result in amateurs contributing proportionally more to intellectual progress, but in fact they contribute less.
Is this true? A lot of the fundamental breakthroughs in (eg) Physics and Chemistry were found by amateurs.
This might be because those breakthroughs took place in an earlier era when the relevant institutions were less developed.
Which I think is broadly correct. By the time there are big, official institutions working in an area good methodology for that domain has been figured out (if not, you wouldn't be able to have an institution, because you wouldn't be able to assess who's work was good). And once that condition obtains, rigor wins out.
But amateurs are the only people who can win in the domains that are so new as to not have robust methodologies.
In many areas the main resource to get data is time. In those areas, amateurs still make less progress, even proportional to the time they spend.
Even non-rigorous arguments can provide Bayesian updates. It seems like even if you are dealing with a mass of non-rigorous arguments, you can compile them in to a big pro-con list and build on non-rigorous work that way.
The largest missing piece of your story is access to resources to collect novel data. The benefit of being a professional is that other people provide you with resources to collect data on topics of interest. The cost of being a professional is that the gatekeepers of those resources require those more robust methods. The more successful you are at answering questions, the greater resources you are given in the form of tenure, grants, etc.
When a new field arises, amateurs are well-positioned to make advances in those topics, but they can only grab low-hanging fruit, by aggregating whatever little data is relevant to the topic at hand. After that, further investigation requires resources to gather genuinely novel data and so the field necessarily professionalizes.
I would suspect that the first intellectuals that address a new topic use informal methods even if they are professional academics, because of the limitations on data. They need to make a case for why professional investigation is worth the resources, and informal methods are more effective at aggregating disparate types of data through "narrative" arguments. The first argument for relativity was a gedankenexperiment, and only later was it confirmed via experiment.
Near vs far, yes?
I believe there was a dude Socrates who did fairy well for himself in terms of renown...
I see a lot of what you talk about here as hypothesis formation work. Too much experimental work just fishes for results without a model of their domain that is used in hypothesis formation. Or worse concoct their model post hoc and pass it off as a priori. I think it would be massively naive to think that this behaviour isn't widespread.
And why? Because this sort of discourse has little value to the professional academic given their incentive structures. Prestige comes from the published result. And it just remains a fact that one can get away with doing a lot of experimental work in various fields without taking the time to engage in the sort of informal discourse that can do much to clarify logical space before a single experiment is run.
The fact that such discourse is accorded no institutional value has pushed various disciplines to the point of absolute absurdity. Philosophy would be the natural home of this kind of crucible discourse. But instead they chase results just like everyone else... Except they do everything a priori, while occasionally updating their views in light of new empirical research.. For all the professed rigour of analytic metaphysics, it is arguable whether it has made any sort of contribution to human knowledge whatsoever. Rigor itself becomes abberant where it yields so little.
I think institutions and the rigor and heterogeneity they can provide are great things. I'm no radical. But they are so much in need of reform I don't think your claims about are necessarily true in all academic contexts. An academic environment that incentivised this sort of discourse as a precursor to the rigorous application of method would offer the best of both worlds imo
Citation needed. Preferably one with demanding statistical methods.
If you're measuring intellectual progress in terms of published papers, then that obviously selects strongly for academic norms of rigor. But I guess I'm not sure how else I'd measure progress.
Social science (of dubious methodology obviously) suggests that speed of progress on a goal affects construal level. So it makes sense that amateurs who have the luxury of rediscovering low hanging fruit and in general doing more breadth first search in an area would be less interested at chipping away at fiddly details in near mode. As you mention, such a construal works better in new areas where a wider variety of imported methods are likely to bear fruit. So I guess I would be less tempted to say that there is a balance point that is optimal and instead say that we should like to fit the correct methods to the current state of a domain which is changing over time. Since people specialize in methods, aiming the wrong people at an area will cause underperformance, even if they are plenty smart.