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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I can't quite claim to be in the framer mold, but I left grad school because I saw no value in adding the 10th decimal place to someone else's research. At any rate, I believe there are major institutional problems, at least in humanities, that occlude the creation of bold new ideas. One of the main problems, as you've pointed out, has to do with the patronage and nepotism endemic to the transistion from undergrad to graduate to professorial studies. To my thinking, one proposal might be to prevent members of a department from choosing the entering grad student class. In philosophy for example, I think it terribly quaint to let Kantians cultivate Kantians, Rawlsians Rawlsians and so on. Recommendations, while important, are overrated, largely because they're prone to confirmation bias: professors will tend to like recommendations that exemplify their own perceived virtues. (Well that's best case. Worst case, someone will respect a recommendation because they respect or like or are friends with the recommender.) In general, to foster genuine creativity in graduate school and further, academia needs greater fragmenting, separating research interests from professional power.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

It's always much more politically expedient to bash the newest framers and laugh at them. . . Until it turns out that they are right.

The problem is, like other institutions before it, academia has become a sinecure for fillers. Being a framer is bad for your career, and the bigger your frame, the more likely that you will be dismissed by the fillers of the previous frames (who are not at all wont to admit that there might be something amiss with the frames they are busy filling).

The existence of this blog is an encouraging step in the right direction, though. . .

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