My Complaint Re Academia
If you want to get paid for abstract analysis that is not mainly organized around current cultural or political fights, academia is pretty much the only game in town. So I am quite grateful that academia exists, and has included me.
But I do have a complaint. In most areas of life, activities are typically justifies in some detail in terms of the accepted purpose of that area. E.g., hospitals save lives, businesses serve customers, roads support travel, armies deter fights, and so on. But though the accepted purpose of academic research is to either answer deep important questions, or to help non-academics somehow, academics rarely explicitly justify their work in such terms.
For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.
You can also check this yourself by asking individual academics to explain how their work could plausibly contribute to answering deep important questions, or to non-academic value. Most will be surprised by the question, having never been asked, and answer poorly.
Yes, in principle the fashions that drive these choices could themselves be driven by processes that induce fashion to track deep important questions and non-academic value. But I’ve been in academia for four decades now and I just don’t see this. Changes to academic fashion, like other fashion, instead mostly results from individuals competing to gain their usual selfish rewards.
The arts are the other main area of life where specialists poorly justify their specific actions in terms of the usual area purposes. So if the arts are mostly about showing off personal abilities, and abilities to judge such abilities, likely so is academia.
This is great. But it's not a complaint! It's an observation.
There's an interesting confluence here with Rod Dreher's recent thoughts. Yes, academia has been taken over by rent seeking, and has lost the vast majority of its proper sense of purpose. There's been too much optimization on of top of fundamental naivete, so that the wrong things get optimized. At one level, academics are given too much credit for always caring about truth. Thus, peer reviewers aren't paid, and yet they're vaguely expected to judge articles on the basis of some sort of merit that's related to truth. But their incentive is to judge articles based on whether it adds to their own citation count. And so the real game is to cite the people who will be invoked as peer reviewers. But that's all hidden. There's a lot of corruption in academia, and woke pressures make it worse because they're another reason not to be honest.
I would propose a reform based on re-qualifying examinations. Kill publish or perish stone dead. The masquerading of rent seeking as scholarship is the single most pervasive corruption driver. Instead, there should be major examinations drafted by the discipline as a whole, and it should be normal for a professor to flunk out of his job because he didn't read and study the latest scholarship and so he failed his re-qualifying exam.
Ultimately, you can't build systems so perfect that people don't need to be good. Only the intrinsic motivation to seek truth can reform academia in the right way. But the protocols and incentives can channel that force better or worse. They're really messed up right now.