brilliant and all too true. my country wastes billions on paying these kind of people in academic, think tanks, bureaucrats, and regulator roles outrageous salaries for half baked ideas without any accountability due to their impeccable 'credentials' and impressive sounding verbiage.
The coming infusion of AI into every corner of academic inquiry will likely devalue the prestige historically attached to marshaling a large fact base to carefully argue a position, since AIs can help so much there. (In math it's the ability to craft a complex proof.)
How this affects the academic reputation and rewards systems built up over the centuries will be interesting. Maybe something like a prediction market that measures outcomes more directly will play a role.
I suspect the asymmetry is even stronger than you suggest: the apparent simplicity of an abstract argument may be almost inversely related to the difficulty of discovering it. A complicated argument advertises the labor invested in it; a successful simplifying insight can erase the intellectual scaffolding required to reach it. But detail has another important function besides prestige: it can expose where an elegant abstraction fails when confronted with reality. Perhaps the productive division of labor is therefore abstract reasoning to identify the underlying structure, followed by detailed work designed aggressively to falsify it.
brilliant and all too true. my country wastes billions on paying these kind of people in academic, think tanks, bureaucrats, and regulator roles outrageous salaries for half baked ideas without any accountability due to their impeccable 'credentials' and impressive sounding verbiage.
The coming infusion of AI into every corner of academic inquiry will likely devalue the prestige historically attached to marshaling a large fact base to carefully argue a position, since AIs can help so much there. (In math it's the ability to craft a complex proof.)
How this affects the academic reputation and rewards systems built up over the centuries will be interesting. Maybe something like a prediction market that measures outcomes more directly will play a role.
I suspect the asymmetry is even stronger than you suggest: the apparent simplicity of an abstract argument may be almost inversely related to the difficulty of discovering it. A complicated argument advertises the labor invested in it; a successful simplifying insight can erase the intellectual scaffolding required to reach it. But detail has another important function besides prestige: it can expose where an elegant abstraction fails when confronted with reality. Perhaps the productive division of labor is therefore abstract reasoning to identify the underlying structure, followed by detailed work designed aggressively to falsify it.
Some examples would be welcome.