Situate Your Essay
Having been an academic researcher for over forty years now, I am well aware of academia’s many big failures as an intellectual system. By comparison, our system of public intellectuals has many advantages, including that it doesn’t try to be boring or hard to understand, and that it is willing to take on topics that ordinary people care about, even when those are out of academia fashion, or poor topics for demonstrating academic impressiveness. However, the system of public intellectuals has one huge failing, a failing so big that it threatens to cancel all its other advantages.
Academics have a key “situate” norm, which says that a paper should situate itself within a prior literature. That is, it should cite not only the actual sources which influenced it, but also the closest prior work in the same topic area; the author should have read and been influenced by those. A paper should also fairly explain its relation to these other papers, and respond to their relevant points on the theses of this paper.
The related norm of public intellectuals is instead to mention any other high profile public intellectuals who have discussed a topic lately. Any other sources or similar writings can be ignored. Yes, the academic situate norm has substantial costs, and we often fail to follow it into other disciplines or low prestige sources. But we follow it far more than do public intellectuals.
This academic norm to situate greatly encourages the accumulation of insight over time. Combined with the norm of novelty, it pushes academics to explain how our each paper adds to and extends the sum total of what we knew before. Public intellectuals, in contrast, can and do regularly repeat what others have said many times before. They fail to create a division of labor so that humanity can coordinate to more efficiently explore the vast space of possible topics.
The obvious solution here is to create or strengthen a situate norm among public intellectuals. Yes, ordinary readers couldn’t easily enforce such a norm, but public intellectuals already follow many norms not now enforced by typical readers. For example, editors of journalists usually enforce norms of spelling, grammar, and non-false quotes that typical readers can’t easily enforce.
If the many words required to situate an essay would detract too much from the flow of that essay, such words might perhaps be included in an available appendix or aside. If this is too big an overhead for short essays (e.g., X posts), we might excuse those.
Situate: I looked for but did not find someone who make this point before. Maybe Richard Posner says something similar in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.
The problem is norm enforcement. In academia you have peer review and an informed readership that each serve to maintain the norms.
It would be nice if the academic quality mechanism (peer review) were decoupled from the distribution channel (publishing in a specific journal). With electronic distribution there's no longer any reason for the two to be tightly coupled. If that decoupling happened then anybody could pay to get their content quality certified to a certain standard of accuracy/novelty – including public intellectuals who otherwise don't have an incentive to navigate the journal submission process.
I enjoyed this, as a professor; I must publish in journals regularly and teach students to do the same. Students must always do a literature review; they think the reason is a typical classroom exercise of "prove that you know X" but it really is, as Hanson says, towards the accumulation of knowledge. I get tired of constantly telling every student that the first commandment as soon as an idea has entered their head: find out what is already known about X.
I have so many metaphors for this, e.g., sudents have an idea that is like an island disconnected from the mainland; there must at least be a peninsula; do the work to build the peninsula if you must... Now with AI, I may even send students an AI overview of whatever their question is before we have our first meeting, to keep us from tediously laboring over that territory and having to rediscover the wheel. Students don't understand how important it will be to their progress to understand whether their question is in virgin territory, sparsely settled, or crammed with high-rises. Sigh.