The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190701-trendyideas?key=mi0Bff1vaLHL09_no2Emg7sn4dWNuRhvVkoo39I05x-Q5CJZ4DU8VWHMRpHsHYr-NUpHdkhCN0pBenY4TG5GU04tSXRqbE92aENwQWVCdXJzWXZrVG42b1pvZw

by jseliger • 7 years ago

148 139 7 years ago

chronicle.com

ex3xu2• 7 years ago

As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004.

The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I'm all in favor of smiting the very dangerous contrapositive to that assumption: that unpopular ideas therefore must also lack value. I support this author as far as he is attempting to raise awareness of this trap -- lest someone else have to go through the same fate as Ignaz Semmelweis, Guglielmo Marconi, or James Allison.

But I felt like this article did little to present valid mechanisms to mitigate the risks of fashion, and instead spent most of the text attacking fashionable ideas simply for being fashionable, operating under the assumption that fashion itself necessarily lacks substance and causes problems on its own. I think this sort of hipster approach is as big of a risk as blindly following fashion -- both premises assume that popularity is necessary and sufficient to determine the value, or lack of value, of an idea.

But maybe I'm just a blind fashion follower myself, since I felt so personally attacked when the author criticized MOOCs as just another fashionable fad -- despite the valid criticisms he linked to, I felt like I got a lot of value out of them, after all.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

hyperpallium• 7 years ago

Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.

nn32• 7 years ago

It's a bit too much to ask him to provide a "cure for fashion".

That's just difficult.

I guess if he could do that it would be an exciting new research area and it would quickly become fashionable fashionable by itself, until it turns into a farce.

paultopia• 7 years ago

Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth:

The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages:

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

Here's the problem with this: it totally ignores the possibility of social learning (well, to be fair, he doesn't completely ignore that possibility, he just dismisses it in a couple of sentences), and with it, social learning about how some bad ideas can be particularly dangerous.

Here's an example. Anti-Semitism. Clearly a "taboo" idea in the sense that people get punished for uttering it; moreover, part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it.

But we're not worried that people might start believing it because we're worried it's true! I'm pretty sure I speak for essentially all other enforcers of that particular taboo when I say that we know that the claims that anti-Semites make are quite false indeed. (I'm assuming here that we're talking about the parts of anti-Semitic thought that make claims to be the sort of thing that can be true or false, like financial conspiracy theories.) Rather, we're worried that people might start believing it because we know history! We know that anti-Semitism is a belief system that is very easily exploited by evil people, who use it to trick people who are casting about for someone to blame for their misfortunes into finding an enemy and then giving the evil people political power in order to attack them. Because we know that anti-Semitism has that kind of mind-virus property (more like a mind-biological-weapon), we come down hard on people who utter anti-Semitic things. It has nothing to do with secretly worrying that they might be true.

The same is the case for lots of other taboo beliefs. (I can think of several that I don't want to mention, because I know that doing so will derail the subsequent conversation with deluded people saying "well, that COULD be true." But, again, historically, those beliefs have contributed to massively evil behaviors and I don't want to contribute to their propagation even indirectly.)

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

The problem is that the likeliness of the uninformed person to believe something they've heard has depressingly little to do with how likely that thing is to be true. A critical examination of the facts is something humans will avoid until it is absolutely unavoidable; we have an array of other heuristics we'll gladly jump to over expending costly mental effort evaluating something for truth.

0815test5• 7 years ago

Do people really 'get punished' for believing, e.g. financial conspiracy theories? I really have to dispute this. People believe (or rather, affect a belief) in these things because they get socially rewarded from holding/affecting such beliefs, not because they've carefully weighed the evidence one way or the other. So it seems that pg is still right on balance - yes, some people may be trying to offset this social reward via some sort of punishment, but what I am disputing is that this has been done strongly enough to tip these ideas into the overall "socially punished" bucket.

wisty• 7 years ago

part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it

I think this is the irrational part people are detecting. Yes a few thousand idiots on the internet believe some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and a few more joke about it, but it's simply not something anyone remotely normal accepts. People also say that gingers don't have souls, but even that's not something that would be healthy to worry about.

ex3xu2• 7 years ago

I mean, I don't think Graham is advocating at all for actively harmful beliefs. He's advocating for the explicit understanding of why these beliefs are harmful, rather than using the fact that they are taboo as an explicit justification for criticism. Because as taboo as anti-Semitism is now, showing any kind of support for Jews was just as taboo under the Third Reich. We come down hard on anti-Semitic people not because they are breaking a taboo, but because anti-Semitism carries the risk of active harm for a whole class of undeserving individuals. We aren't secretly worried that it might be true because we can take the effort to understand the principles behind this particularly well-understood example of tribalistic hate speech.

Take a look at something like Chomsky's political speech attacking NAFTA and neoliberalism in the 1990s, which Graham briefly alludes to. NAFTA was and remains a fairly popular initiative for the liberal establishment, but the principles under which Chomsky's justification stands can be imagined to hold up under scrutiny decades in the future, whereas exploitation of cheap Mexican labor -- probably not so much, I'd wager.

Another recent example -- Raghuram Rajan's 2005 paper [0] criticizing the financial innovations that would go on to destroy the world economy in the 2008 crash. This example satisfies the two "conspiracy-theory-esque" conditions that you cite from Graham, as he certainly made Kohn, Greenspan, Summers, and other major figures in the economic establishment angry enough to call him a "Luddite" with views that would qualify under Graham's "unsayable" criteria. At least, before he would be proven right just a few years later.

So you're certainly correct in pointing out that not every instance of taboo carries ideas worth considering -- and for some ideas, this is indeed a dangerous understatement -- but I don't agree with you when you imply that Graham is wrongheaded in every instance, and no taboos should ever be considered. To give another example, Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscenity across the world in the 1920s [1]. As far as I can tell, Graham is more concerned with scientific innovations rather than political speech, anyway.

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w11728

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous...

Der_Einzige7• 7 years ago

I like attacking academics for careerism as much as the next guy (and especially in the context of the strange embrasure of post modernist authors) but they straight up aren't even talking about the worst form of this yet.

The French authors listed at least had a sembalance of value from their works. Hell, I'd highly recommend everything Arendt wrote and Derrida wrote at least one good book on the Marx/Stirner rivalry. Plus if you're getting a philosophy degree you basically need to read everyone on that list (okay maybe exclude Foucault cus he says some dumb and anti-historical shit about leprosy)

But this piece failed to really get at the heart of Charlatanism. What really scares me are the "academics" who unironically believe in psychoanalysis today. It's not just for fashion - it's pure lunancy. These are your "lacanians". Try reading Lacan, or Deleuze and Guattari and you will see a whole level of bullshit one wouldn't even imagine possible. Seriously the story of Jacques Lacan and his popularity today among academics should scare you.

kaycebasques3• 7 years ago

Philosophize This just did a series on Foucault [0] and Deleuze [1] which I got a lot of value out of. Particularly the Deleuze discussion about how post-modernism doesn’t always have to devolve into deconstruction. That was eye-opening and hugely helpful for me. And Foucault’s idea of the panopticon is probably very relevant to anyone interested in surveillance capitalism.

I studied History at Cal so I understand the contempt for the philosophers and their academic followers. They can be personally obnoxious and seem to be intentionally obscure. Post-modernism seems to be creating more problems on campuses than its solving. But when I hear a good, plain English account of their arguments, like in Philosophize This, the ideas help me understand the world, and I’m thankful to them for that.

[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tcYLy2ILoRoDddvR56Kxy?si=O...

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=n...

Der_Einzige7• 7 years ago

Foucault's only half decent book was discipline and punish (where the panopticon chapter is in) but if you actually read him (or open up any of DnGs anti-oedipus) you will see very rapidly why you had to have a secondary source understand them.

It's because modern people don't read Charlatan authors as much as Foucault did. Foucault is a terrible historographer and no amount of writing against "metanarratives" or "totalizing descriptions of history" saves him from this

"Deconstruction" is not what I critique. I critique people who unironically stlll believe in the powers of psychoanalysis. DnG don't get a pass for inventing schozoanalysis - it's way worse!

povertyworld• 7 years ago

Pretty sure the panopticon predates Foucault by at least a century.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

Luckily, no one takes psychoanalysis seriously in the cognitive sciences. I can't imagine getting funding for a neuroimaging study of the Id.

hirundo2• 7 years ago

As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon.

If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or not.

As a corollary if you agree with all of the mainstream positions of your (aspirational or actual) social group, whether you realize it or not, you've probably arrived there via social pressure rather than an open, honest, rational method.

So I don't hold an accusation of extremism as an insult, but more a prerequisite of someone capable of independent thought.

That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom, and they tend to be right or wrong in interesting ways. Which is valuable.

0815test5• 7 years ago

"Social pressure" comes in many varieties. Many, perhaps even most, extremist positions aren't sustained by truth seeking based on perceived evidence, but by 'evaporative cooling' of fringe social groups, pushing the group away from reasonable stances and towards more distinctive and extreme ones.

lostmymind662• 7 years ago

Just because you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream population, doesn't mean your are incapable of independent thought.

"That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom"

Conventional wisdom usually is a result of many generations passing down wisdom and knowledge down to the next generation. It's not always correct, but I will give it more credibility than extremist views, which are almost always incorrect and based more on emotion than facts.

Extremest views are also usually held by younger people, which immediately should be put up to more scrutiny, simple based on a lack of knowledge and life experience.

jlawson• 7 years ago

Responding to your first paragraph.

If you came to the same conclusion as the mainstream on every issue, it almost certainly means you're incapable of independent thought. Not just one issue.

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

Extremest views are also usually held by younger people, which immediately should be put up to more scrutiny, simple based on a lack of knowledge and life experience.

On the other hand, as people get older they start to lose fluid intelligence and deliberative capacity and instead more regularly fall back on gut feelings and intuitions that might no longer apply in the present the same way they did in the past without thorough examination. There's also simply the fact that things we believed and people may have internalized from the past are often extremely questionable in light of the scientific and social progress that we've made today.

https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/three-behavioral-insight...

Der_Einzige7• 7 years ago

This is exactly why the term for what this article is criticising is "Critical Theory".

Leftist postmodernists are damn good at critiquing things, and calling out why one should reject a mainstream position.

Of course, they forgot that the seductive belief in rationalism - specifically in the claim that some human recognize reality more correctly than others (and education is what separates the wrong from the correct) - is most likely the beginning of every from of hierarchy and oppression that they critique.

Why is it that Foucault - an author who writes all about how shitty schools are - is required reading in many undergraduate classes? If he saw people being graded for regurgitating his ideas, he'd be spinning in his grave!

The Academy is where critical theory goes to be neutered. And it must be, as it would be too subversive without tenured academics to keep the proles from direct action.

xfs• 7 years ago

Well, you have to master the language of critique before being able to critique the language itself.

traverseda• 7 years ago

Extremism isn't an understanding it's a way of doing things.

I don't imagine that people are getting called extremists for jumping on the communism bandwagon, as an example. They're getting called extremists for how they're behaving, how they're promoting their ideas.

There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns - trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws - with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt.

You can think of the marketplace of ideas as a sort of dominance contest. The academic extremists I've encountered don't keep their claws sheathed, they're willing to do whatever it takes to make sure their ideas are the winner. And that's a problem because it poisons the discourse for everyone and promotes anti-intellectual sentiment.

If you're being called an extremist just for having some out-there ideas, well I don't know what's up with your social group but I don't think that's normal. Extremism is about tactics, it's about the fanaticism that keeps you from being able to co-exist with other ideas.

marcosdumay3• 7 years ago

Well call both "extremism". What is bad, because they are very different.

Like the GP says, extremist ideas are the very natural consequence of thinking by oneself. But extremist actions are the consequence of the very misguided arrogance of thinking that you are correct just because your ideas leaded you there.

kartan• 7 years ago

extremism /ɪkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m,ɛkˈstriːmɪz(ə)m/ noun the holding of extreme political or religious views; fanaticism.

Update: My point is that you are redefining what "extremism" means. e.g. The far-right is extremism. To think that you can create colonies in Mars in the next 10 years is "unorthodox".

If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

pixl973• 7 years ago

The word extremism has nothing to do with right or wrong itself.

If I live in an area that has had a stable climate for 1000 years, but i had at least some evidence that an 'extreme' change was going to occur, most people would consider that extremism. Especially since people will radically have to alter their behavior to survive.

In general extremist are incorrect, yet due to black swans, not always.

brighter2morrow• 7 years ago

If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words.

Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extremist political groups live by isolating their membership from mainstream society. Mainstream society's way to reduce the reach of the far-right and far-left is to reach out to their low-level rank-and-file members to sooth their fears and invite them back to mainstream society.

mrrrgn2• 7 years ago

Certain personality types are more likely to ignore social pressure and pursue logical conclusions of ideals. It's probably no accident that such personality profiles only account for a small percentage of our population as logical conclusions based off of faulty models can lead to huge disasters.

The great mass of people who don't do much deep thinking act as a dampener and probably prevent our society from shaking itself apart as it whips to and fro across the space of all possible ideologies.

hirundo2• 7 years ago

This is an argument against teaching critical thinking skills, which in the current zeitgeist is an extremist position. By thinking independently like this you weaken the dampener and risk the disintegration of society.

If that's followed by an adaptive reintegration, it's a feature not a bug.

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

I don't think that's so much an adaptive aspect of human societies as it is a result of the sort of memes that are effective at propagating themselves. If you are a meme that is facing selective pressures towards persisting for as long as possible, you'll fare best if you exploit human psychology such that you're very hard to get rid of and invoke behavior in the people that carry you that is oppressively dogmatic and ideally prevents the sort of exploratory behavior that might see you replaced by another meme.

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

That sounds a bit naturalist fallacy - just because it is selected for doesn't mean it is ideal. Legacy is perfectly capable of leaving maladaption. The inertia can and has worked against them too.

For instance it could have been from the history of human group hunting, warfare that sort of cohesion served better than intellectual ability in the short term.

But under modern conditions the utility would invert - muscle power is basically worthless compared to machines for labor for one. Not falling for the stupid delusions of the day can give a lead of centuries.

Besides shouldn't proper deep thinkers should be able to weigh risks of ideologies? The unthinking masses would continue along with disaster while critical thinkere would say "stop!".

134152• 7 years ago

This is mostly wrong, because there is only one reality. As trivial as this may sound, if you're interested in reality, then you will invariably get to the same conclusion as many other people. Of course, there will always be some shifts in knowledge and at that time a fringe position can be the right one, but these are rare - very rare, indeed. Generally, the fact that there is one reality means that scientific opinions will converge and they do so fairly quickly. The majority of the work in science is adding a little bit here and there and refining theories, not coming up with radically new theories that contradict existing opinions in a radical way.

I'd be wary about areas in which this is not the case. There are such areas, particularly in the humanities, but these are the ones with major methodological problems.

ajna91• 7 years ago

But most of what people care about are not "mere facts" of reality. What is the correct answer to the questions of morality, politics, etc?

Der_Einzige7• 7 years ago

There's entire books written which contradict every point you've brought up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own (his stuff on epistemology not the rest)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

pixl973• 7 years ago

because there is only one reality

Mostly, yet this view also has significant problems. The biggest issue is that as complexly increases, ability to completely traverse the problem space decreases. Combinatorial explosions commonly happen. The more variables you add to the equation, the larger effect local variables will have on the answer people arrive at.

tlear• 7 years ago

Claim is not about the ideas but people. It is like a fudge who build a website completely from scratch vs one who did it in Wordpress.

Talking to first one is interesting, second one not so much. The second website is most likely much better then first though

Vaskivo• 7 years ago

I also believe there is only one reality.

But thinking that we currently understand it in its totality is complete arrogance. (I even doubt we can achieve it)

An subjectivity shows us that that understanding is way harder than it seems.

alexashka• 7 years ago

If you change 'extremist' to 'unconventional', then we're in full agreement.

Extreme positions for an independent thinker make sense if you're in your 20s or 30s because you form ideas in contrast to status quo, often by swinging in the opposite direction.

By the time you've had a decade or two to test your ideas in the real world, the extremism fades away into either 'things are far more complex than I thought' or 'I'd need to change many minds to make this work and I see no clear path to get there' - which are not extreme positions as far as I can tell.

barrkel• 7 years ago

The easiest way for an aspiring rationalist to talk himself into supporting a faulty conclusion is to start with a feeling of rightness or wrongness, examine those feelings and pluck out some rationalisations, then mistake them for principles and follow them to extremes.

platz• 7 years ago

Which is why highly educated folks have some of most flagrant biases.

UncleMeat• 7 years ago

Second option bias is a real thing. People are often quick to criticize the mainstream but then fail to apply the same skepticism to the ideas that follow. There is tremendous risk in unexamined skepticism.

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

At pretty much every point in time prior to today, in essentially every field, a large portion of the broad academic consensus was either flat-out wrong or missing a large amount of vital nuance, and eventually a fringe idea developed prominence and replaced it to make academic consensus closer to the truth (we hope).

We'd be daft to think the same is not true today. It is very likely that there is some fringe position right now that is far more accurate than whatever passes as consensus, but we may not find that out for some time still.

Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still. Ideally, we should have fringe positions branching out from consensus in every direction, serving as the filopodia of academic thought.

roenxi• 7 years ago

Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still.

Which goes to a real problem that is easy to overlook - using a rational method to make decisions is extremely risky. If you get any of your assumptions wrong, it will cause a cascade of stupid-but-logical decisions and conclusions. And basically everyone believes something that is untrue in some sense, so it seems almost pot luck whether the untrue things are relevant or irrelevant in practice. There are a lot of geniuses in history who also believed some clearly stupid things.

Decisions made via social pressure are very tolerant of bad assumptions. If people don't understand why they are doing things but follow the crowd, they probably aren't going to end up anywhere too scary. If they try and make rational decisions from bad assumptions they could end up doing things that are profoundly foolish.

shrimpx• 7 years ago

I think the crux of what you're saying is that if you're a member of group A and you do some "critical thinking", you might find yourself associating with the ideas of group B instead. But you're still a member of group A, so some members of group A will find your new ideas to be incongruent... Of course if you leave group A and hang out in group B instead, nobody will disagree with your "extreme" ideas.

dfgdghdf• 7 years ago

If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another.

This is a big claim. Evidence?

invalidOrTaken• 7 years ago

What sort of evidence would convince you?

Nasrudith2• 7 years ago

Here is an easy example through history - republicanism vs monarchy. Previously advocating for self governance was radical. Now advocating for a return to ruling monarchies is extremist.

John Brown was also an extremist but now not being an abolitionist is extremist.

glennpratt4• 7 years ago

This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or not.

This seems rather self indulgent when you've set the criteria so vaguely.

Perhaps an example of an extemist view would be beneficial.

barry-cotter4• 7 years ago

The tax system is incredibly poorly designed everywhere. Rather than the hodgepodge of different races, levied at different places and times for different reasons by different levels of government a single tax is best. I’m partial to either a Georgist Land value tax or a consumption tax but I’m sure there are other good options.

Large scale immigration is incompatible with a welfare state unless immigrants are highly selected, as in Canada or Australia. If the US continues its march to open borders the welfare state will be dismantled or citizenship law will change to have multiple categories of rights for different types of citizens and residents.

Civic nationalism is incoherent unless people can be expelled from the community. Ethnic nations make sense, because people are loyal to their kin or cultural group. A group where people had to sign on to an explicit statement of values makes sense because then there’d be a very clear signal of whether you were in or out. Liberalism only works with a huge majority in favour of its values and without that huge majority that agree on most things it will slide towards political violence and likely civil war without vicious political repression.

renox• 7 years ago

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon. If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another.

Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much?

That said when talking about society, critical thinking is easy, coming up with credible proposals is hard.

barry-cotter4• 7 years ago

Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much?

The unity of views on many, many different topics among followers of a single political party would be vanishingly unlikely unless they were taking their beliefs and talking points from their fellow party members rather than thinking for themselves. This is not a US specific thing. Normal people don’t reason from principle, they reason coalitionally, based on the two most important questions in politics

Who, Whom?

Sniffnoy• 7 years ago

The thing is, there are two different things meant by the word "extremism", and the word itself serves to conflate the two.

One is what you discuss -- object-level positions that are extreme in some way. This is, as you say, no vice.

The other thing that is meant by "extremism" is what one might call "meta-level extremism"; it includes such things as trying to silence one's opponents rather than argue with them, the use of violence, etc. This, obviously, is a bad thing. (And while I called it "meta-level extremism" above, what it really is, I'd say, is illiberalism.)

For this reason, I don't like the word "extremism", as it conflates the two. Of course, it's possible that the reason the same word is used for both is because, for pyschological reasons, in humans these tend to go together. But they are logically separate.

nn32• 7 years ago

It happens in academia, it happens in programming.

Why exactly are you using that trendy java script frame work again? Maybe it's a little better (or not), but at least it is a lot cooler than yesterday's and looks better on a resume.

I guess it's just how human societies work.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

Let me introduce you to a little something called Industry Best Practice, which is pretty much just fashion as corporate policy.

You are using the latest JavaScript framework because your boss made you use it. Your boss made you use it because it's popular -- had he chosen an unpopular framework with a less active community and a smaller pool of developers to hire from, his ass would be grass because he would be introducing unnecessary risk into the software project. If your boss decides to be a maverick, exercise his own judgement in development tool choice, and pick Haskell or Erlang or something, he had better offer a perfect guarantee that the project will not fail or overrun its budget because if it does, the language/tool/framework will be blamed -- because it differs from Industry Best Practice.

Apocryphon3• 7 years ago

It's cargo cults all the way up.

whoevercares• 7 years ago

I thought this is about deep learning lol.

autokad• 7 years ago

A company was holding a competition for 'a great new idea to solve heart disease' with a huge million $ prize. our research group of 30+ people consisting mostly of faculty wanted to win it, so we broke our group into 6 or so sub-groups to come up with ideas and submit it to the greater group.

my group wanted to submit as an idea 'tax on soda'. I was adamantly against the idea. Ignoring the fact that I don't think it would work, its not a 'NEW' idea, and the company that was holding the comp was doing this for PR, and this doesn't seem like an idea they'd choose as a winner. However, when the groups got back together, all of the other groups submitted the same idea, tax soda.

I was floored. there was over 300 years (3 centuries) of higher education among the groups, and they were completely incapable of original thought.

justicezyx• 7 years ago

You should ask why such an old idea were not experimented on large scale, not that is not novel.

When solving problem, start with the obvious, then go with more sophisticated...

Your example is just an example that people do not see the defect in the system, not people cannot come up with novel idea.

fouc• 7 years ago

Sounds like wisdom of the crowds. A tax on soda is a fairly pragmatic choice that's implementable with minimum fuss and could show a fairly decent improvement across the population of maybe 2-3%

nine_k• 7 years ago

How about someone saying: "They all are going to suggest a tax on soda. Let's try to come up with something else!"?

btrettel3• 7 years ago

To comment on a tangential issue...

there was over 300 years (3 centuries) of higher education among the groups

I don't think simply adding up the total number of years of education is meaningful. Most of that education is redundant. If it were humanly possible I'd be more impressed by 300 years of education for a single person as it wouldn't have the same amount of redundancy.

You'll see this cumulative strategy appear in other areas as well, e.g., "our lawyers have 200 years of experience!"

LanceH• 7 years ago

As much as I would like to hate on lawyers, 200 years of trial or contract experience is meaningful. They have seen countless variations on whatever theme they practice, they know the jurisdiction, they know the judges, the opposing counsel, etc...

andrekandre• 7 years ago

what was the other alternative that you wanted to explore?

icsllaf• 7 years ago

These innovation/idea competitions are almost always self-fulfilling prophecies. No one wants to submit an idea that's even slightly out of there because only viable and ideas grounded in reality will win but the only ideas submitted are viable and grounded in reality so there's no way to actually break the mold and most people are scared to.

Fede_V2• 7 years ago

I am as anti-pomo/critical theory as it gets, but, sadly, this phenomena is very much present in the hard sciences as well.

For example, about 10-15 years ago, the big craze in biology was microarrays, and the early papers made crazy promises about everything that they would deliver. With hindsight, it turned out almost all the early papers were fatally flawed and were drastically statistically underpowered: it turns out that living systems have a huge amount of noise, making clean measurements is difficult, and things are very complicated. The same exact thing played out with microRNAs, epigenetics (chipSeq data is exceedingly noisy), metagenomics, single cell genomics, etc.

Every single time you'd get 'trailblazers' who'd come into the field, do shitty rushed science, hype their results like crazy, and by the time people figured out that all the initial results were garbage, they'd have moved onto the new hot thing.

I guess the advantage that hard sciences have over the humanities is that eventually we'd figure it out and do things properly - but the amount of money that has been wasted in shitty research that didn't add anything to human knowledge is probably in the hundreds of billions in the last 15 years alone.

api2• 7 years ago

Every single time you'd get 'trailblazers' who'd come into the field, do shitty rushed science, hype their results like crazy, and by the time people figured out that all the initial results were garbage, they'd have moved onto the new hot thing.

Same thing happens in business with the latest startup or investment fad. People are sheep.

dannykwells• 7 years ago

Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this. With things like microarrays and other tech, sure there were promises that were too big. But the underlying idea (gene expression matters, there are lots of genes, we should measure them all) is correct.

To wit, RNA-seq has transformed cancer biology. And Nanostring is now offering a microarray-like technology with extremely impressive signal to noise. And we still use lots of tools initially developed for microarrays (Limma, for example). So I would argue the investment in microarray technology has absolutely paid off.

I think you're throwing the baby out with the bath water to say that, because a few bad eggs are effectively salesman and not scientists, that we wasted "hundreds of billions" of dollars (i.e., a large fraction of the NIH budget). The fact is, most research doesn't hold up not because the researchers weren't honest, or because they were salesmen, but fundamentally, because science is hard and it's really hard to be right for the right reason in science.

Alternatively, if you have a formula to determine, in real time, which results are hype and won't stand up vs. which are real and will, well, that would be something too.

Fede_V2• 7 years ago

I don't have issues with the technologies, I have issues with the early papers that came out with 'gene signatures' based on maybe 40 or 50 patients.

I think in general it's actually quite easy to tell which results are hype and which are not. Do a power analysis and estimate what kind of sample size would be required to measure the effect the researchers estimate - if they are off by an order of magnitude, reject.

dfeliej• 7 years ago

In my experience, there's a disproportionate reward associated with fashions in science. That is, the people at the forefront of a trend get rewarded professionally (tenure, positions, promotion), even when behaving in a way that is irresponsible theoretically or empirically. The skeptics, on the other hand, who carefully lay out the problems with the new research, and eventually point out the obvious flaws, get treated as sticks-in-the-mud, etc., even though they are eventually proven correct.

There are gains to be made through innovation, and I'm not arguing against that. Sometimes too, details are just minor details to work out. But sometimes the details matter and point to bigger problems.

The problems with fads in science are that the focus in academics seems sometimes to be on popularity per se rather than verdicality, and denialism about scientific fads as a phenomenon. This is pointed out in the article, and is one of its better points.

Someone else criticized the article for not presenting solutions, which is fair, but I think that's in part because effective solutions would probably require a huge shift in culture in academics. We'd need to return to more stable professional positions rather than the cannabilistic postdoc system in place now, with declining tenure; we'd need to focus more on groups of researchers and findings rather than celebrity academics ala TED talks; we'd need to put much more emphasis on a pattern of replications rather than single studies; etc. etc. Even then, I don't think the problem would entirely go away.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

The "furious exchange of proper nouns" made me lul.

"Derrida and Badiou at Tanagra!"

It's like this because like the Tamarians, everyone in the discussion is assumed to be familiar with all of the background material -- and if you are not, then what the hell are you doing here? I saw this kind of elitism unfold here on Hackernews once. Someone once asked for an explanation of what deconstruction was and was told basically, "Have you read your Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzche, Freud, and Levinas yet? No? Then shaddap, you are obviously not prepared to even begin to understand deconstruction." Can you imagine Feynman doing that? Like, "Have you read your Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger yet? No? Then shaddap..."

Philosophy is like AI: as soon as we know it works and put it into practice, it ceases to be philosophy. So people who majored in philosophy are put in the uncomfortable position of having to justify the importance -- to others and perhaps themselves -- of what they study, and it's much easier to seem important by forming exclusive intellectual cliques and inventing ways to consider people outside your clique to be stupid and wrong-headed than it is to dig deep and find out why and how your work is important in the real world -- or, worse yet, face the music and admit your work is not important at all and you're better off doing something else.

primroot• 7 years ago

"Intellectuals don't make studies about themselves." - Noam Chomsky (probably paraphrased because I can't find the source, although I'm sure I've heard him plenty of times say this.)

I think intellectuals (including the ones that do honestly try to answer questions about the world rather finding ways to convince people about how important their field is) should be compared to the priestly castes of older societies. That is one way to make sense of their behavior.

Zarath2• 7 years ago

I wrote a long response to this and deleted it, so I'll just say this. Politics and philosophy are one of the few things where everyone feels qualified no matter how pedestrian or unqualified they are. So you'll have to forgive people for not bothering to listen to someone who hasn't read a book on politics or philosophy maybe in their entire life yet feel like their regurgitated Fox News talking points should be taken seriously in a discussion. You wouldn't listen to someone who hasn't passed physics 1 about the whether the bridge you are building is stable. This isn't elitism.

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

On the one hand, having a shared vocabulary and basis for understanding with others is often strictly necessary for fruitful academic debate.

On the other hand, just because someone hasn't read the same book doesn't mean they haven't already intuited the same concepts, or that they couldn't have a basis for understanding with you. Maybe I've never read Wittgenstein but I'm intimately familiar with Zen Buddhism, etc. Insular academic fields often feel like they are going out of their way to repel all the potential Ramanujans of the world, and I'm not sure I trust that it's always for the right reasons rather than to fulfill perverse incentives built into the structure of traditional academia.

aldoushuxley001• 7 years ago

It's close to elitism, maybe better called gatekeeping. Everyone has their own philosophy. While I agree it's fair for people not to care or listen to someone else's philosophy, people also shouldn't be gaslighted for musing about philosophy either, regardless of which or how many books they've read.

nkurz• 7 years ago

You wouldn't listen to someone who hasn't passed physics 1 about the whether the bridge you are building is stable.

It depends what they were saying about it. If they were claiming that it's obviously safe because it's made of steel, because steel is really strong, then no --- not even if they had a PhD in Physics and knew the exact tensile strength of the materials. But if they were mentioning that in their personal observation this particular bridge sure sways a lot when it's windy, I'd probably listen to them despite their lack of formal education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOjxPCfaFk.

pessimizer• 7 years ago

Politics and philosophy aren't physics.

robocat• 7 years ago

an explanation of what deconstruction was

Here's an explanation of deconstruction I liked:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070610103653/http://www.info.u...

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure

A classic written by a software engineer, mostly about what deconstruction is, with background about what postmodernism is. Quite long but very well written.

api2• 7 years ago

One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.

n4r9• 7 years ago

Is it necessarily the job of academics to have superficial appeal to the layman?

Der_Einzige7• 7 years ago

"maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience"

Someone did. His name is Wittgenstein. Folks just don't read him.

Also, real people def experience existential dread. Camus and Sartre are great reads for trying to come to terms with the possibility of infinite (but some infinities are larger than others!) freedom

Real people experience oppression, which is why most of the "postmodern neo-marxists" care so much about stopping it.

Real people experience ethical dilemmas, and would find a lot of utility in exploring the thoughts of Kant, JSM, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Arendt. Out of those, Kant is the only one whose sort of difficult to understand without knowing the jargon. Really this article is about how terrible contemporary French Philosophy given that the useless jargon seems only to be in their works (since Hegel anyway)

Apocryphon3• 7 years ago

Kierkegaard doesn't use academic philosophy jargon, but he came up with his own, and the English translations of his work come off as cryptic and dense.

wayoutthere• 7 years ago

People don’t want philosophy; if they did then there are plenty of authors from Aristotle through the modern day. Existentialism is basically “how to survive in an arbitrary world that makes no sense”. It’s a fucking guidebook for the modern world built in the years before and after WW2.

People en masse want pop-philosophy that confirms their existing beliefs. Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

badpun• 7 years ago

Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

I've just watched an interview with him where he says that, when he's out on the street in basically any city in the world, he's approached roughly once every ten minutes by someone thanking him for the help they got from his lectures and books. In many cases they say that, thanks to JP, they were able to lift themselves from shitty life situation (ex. abusive family, addiction, depression, aimlessness, anger etc.) and turn their lives around. I cannot reconcile that with your comment.

0815test5• 7 years ago

The stance that "the world is arbitrary and makes no sense" is itself far from uncontroversial! Indeed, the very term "modern world" suggests that our world (in contrast with the "pre-modern" one) does derive much of its comparative success from institutions and frameworks that work (at least to some extent) in ways that can be made some sense of and understood fairly well.

faissaloo• 7 years ago

Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

I contest this, JP is among the many reasons why I've practically 'turbocharged' my life and transformed from a scrawny pretty toxic guy into an assertive, empathetic, can-do and intelligent dad-type guy.

sho• 7 years ago

Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person

Without wishing to get into yet another discussion about Peterson, I think that's a pretty textbook example of an intellectually dishonest attempt to simply pigeonhole someone you probably don't know all that much about into the "enemies" basket.

I've read and listened to JP to some extent - believe it or not, yes, as part as some kind of greater effort to better myself, as is much of my reading. I agree with some of what he thinks, and disagree with others, but I don't regret the time spent. If that makes me a "shit person" then frankly I think it's your worldview that is the problematic one.

Fins• 7 years ago

Nobody reads JP to become a better person, they do it to feel better about being a shit person.

Isn't that the case for any other pseudo-profound pop-philosophy as well, not just JP?

And isn't JP so popular exactly because the more mainstream academic trend is so laughable?

dang• 7 years ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375846 and marked it off-topic.

mistermann• 7 years ago

I think that is a perfectly reasonable and prudent approach (assuming those who are interested can still navigate to it) - this allows these important conversations to take place without disrupting the community mood in the main thread.

In the longer term, I believe strongly that with some effort (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375985), perhaps HN might one day be the one place where such things could be discussed in an objective manner, and perhaps once we iron out the kinks in how that can be accomplished, the outside world might even be able to learn these skills and we could finally start to discuss these topics in a reasonable manner before time runs out (as seems to be the case with many of them, such as global warming).

Sincere thanks for allowing the discussion to take place.

EDIT: It seems others can't navigate to it from the main thread. Dang, if you read my reply (within the disconnected thread), I hope you can start to see why I believe this phenomenon is an important problem. Society is at a point of impasse on too many important issues. Our technological capabilities have been developing at a parabolic rate, but our cultural and language/communication developments have been largely static.

This imbalance is starting to become an existential threat on several different fronts, and I think it is time that people with "great" power should be starting to consider whether a moral obligation to at least try to do something comes with that power.

bigbadgoose• 7 years ago

It's OK, even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th deviations have their "normies"

username902• 7 years ago

Social sciences has yet to find their scientific method. Natural science was mostly bullshit before the scientific method and it set them straight. So in my opinion listening to social scientists today is kinda like reading Aristotle to learn about physics. A lot of thoughts for sure, and it sounds smart, but it totally lacks any connection to reality.

pmyteh• 7 years ago

My part of political science has been (attempting to) follow scientific method since the 1940s. Its results have been... underwhelming. The main reason for this, bluntly, is that people are really damned complicated. They're difficult to model, they behave irrationally, even a minimal model has way too many variables. Hell, they don't even vote using the same heuristics that they did 50 years ago. There's a reason why abstract social science (like model-based economics) can look like it has little connection to reality, while the less abstract you get then the woolier and less scientifically satisfying it generally becomes. It's because getting crisp, reproducible, cumulative, results is extraordinarily hard.

Faced with that, you have two choices: keep trying to get better at what we're doing, or decide that these questions aren't worth answering (or that it isn't possible to). I think that better understanding the behaviour of people collectively organising themselves is vital, so I pursue the first. But I have sympathy with those that would prefer to work on something else.

username902• 7 years ago

Right, the scientific method is mostly useless for social science which is why it is in such a dire state. My point is that we need something of equal significance for social science before it will start make noticeable progress, until then it will be on the level as Aristotelian physics.

ausbah• 7 years ago

why shouldn't social sciences use the scientific method? seems like all the issues with using it in social sciences arise from messy implementations

fujvcijccfbj2• 7 years ago

Social sciences have their own methods, which are suited for the unique kinds of data and questions they deal with. Read John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research for a solid overview of why you can’t just mask natural science methods onto the social sciences, and which might also clue you into why your assumptions regarding the value of social science research are wrong.

btrettel3• 7 years ago

From the article:

Mayr’s observation draws attention to the fact that fashion is never merely additive; it demands we abandon certain things, and those abandonments can be, at the very least, premature.

I've observed these premature abandonments in my own area (a particular subfield of fluid dynamics), but I think its cause is more complicated than "academics follow fads". I think fads are part of it, but the grant funding cycle is another part. Perhaps grants are largely driven by fads. I wouldn't really know, but I can recall calls for proposals on fad X as applied to Y. I think part of it is that people rarely do actually comprehensive literature reviews, so they don't have a good idea of what's been done and what hasn't been done, so they might assume something isn't as novel as it actually is. Or their literature review might make them think that X is solved, but a little-known paper showed that X is actually more complicated than is commonly believed and not solved.

This dynamic means there's a lot of "low-hanging fruit" available that won't look like low-hanging fruit to most people. I'm happy to grab such things myself. A few years ago I made a large data compilation for a problem I'm interested in (~1200 data points from ~50 studies) and have written two papers from that already, with several more planned. Many people seem to implicitly assume this work has already been done because it seems "obvious", but I think large data complications of this variety are rarely ever done. Many things that are commonly believed are actually easily shown to be false with the right data. I'm planning to make a career of this. It's not sexy right now but that could change with time.

Edit: Data compilation is a commonly missed "last step" in a review. Most reviews I've read seem to collect the conclusions of analyses of small amounts of data. It's better to instead collect all the data, filter out the bad data, and draw conclusions from the compilation instead. A collection of the conclusions of small studies will have bad data, biases, and/or not generalize as well.

aalleavitch10• 7 years ago

Kuhn said it first: https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Kuhn.html

chiefalchemist• 7 years ago

Humans are humans. Some industries (e.g., academia, journalism, science, etc.) have mythical branding that positions them above bein human. They are not. History is pretty clear about this.

Such a flaw in and of itself isn't a bad thing. What it is, it is. The danger comes when others put too much (blind) faith in the myth, and not enough in the lessons history has already taught.

samirillian• 7 years ago

Let me excerpt an email from a friend:

...[H]ermeneutics is fundamentally about power, as Nietzsche described. But in Nietzschean terms it is not like Foucaultan terms, for Nietzsche includes "being a slave" or being incorporated into the power of another, as a potentially positive or potentially negative thing. For Foucault it is never neutral and rather black and white. And for Hegel. Which is why Nietzsche and Derrida are both superior to Foucault and Hegel whenever hermeneutics and the hermeneutic circle are issues of earnest import.

Now, I think this paragraph is entirely readable and gives a pretty good breakdown of the difference between, say, a Neitzschean and a Foucauldian understanding of power, freedom, and interpretation. Personalities here serve both as metaphors and as reminders that the world we live in is a _human_ world.

I'm sure the people this writer is talking about are insufferable, but this writer is also kind of an ignoramus.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

My view of fads is that they are endemic to domains in which the underlying structures are complex and deep, but in which being able to rapidly assess tribal affiliation IFF[1], evident, costly, and at the least not trivially donned-ordoffed signifiers are required.

I've noted the similarities previously across a number of domains: clothing, music, food and diet, fitness, art. To a certain extent architecture. Automotive and other equipment or product design. Fandoms around books, or films, or comics. Theories of political economy. And management fads. See:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

Add to that software languages, development methodologies, and academic fashions.

The inderlying reasons are information theoretic as well as tribal. We're working in complex multidementional dynamic spaces with diverse worldviews and incomplete, inconsistant, variably understood-and-applied vocabularies (and other symbolic references) scrabbling for a small pie and limited prestige slots. Simply understanding a common language (or choosing which to adopt) is a high-risk decision made under highly imperfect knowledge.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Indentify friend or foe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe

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