5 ms·

Academic B.S. as artificial barriers to entry

35 points by mwsherman 11y ago

emcq 11y ago
Some interesting points but it isn't limited just to academia. You unfortunately see similar cliques in industry for things like databases, languages, MVC frameworks, etc which is rather thin knowledge that can be picked up quickly by competent hires.
- firasd 11y ago
  I suspect at some point JavaScript developers got together and decided: why say "server-side rendering" and "editable" if you can say "isomorphic" and "mutable"?
pinaceae 11y ago
Sir Karl Popper will blow your mind.
rhaps0dy 11y ago
At first, this seems to me like a false conspiracy theory. But those texts ARE needlessly obscure. I propose another possible explanation: signaling. By parsing and writing complicated text, they show their verbal prowess. Or their mathematical ability. I thought "write simply and clearly" was basic in technical text writing.
firasd 11y ago
I understand (and agree to some extent with) the argument but I think the excerpted paper doesn’t work well as an example of the issue. The concluding paragraph is lucid and a bit poetic, and upon clicking the link it turns out the title (and general question it explores) is an allusion to another well-known paper. It’s almost literary compared to what sometimes passes for writing in academic articles.
loourr 11y ago
This really sums up what I've been thinking about Critical Theory. It seems like such a stark contrast from science & engineering where the idea is to explain something complex in the simplest terms. Whereas it seems Critical theory exists to disguise simple ideas in complex terms.
- huac 11y ago
  no, the point is that what you consider a "simple idea" is actually extremely complex, hence the need for very specific or obscure (and often German) terms
sevensor 11y ago
This is true even in engineering --- I was shocked by how much B.S. I had to add to a paper to get it published. Same content, twice as long, and vaguely implying stuff way beyond what it's actually about.
- biot 11y ago
  Taken to its limit, the original paper (without the BS filler) then becomes the abstract.
xamuel 11y ago
For mediocre "pushing-the-envelope" publish-or-perish papers, it's often a matter of flinging the muddy paper at enough journals until it sticks at one of them. If so, the last thing you want is for the reviewer to actually understand what you're talking about. So obfuscate the hell out of it and hope you get a lazy "uhh, looks good!" referee.
axplusb 11y ago
As an econ PhD dropout, I never quite understood why such an emphasis was made on physics-lookalike models. I was always more encouraged to come up with a bunch of equations that would mimic some phenomenon, than dig around and understand this phenomenon in more depth. A few arguments that I can agree with though: - Models are a compact formulation of complex theories. I remember a professor writing a dozen equations and claiming he just taught us Marx's Capital. In retrospect I think that's pretty funny, and quite telling of the superficiality that is rampant in the profession. But still that might have been a great executive summary (I still haven't read the book). Another example is Piketty's "r > g" that really is a lot of food for thought. - Models can lead to actionable insight. I think there are people in Central Banks and Economics departments of governments who rely quite heavily on some models to forecast GDP, unemployment etc. But this comes with a huge caveat: it's often easy to tweak a model to make it describe pretty much the opposite phenomenon of the one intended. So the real benefits of that kind of academia were and still are pretty unclear to me. I believe some academics were hiding their lack of deep understanding of economic matters behind a fog of math. Even Blanchard (former chief economist at the IMF) admitted to something along those lines in the wake the 2008 crisis.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  The benefit of the models is that they force you to both explicitly state all your assumptions and also verify that your conclusions logically follow from your assumptions. Further, it enables others who wish to criticize it to easily derive predictions and show that those predictions fail to match reality, while making it impossible for you to say "that isn't what I meant". If the math says it, that's what the model predicts. Vague verbal reasoning just involves a lot of time wasting - "your model seems to show this, I think" -> "no that's totally not what I meant, you don't understand" -> etc.
benbreen 11y ago
I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable, but I think it's unfair to take that article as an example of Sokal-style nonsense. As an exercise, here's my translation of what she's saying [supplied in brackets]: This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies [clear enough] and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture [reference to the economic historian Ernst Labrousse's idea of conjuncture, basically a middle-term historical trend on the order of decades rather than centuries]. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents [this is going to be a paper about urban centers in the developing world which were, until recently, largely rural], the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics [cities are complex and hard to figure out]. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy [the different historical points of origins of cities structure how we should think about them, e.g. urban studies of London might not tell us what we need to know about Manilla] and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization [the author basically says, I'm going to be drawing on the works of various French theorists here and I think it's useful.] Likewise the final paragraph, while overwraught, is actually saying something substantive. Basically, "we need to study cities in terms of what they exclude as while as what they include. Many develping world cities were rural zones within living memory of the present, and that agricultural background continues to persist even as they become more urban." Really nothing very objectionable to me there - and I say that as someone who does think there are major problems with obscurantism in academic writing, especially various branches of philosophy and literary studies.
- im2w1l 11y ago
  >I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable But that is exactly what Noah says too! That there is content. Just that it has been made needlessly complex to keep people out and wages up.
RodericDay 11y ago
When I started engineering, being new to atheism and the internet and all sorts of cliches like that, I was super into "rationalism" and making fun of "liberal arts". I brough up Sokal's essay "debunking" post-modernism a lot, I thought Steven Pinker and his ilk were super intelligent, etc. Old me would have loved this piece. Nowadays a piece like this one, making fun of estoeric language with the least amount of philosophical charitability possible, just makes me cringe a little bit.
- TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
  And yet, postmodern bullshit does a lot of real harm in this world.
rdlecler1 11y ago
Unfortunately the more complex the work the more difficult it is to peer-review it. Most peer reviewers don't want to look stupid and so there is a higher chance that they'll give the thumbs up rather than question the underlying work. This leads to strong selection for presentation styles that obfuscate research. The more people who can actually understand what you're doing the more people who will be able to challenge you if you are wrong.

35 points by mwsherman 11y ago

emcq 11y ago

Some interesting points but it isn't limited just to academia. You unfortunately see similar cliques in industry for things like databases, languages, MVC frameworks, etc which is rather thin knowledge that can be picked up quickly by competent hires.

firasd 11y ago
I suspect at some point JavaScript developers got together and decided: why say "server-side rendering" and "editable" if you can say "isomorphic" and "mutable"?

pinaceae 11y ago

Sir Karl Popper will blow your mind.

rhaps0dy 11y ago

At first, this seems to me like a false conspiracy theory. But those texts ARE needlessly obscure. I propose another possible explanation: signaling. By parsing and writing complicated text, they show their verbal prowess. Or their mathematical ability. I thought "write simply and clearly" was basic in technical text writing.

firasd 11y ago

I understand (and agree to some extent with) the argument but I think the excerpted paper doesn’t work well as an example of the issue. The concluding paragraph is lucid and a bit poetic, and upon clicking the link it turns out the title (and general question it explores) is an allusion to another well-known paper. It’s almost literary compared to what sometimes passes for writing in academic articles.

loourr 11y ago

This really sums up what I've been thinking about Critical Theory. It seems like such a stark contrast from science & engineering where the idea is to explain something complex in the simplest terms. Whereas it seems Critical theory exists to disguise simple ideas in complex terms.

huac 11y ago
no, the point is that what you consider a "simple idea" is actually extremely complex, hence the need for very specific or obscure (and often German) terms

sevensor 11y ago

This is true even in engineering --- I was shocked by how much B.S. I had to add to a paper to get it published. Same content, twice as long, and vaguely implying stuff way beyond what it's actually about.

biot 11y ago
Taken to its limit, the original paper (without the BS filler) then becomes the abstract.

xamuel 11y ago

For mediocre "pushing-the-envelope" publish-or-perish papers, it's often a matter of flinging the muddy paper at enough journals until it sticks at one of them. If so, the last thing you want is for the reviewer to actually understand what you're talking about. So obfuscate the hell out of it and hope you get a lazy "uhh, looks good!" referee.

axplusb 11y ago

As an econ PhD dropout, I never quite understood why such an emphasis was made on physics-lookalike models. I was always more encouraged to come up with a bunch of equations that would mimic some phenomenon, than dig around and understand this phenomenon in more depth. A few arguments that I can agree with though: - Models are a compact formulation of complex theories. I remember a professor writing a dozen equations and claiming he just taught us Marx's Capital. In retrospect I think that's pretty funny, and quite telling of the superficiality that is rampant in the profession. But still that might have been a great executive summary (I still haven't read the book). Another example is Piketty's "r > g" that really is a lot of food for thought. - Models can lead to actionable insight. I think there are people in Central Banks and Economics departments of governments who rely quite heavily on some models to forecast GDP, unemployment etc. But this comes with a huge caveat: it's often easy to tweak a model to make it describe pretty much the opposite phenomenon of the one intended. So the real benefits of that kind of academia were and still are pretty unclear to me. I believe some academics were hiding their lack of deep understanding of economic matters behind a fog of math. Even Blanchard (former chief economist at the IMF) admitted to something along those lines in the wake the 2008 crisis.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
The benefit of the models is that they force you to both explicitly state all your assumptions and also verify that your conclusions logically follow from your assumptions. Further, it enables others who wish to criticize it to easily derive predictions and show that those predictions fail to match reality, while making it impossible for you to say "that isn't what I meant". If the math says it, that's what the model predicts. Vague verbal reasoning just involves a lot of time wasting - "your model seems to show this, I think" -> "no that's totally not what I meant, you don't understand" -> etc.

benbreen 11y ago

I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable, but I think it's unfair to take that article as an example of Sokal-style nonsense. As an exercise, here's my translation of what she's saying [supplied in brackets]: This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies [clear enough] and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture [reference to the economic historian Ernst Labrousse's idea of conjuncture, basically a middle-term historical trend on the order of decades rather than centuries]. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents [this is going to be a paper about urban centers in the developing world which were, until recently, largely rural], the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics [cities are complex and hard to figure out]. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy [the different historical points of origins of cities structure how we should think about them, e.g. urban studies of London might not tell us what we need to know about Manilla] and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization [the author basically says, I'm going to be drawing on the works of various French theorists here and I think it's useful.] Likewise the final paragraph, while overwraught, is actually saying something substantive. Basically, "we need to study cities in terms of what they exclude as while as what they include. Many develping world cities were rural zones within living memory of the present, and that agricultural background continues to persist even as they become more urban." Really nothing very objectionable to me there - and I say that as someone who does think there are major problems with obscurantism in academic writing, especially various branches of philosophy and literary studies.

im2w1l 11y ago
>I was prepared to read something truly dreadful in the samples that he gives, but (while they're far from well written) they actually do have meaningful content. It's not content I necessarily find valuable But that is exactly what Noah says too! That there is content. Just that it has been made needlessly complex to keep people out and wages up.

RodericDay 11y ago

When I started engineering, being new to atheism and the internet and all sorts of cliches like that, I was super into "rationalism" and making fun of "liberal arts". I brough up Sokal's essay "debunking" post-modernism a lot, I thought Steven Pinker and his ilk were super intelligent, etc. Old me would have loved this piece. Nowadays a piece like this one, making fun of estoeric language with the least amount of philosophical charitability possible, just makes me cringe a little bit.

TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
And yet, postmodern bullshit does a lot of real harm in this world.

rdlecler1 11y ago

Unfortunately the more complex the work the more difficult it is to peer-review it. Most peer reviewers don't want to look stupid and so there is a higher chance that they'll give the thumbs up rather than question the underlying work. This leads to strong selection for presentation styles that obfuscate research. The more people who can actually understand what you're doing the more people who will be able to challenge you if you are wrong.