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The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

148 points by jseliger 7y ago

ex3xu 7y 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 http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.
- nn3 7y 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 7y 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: 1. 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. 2. 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.)
Der_Einzige 7y 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.
- kaycebasques 7y 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=OCDqkr12TbOqWc1gEdHeSQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tcYLy2ILoRoDddvR56Kxy?si=O... [1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=nqrGIXBWSISvqBsGtf9jQQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=n...
  - Der_Einzige 7y 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!
hirundo 7y 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.
- barrkel 7y 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 7y ago
    Which is why highly educated folks have some of most flagrant biases.
- 0815test 7y 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.
- lostmymind66 7y 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.
nn3 7y 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.
- bitwize 7y 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.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    It's cargo cults all the way up.
whoevercares 7y ago
I thought this is about deep learning lol.
autokad 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    How about someone saying: "They all are going to suggest a tax on soda. Let's try to come up with something else!"?
- btrettel 7y 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!"
Fede_V 7y 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.
- api 7y 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 7y 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.
bitwize 7y 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 7y 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.
- Zarath 7y 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.
api 7y 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 7y ago
  Is it necessarily the job of academics to have superficial appeal to the layman?
- Der_Einzige 7y 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)
  - Apocryphon 7y 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 7y 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.
bigbadgoose 7y ago
It's OK, even the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th deviations have their "normies"
username90 7y 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 7y 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.
  - username90 7y 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.
    - 0815test 7y ago
      And yet the Chinese are successfully using real actual Scientific Socialism ("with Chinese characteristics" - but Scientific Socialism nonetheless!) to raise hundreds of millions of their fellow countrymen from the most extreme sort of poverty. You don't get any less "woolly and unsatisfying" than that!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
btrettel 7y 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.
aalleavitch 7y ago
Kuhn said it first: https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Kuhn.html https://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Kuhn.html
chiefalchemist 7y 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 7y 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.
dredmorbius 7y 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/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe
teslaberry 7y ago
GLOBAL WARMING ANYONE? CATACLYSMIC FEAR BASED SCIENCE FUNDING ANYONE? CONTROL BASED, RATIONAL FOR GOVERNMENT TAXING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING AT THE CONSUMER LEVEL ANYONE? wonder why this stuff is trending? if you ask me, the problem with most simpleton's is they cannot dissect how legitimate policy directionality SHOULD inform the process of funding science and engineering, and instead they confuse these ideals with trendy apocalytic predictionism that funds, or at least, OVERFUNDS, some completely lunatic ideas like salting the atmosphere with nitros oxides, burning fuel to store c02 underground or to hoover it up from smokestacks, rather than finding ways of preventing the useage or mitigating the useage of c02 altogether. it's so amazingly obvious to a critical thinker that it makes me want to slap my head, when after 20 years of stupidity, this last week you see prominent articles promoting the only sane appraoch to effectively sinking carbon PLANT MORE TREES. the reset of the world has known this forever and so did americans before the global warming trendsetting apoloytpic religionists took their cult of fear mainstream. no . SCIENCE IS NOT BUILT ON CONSENSUS. and no, FEAR BASES TRENDING CONSENSUS is NOT 'SCIENTIFIC' it is the opposite. it is a religion predicting the future timing of our doom. the end is NEIGH is trendy for only so long.....until we suffer the consequences of exhaustion. what happens then? a huge backlash against common sense conservative environmentalism by a bunch of idiots, because of decades of algorism throwing them all in the other direction. that will be the real catastrophe. and it will be the fault of the global warming alarmists pushing horrible ideas, horrible policies, and horrible amounts of unending fear based messaging. roosevelt said it: there is nothing to fear but fear itself. start fighting the fear.

148 points by jseliger 7y 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 http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

hyperpallium 7y ago
Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.
nn3 7y 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 7y 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: 1. 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. 2. 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.)

Der_Einzige 7y 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.

kaycebasques 7y 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=OCDqkr12TbOqWc1gEdHeSQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tcYLy2ILoRoDddvR56Kxy?si=O... [1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=nqrGIXBWSISvqBsGtf9jQQ https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=n...
- Der_Einzige 7y 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!

hirundo 7y 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.

barrkel 7y 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 7y ago
  Which is why highly educated folks have some of most flagrant biases.
0815test 7y 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.
lostmymind66 7y 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.

nn3 7y 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.

bitwize 7y 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.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  It's cargo cults all the way up.

whoevercares 7y ago

I thought this is about deep learning lol.

autokad 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  How about someone saying: "They all are going to suggest a tax on soda. Let's try to come up with something else!"?
btrettel 7y 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!"

Fede_V 7y 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.

api 7y 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 7y 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.

bitwize 7y 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 7y 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.
Zarath 7y 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.

api 7y 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 7y ago
Is it necessarily the job of academics to have superficial appeal to the layman?
Der_Einzige 7y 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)
- Apocryphon 7y 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 7y 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.

bigbadgoose 7y ago

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

username90 7y 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 7y 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.
- username90 7y 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.
  - 0815test 7y ago
    And yet the Chinese are successfully using real actual Scientific Socialism ("with Chinese characteristics" - but Scientific Socialism nonetheless!) to raise hundreds of millions of their fellow countrymen from the most extreme sort of poverty. You don't get any less "woolly and unsatisfying" than that!

deleted 7y ago

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btrettel 7y 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.

aalleavitch 7y ago

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

chiefalchemist 7y 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 7y 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.

dredmorbius 7y 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/clothing_music_diets_art_management_theory_fad_as/ 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe

teslaberry 7y ago

GLOBAL WARMING ANYONE? CATACLYSMIC FEAR BASED SCIENCE FUNDING ANYONE? CONTROL BASED, RATIONAL FOR GOVERNMENT TAXING THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING AT THE CONSUMER LEVEL ANYONE? wonder why this stuff is trending? if you ask me, the problem with most simpleton's is they cannot dissect how legitimate policy directionality SHOULD inform the process of funding science and engineering, and instead they confuse these ideals with trendy apocalytic predictionism that funds, or at least, OVERFUNDS, some completely lunatic ideas like salting the atmosphere with nitros oxides, burning fuel to store c02 underground or to hoover it up from smokestacks, rather than finding ways of preventing the useage or mitigating the useage of c02 altogether. it's so amazingly obvious to a critical thinker that it makes me want to slap my head, when after 20 years of stupidity, this last week you see prominent articles promoting the only sane appraoch to effectively sinking carbon PLANT MORE TREES. the reset of the world has known this forever and so did americans before the global warming trendsetting apoloytpic religionists took their cult of fear mainstream. no . SCIENCE IS NOT BUILT ON CONSENSUS. and no, FEAR BASES TRENDING CONSENSUS is NOT 'SCIENTIFIC' it is the opposite. it is a religion predicting the future timing of our doom. the end is NEIGH is trendy for only so long.....until we suffer the consequences of exhaustion. what happens then? a huge backlash against common sense conservative environmentalism by a bunch of idiots, because of decades of algorism throwing them all in the other direction. that will be the real catastrophe. and it will be the fault of the global warming alarmists pushing horrible ideas, horrible policies, and horrible amounts of unending fear based messaging. roosevelt said it: there is nothing to fear but fear itself. start fighting the fear.