5 ms·

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from be

Great thought provoking article, a lot of starting points for wikipedia deep dives. It's really surprising to me that most of the big name intellectuals from before the 19th century were indeed not doing their work in the university system. I guess it's in nobody's interest to highlight this. Academia wants to present itself as the obvious deposit and trailblazer of knowledge and that it always has been. There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. I find it curious and bad that people can go through the academic pipeline without ever being presented with any deep explanation of what this thing even is, where it came from, what else it could be, what historical opposition there was or what debate there was around what it should be, what it is in ideal theory and what it is in real practice and what cynics see it as. People just enroll because that's obviously the thing to do. Then they may stick around for grad school and get comfy in the system but reflection and meta is rare.

biofox 1y ago
It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head: Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century] Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century] Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century] William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century] Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century] Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish. Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician. Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    They were all educated at universities though.
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
      - analog31 1y ago
        It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.
      - checker659 1y ago
        The article doesn't say much about the role of religion in this matter. Surely what one could study was limited by what was allowed by the church.
- oersted 1y ago
  The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time. For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description? Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution. Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world. I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    > Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.
    - oersted 1y ago
      Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.
- ricksunny 1y ago
  That’s an impressive off-the-cuff cataloguing - few could do that.
baby-yoda 1y ago
> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me. https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/weekend-big-deal-long-read-is-the-staggeringly-profitable-business-of-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science.html https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...
- biofox 1y ago
  > [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. > “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.” Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.
  - pphysch 1y ago
    Jeffrey Epstein is speculated to be a Mossad agent, but Robert Maxwell was known to be one. Not exactly a innocent patron of the sciences, as GP sort of implies.
jltsiren 1y ago
In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic / secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian ideology that gave rise to the research university. If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if schools focus on practical and directly useful skills, people's ability to see the big picture may be lacking. In other words, you speak of symptoms of living in a society that has embraced the research university but not the ideology behind it.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  It's also simply hard to teach most of this beyond caricature level in secondary school. Ideally it wouldn't be a separate thing but integrated into how you learn the science itself. And this is somewhat attempted yes, there are often small-print framed stories in textbooks about how a discovery came about, but learning the actual science is hard enough and physics is better taught topicwise instead of chronologically with all the dead ends. The modern picture of the world is complicated enough without teaching how the process of it unfolded. Especially while the students haven't really learned the necessary context in history class to even have a "mental map" of the centuries, to place major temporal landmarks on it, to know who lived in parallel with whom. This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10 years of curious self-directed reading after high school to appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same topic from different angles and different disciplines. The same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would have seemed super boring started to become interesting because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought that!". Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names, dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have points of reference to be curious what all those years were actually based on. And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in university education.
canjobear 1y ago
On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain about academia. What’s lacking is realistic alternatives.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Academics, yes. Like from the upper years of the PhD process onwards, to postdocs and professorship, yes. But during the bachelor's and master's, we had essentially zero idea what professors did outside lecturing. Didn't even realize a thing called "PhD student" exists. Just that TAs exist. Didn't know what a scientific publication or journal is. I did end up learning about it when I got a student assistant job at a chair, and interacted with the PhD students. Even then, I didn't quite understand what peer review was, other than a vague idea of being some kind of expert stamp of approval that it is real science and not woowoo. Didn't know what a citation was or why it mattered. The whole "knowledge production" system is fully opaque. And this was the view inside the university as a student. Now imagine people who don't attend university. To them science is not much more than some mad scientist Einstein trope and that's it. And that it has something to do with NASA and stuff.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
wisty 1y ago
Also, peer review started in the 1960s. Einstein published a single peer reviewed paper Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or perish climate of the 90s would have made his work in the early 60s impossible.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or perish climate of the 90s would have made his work in the early 60s impossible. I found the posted article interesting in that it seemed to contradict this sentiment. See from the section titled "Göttingen and the birth of modern academia". Not the 60s vs now comparison, but the article contradicts the idea that "publish or perish" is new. Instead it says that careers depended on publication counts before original research was even expected of university professors.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > Instead it says that careers depended on publication counts before original research was even expected of university professors. But these were not peer-reviewed publications.
    - bonoboTP 1y ago
      True. But I'd also gladly report that in small pockets like AI, having highly cited and used arXiv preprints that never passed peer-review can also be impactful regarding careers and job offers. Industry and academics often are smarter than looking at raw numbers. And they are aware that some subfields can sometimes be overtaken by mafialike collusion rings that keep every outsider away from their turf (it's usually hyperspecific to some narrowly defined AI task or benchmark area). It also depends on whether the decision maker is some huge committee and multi-level bureaucracy with process and metrics and numbers in Excel sheets or just one professor who can make their overall assessment without being questioned on it. Of course, this relies on trust that can be abused for biased hiring. Falling back on raw metrics is often a CYA tactic in low-trust, litigious societies.
  - 1y ago

biofox 1y ago

It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head: Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century] Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century] Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century] William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century] Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century] Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]

bonoboTP 1y ago
Still, it may be surprising to learn that these weren't doing their famous work within the university system: Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Huygens, Leibniz, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Leeuwenhoek, Halley, Spinoza, Hobbes, Cavendish. Kepler didn't get a professorship and did his most famous work (elliptical orbits, Kepler's Laws) later in Prague as imperial mathematician. Newton is the main one who indeed was a prof in Cambridge during his main works.
- griffzhowl 1y ago
  They were all educated at universities though.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    Yes, but the point is that universities weren't places of research, but learning/teaching.
    - analog31 1y ago
      It could be that interest in research itself is a relatively recent development. A lot of scholarship amounted to study of past scholarship, until science came along. Empirical science as we know it was barely a century old when Newton came along.
    - checker659 1y ago
      The article doesn't say much about the role of religion in this matter. Surely what one could study was limited by what was allowed by the church.
oersted 1y ago
The article does state that professors did do research, but in their free time. For the examples you listed, were their famous research achievements really part of their university job description? Otherwise it’s more like Nietzsche working as an undertaker or Einstein working in the patent office just to support themselves. Naturally many such people would opt to be teachers to get by, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the university was a research institution. Earlier many philosophers and mathematicians were also priests or monks, that’s also a lifestyle that allows for research without worrying about supporting yourself. Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyist aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. It’s the same story with most famous artists actually, even now. Most of open-source even operates that way, and it’s an important foundation of our modern world. I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s not like giving everyone universal income would work either, most people do not have this impulse. And grant systems are pretty flawed too. But there is some important insight in the observation of how much has been achieved by people trying to do cool things as a hobby. It’s just really hard to support that systematically, almost by definition.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  > Similarly during the scientific revolution it was mostly hobbyists aristocrats that drove it, those who had the means to support themselves while doing free research. I think this is overexaggerated in the popular consciousness. Most of the famous intellectuals weren't really big aristocrats. Yes they mostly didn't come from dirt poor peasant or serf families. But they also weren't, with some exceptions, highest nobility. It was much more common that they secured funding through patronage from or got hired by the aristocrats. The aristocrats didn't really do the hard work themselves, again with some exceptions.
  - oersted 1y ago
    Indeed, the way I expressed it was an oversimplification. I generally wanted to make the point that they were people that weren’t forced to have a tiring full-time job just to get by, and that research was not really their job, with patronage as middle ground.
ricksunny 1y ago
That’s an impressive off-the-cuff cataloguing - few could do that.

baby-yoda 1y ago

> There is similarly little discussion on the origins of peer review and impact factors and journals, it's just taken as the obvious hallmark and basis of good science. Pioneered and exploited by Robert Maxwell (father of the infamous Ghislaine). Good summary below; was an all around eye-opening revelation for me. https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/weekend-big-deal-long-read-is-the-staggeringly-profitable-business-of-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science.html https://thetaper.library.virginia.edu/big%20deal/2019/04/26/...

biofox 1y ago
> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him. > “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.” Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.
- pphysch 1y ago
  Jeffrey Epstein is speculated to be a Mossad agent, but Robert Maxwell was known to be one. Not exactly a innocent patron of the sciences, as GP sort of implies.

jltsiren 1y ago

In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic / secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian ideology that gave rise to the research university. If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed citizens (which includes learning how the core institutions of the society came to be), they can supposedly pick vocational and other practical skills when needed. On the other hand, if schools focus on practical and directly useful skills, people's ability to see the big picture may be lacking. In other words, you speak of symptoms of living in a society that has embraced the research university but not the ideology behind it.

bonoboTP 1y ago
It's also simply hard to teach most of this beyond caricature level in secondary school. Ideally it wouldn't be a separate thing but integrated into how you learn the science itself. And this is somewhat attempted yes, there are often small-print framed stories in textbooks about how a discovery came about, but learning the actual science is hard enough and physics is better taught topicwise instead of chronologically with all the dead ends. The modern picture of the world is complicated enough without teaching how the process of it unfolded. Especially while the students haven't really learned the necessary context in history class to even have a "mental map" of the centuries, to place major temporal landmarks on it, to know who lived in parallel with whom. This is the biggest issue in general, that the material is fragmented and separated. You learn about romanticism and its poets in literature class but it doesn't get connected to how romanticism motivated changes in scientific attitudes and what discoveries are from that era etc. I needed at least 10 years of curious self-directed reading after high school to appreciate such things. Just randomly arriving at the same topic from different angles and different disciplines. The same familiar characters and events start to pop up at new places in new light. Then suddenly even articles that would have seemed super boring started to become interesting because a story could be surprising and counterintuitive. If you have no background knowledge or expectation or intuition then any story is "meh" and not "who would have thought that!". Indeed if I sent high school myself the OP article, he wouldn't get much out of it, other than a flood of names, dates and boring facts. Once you are out of college, you have points of reference to be curious what all those years were actually based on. And my complaint was more that it also doesn't happen in university education.

canjobear 1y ago

On the contrary, academics love to navel gaze and complain about academia. What’s lacking is realistic alternatives.

bonoboTP 1y ago
Academics, yes. Like from the upper years of the PhD process onwards, to postdocs and professorship, yes. But during the bachelor's and master's, we had essentially zero idea what professors did outside lecturing. Didn't even realize a thing called "PhD student" exists. Just that TAs exist. Didn't know what a scientific publication or journal is. I did end up learning about it when I got a student assistant job at a chair, and interacted with the PhD students. Even then, I didn't quite understand what peer review was, other than a vague idea of being some kind of expert stamp of approval that it is real science and not woowoo. Didn't know what a citation was or why it mattered. The whole "knowledge production" system is fully opaque. And this was the view inside the university as a student. Now imagine people who don't attend university. To them science is not much more than some mad scientist Einstein trope and that's it. And that it has something to do with NASA and stuff.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

wisty 1y ago

Also, peer review started in the 1960s. Einstein published a single peer reviewed paper Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or perish climate of the 90s would have made his work in the early 60s impossible.

bonoboTP 1y ago
> Also woth noting that Higgs claimed that the publish or perish climate of the 90s would have made his work in the early 60s impossible. I found the posted article interesting in that it seemed to contradict this sentiment. See from the section titled "Göttingen and the birth of modern academia". Not the 60s vs now comparison, but the article contradicts the idea that "publish or perish" is new. Instead it says that careers depended on publication counts before original research was even expected of university professors.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > Instead it says that careers depended on publication counts before original research was even expected of university professors. But these were not peer-reviewed publications.
  - bonoboTP 1y ago
    True. But I'd also gladly report that in small pockets like AI, having highly cited and used arXiv preprints that never passed peer-review can also be impactful regarding careers and job offers. Industry and academics often are smarter than looking at raw numbers. And they are aware that some subfields can sometimes be overtaken by mafialike collusion rings that keep every outsider away from their turf (it's usually hyperspecific to some narrowly defined AI task or benchmark area). It also depends on whether the decision maker is some huge committee and multi-level bureaucracy with process and metrics and numbers in Excel sheets or just one professor who can make their overall assessment without being questioned on it. Of course, this relies on trust that can be abused for biased hiring. Falling back on raw metrics is often a CYA tactic in low-trust, litigious societies.
- 1y ago