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If we consider the academic ecosystem from an evolutionary standpoint, the most important thing to recognize is that objective truth is not the measure of fitne
by JackFr 12y ago
If we consider the academic ecosystem from an evolutionary standpoint, the most important thing to recognize is that objective truth is not the measure of fitness, the ability to command a budget is.
Those academics survive who can sell, who can get grants and budgets, who can get paid and who can hire. It is nice to believe that these abilities are correlated with the ability to discover new truths. Over the longer term it certainly is and in hard sciences moreso, but in the short and medium term and in subjects as loosey goosey as social psychology (where being wrong has virtually no measurable consequence) it is certainly less so.
The conclusion then might be that liberals, rather than being better truth seekers, are simply better at funnelling public money through their offices.
- ArkyBeagle 12y agoThat nearly sounds like it uses the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. This generalizes - if we view markets ( and this are one, I think - of a sort ) as control-feedback systems, everything is easy until you get large lags and higher uncertainty due to lag. If the lag itself is highly uncertain, abandon hope all ye who enter here. The hard part is always separating the stories we tell ourselves about things from the nature of the things themselves.