Hmm, yeah I guess what I wrote wasn’t too directly helpful for your question.
the way Holden delineates what academia is interested in, it should totally be interested in my ideas…
I think Holden forgot “trendy”. Trendy is very important. I think people in academia have a tacit shared understanding of the currently-trending topics / questions, within which there’s a contest to find interesting new ideas / progress. If an idea is important but not trendy, it’s liable to get neglected, I think. It’s kinda like in clothing fashion: if you find a brilliant use of beads, but beads aren’t fashion-forward this year, roughly nobody will care.
Of course, the trends change, and indeed everyone is trying to be the pioneer of the next hot topic. There are a lot of factors that go into “what is the next hot topic”, including catching the interest of a critical mass of respected people (or people-who-control-funding), which in turn involves them feeling it’s “exciting”, and that they themselves have an angle for making further progress in this area, etc. But trendiness doesn’t systematically track objective importance, and it’s nobody’s job to make it so.
At least, that’s what things felt like to me in the areas of physics I worked in (optics, materials science, and related). I’m much less familiar with philosophy, economics, etc.
Remember, aside from commercially-relevant ideas, success for academia research scientists (and philosophers) is 100% determined by “am I impressing my peers?”—grants, promotions, invited talks, etc. are all determined by that. So if I write a paper and the prestigious people in my field are unanimously saying “I don’t know about that thing, it’s not an area that I know or care about”, the result is just as bad for me and my career as if those people had unanimously said “this is lousy work”.
it doesn’t like the aesthetics of my writing
To be clear, when I said “the aesthetic of what makes a good X”, I meant it in a really broad sense. Maybe I should have said “the implicit criteria of what makes a good X” instead. So “the paper concerns a currently-trendy topic” can be part of that, even though it’s not really “aesthetics” in the sense of beauty. E.g., “the aesthetic of what makes a good peer-reviewed experimental condensed-matter physics paper” has sometimes been greatly helped by “it somehow involves nanotechnology”.
From the years in academia studying neuroscience and related aspects of bioengineering and medicine development… yeah. So much about how effort gets allocated is not ‘what would be good for our country’s population in expectation, or good for all humanity’. It’s mostly about ‘what would make an impressive sounding research paper that could get into an esteemed journal?’, ‘what would be relatively cheap and easy to do, but sound disproportionately cool?’, ‘what do we guess that the granting agency we are applying to will like the sound of?’. So much emphasis on catching waves of trendiness, and so little on estimating expected value of the results.
Research an unprofitable preventative-health treatment which plausibly might have significant impacts on a wide segment of the population? Booooring.
Research an impractically-expensive-to-produce fascinatingly complex clever new treatment for an incredibly rare orphan disease? Awesome.
Hmm, yeah I guess what I wrote wasn’t too directly helpful for your question.
I think Holden forgot “trendy”. Trendy is very important. I think people in academia have a tacit shared understanding of the currently-trending topics / questions, within which there’s a contest to find interesting new ideas / progress. If an idea is important but not trendy, it’s liable to get neglected, I think. It’s kinda like in clothing fashion: if you find a brilliant use of beads, but beads aren’t fashion-forward this year, roughly nobody will care.
Of course, the trends change, and indeed everyone is trying to be the pioneer of the next hot topic. There are a lot of factors that go into “what is the next hot topic”, including catching the interest of a critical mass of respected people (or people-who-control-funding), which in turn involves them feeling it’s “exciting”, and that they themselves have an angle for making further progress in this area, etc. But trendiness doesn’t systematically track objective importance, and it’s nobody’s job to make it so.
At least, that’s what things felt like to me in the areas of physics I worked in (optics, materials science, and related). I’m much less familiar with philosophy, economics, etc.
Remember, aside from commercially-relevant ideas, success for academia research scientists (and philosophers) is 100% determined by “am I impressing my peers?”—grants, promotions, invited talks, etc. are all determined by that. So if I write a paper and the prestigious people in my field are unanimously saying “I don’t know about that thing, it’s not an area that I know or care about”, the result is just as bad for me and my career as if those people had unanimously said “this is lousy work”.
To be clear, when I said “the aesthetic of what makes a good X”, I meant it in a really broad sense. Maybe I should have said “the implicit criteria of what makes a good X” instead. So “the paper concerns a currently-trendy topic” can be part of that, even though it’s not really “aesthetics” in the sense of beauty. E.g., “the aesthetic of what makes a good peer-reviewed experimental condensed-matter physics paper” has sometimes been greatly helped by “it somehow involves nanotechnology”.
From the years in academia studying neuroscience and related aspects of bioengineering and medicine development… yeah. So much about how effort gets allocated is not ‘what would be good for our country’s population in expectation, or good for all humanity’. It’s mostly about ‘what would make an impressive sounding research paper that could get into an esteemed journal?’, ‘what would be relatively cheap and easy to do, but sound disproportionately cool?’, ‘what do we guess that the granting agency we are applying to will like the sound of?’. So much emphasis on catching waves of trendiness, and so little on estimating expected value of the results.
Research an unprofitable preventative-health treatment which plausibly might have significant impacts on a wide segment of the population? Booooring.
Research an impractically-expensive-to-produce fascinatingly complex clever new treatment for an incredibly rare orphan disease? Awesome.