I think your final paragraph is getting at an important element of the disagreement. To be clear, *I* treat science and high frequency trading differently, too, but yes I think to me it registers as “very important” and to Ben it seems closer to “sacred” (which, to be clear, seems like a quite reasonable outlook to me)
Science is a terrible career for almost any goal other than actually contributing to the scientific endeavor.
Small background tidbit that’s part of this: I think many scientists have goals that seem like more like like “do what their parents want” and “be respectable” or something. Which isn’t about traditional financial success, but looks like opting into a particular weird sub-status-hierarchy that one might plausibly well suited to win at.
Another background snippet informing my model:
Recently I was asking an academic friend “hey, do you think your field could benefit from better intellectual infrastructure?” and they said “you mean like LessWrong?” and I said “I mean a meta-level version of it that tries to look at the local set of needs and improve communication in some fashion.”
And they said something like “man, sorry to disappoint you, but most of academia is not, like, trying to solve problems together, the way it looks like the rationality or AI alignment communities are. They wouldn’t want to post clearer communications earlier in the idea-forming stage because they’d be worried about getting scooped. They’re just trying to further their own career.”
This is just one datapoint, and again I know very little about academia overall. Ben’s comments about how the replication crisis happened via an organic grassroots process seems quite important and quite relevant.
Reiterating from my other post upthread: I am not making any claims about what people in science and/or academia should do. I’m making conditional claims, which depend on the actual state of science and academia.
I think your final paragraph is getting at an important element of the disagreement. To be clear, *I* treat science and high frequency trading differently, too, but yes I think to me it registers as “very important” and to Ben it seems closer to “sacred” (which, to be clear, seems like a quite reasonable outlook to me)
Small background tidbit that’s part of this: I think many scientists have goals that seem like more like like “do what their parents want” and “be respectable” or something. Which isn’t about traditional financial success, but looks like opting into a particular weird sub-status-hierarchy that one might plausibly well suited to win at.
Another background snippet informing my model:
Recently I was asking an academic friend “hey, do you think your field could benefit from better intellectual infrastructure?” and they said “you mean like LessWrong?” and I said “I mean a meta-level version of it that tries to look at the local set of needs and improve communication in some fashion.”
And they said something like “man, sorry to disappoint you, but most of academia is not, like, trying to solve problems together, the way it looks like the rationality or AI alignment communities are. They wouldn’t want to post clearer communications earlier in the idea-forming stage because they’d be worried about getting scooped. They’re just trying to further their own career.”
This is just one datapoint, and again I know very little about academia overall. Ben’s comments about how the replication crisis happened via an organic grassroots process seems quite important and quite relevant.
Reiterating from my other post upthread: I am not making any claims about what people in science and/or academia should do. I’m making conditional claims, which depend on the actual state of science and academia.