I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it’s the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven’t seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.
Voted up, but I think that there are LOTS of fields that are that confused. Possibly every field without regular empirical tests (e.g. chemistry, engineering, computer science, applied physics, boxing) is that confused.
i ghost write papers for lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions and my experience has been that the soft sciences are a muddle of garbage with obscenely little worth given the billions of dollars poured into them that could be saving lives.
I, for one, am dying to hear more about this “ghost write [soft science] papers for lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions” business. Probably far more than you would be willing to tell, especially if you plan to keep this gig for any length of time.
comments by gwern and Desertopa upvoted, their links read.
How long can this go on before the whole thing* comes crashing down? Those of us who are Americans are ruled mostly by people who were “lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions” and then became lazy rich graduate students getting J.D.s or M.B.A.s from prestigious institutions, having been admitted based on their supposed undergraduate accomplishments.
The only thing to hope for, it seems, is that our supposed leaders are still getting cheat sheets from underpaid, unknown smart people.
* My impression is that higher education in the hard sciences in America is still excellent.
I’ve complained before about the same thing. My only answer is “it’ll pass eventually, the only question is how much we’ll have to suffer in the interim”.
Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.
With the caveat that low-level undergraduate assignment substance levels are not the same as cutting-edge research substance levels, though they are related.
See my reply to Desrtopa: A non-lost field should have a large enough inferential distance from a layshadow that the layshadow shouldn’t be able to show proficiency from a brief perusal of the topic, even at the undergraduate levels.
I think you’ve started to identify an empirical test to sort the wheat from the chaff in universities. I’ve read your post from June, and agree. My guess would be that the proportions would turn out to show a lot of very expensive (and heavily subsidized) chaff for every unit of worthwhile wheat. This is a big issue, and I think you’ve called it correctly.
I don’t think any field in which they can produce an essay without being detected is necessarily valueless. At an undergraduate level, students in hard sciences are often assigned essays that could reasonably be written by a layperson who takes the time to properly search through the available peer reviewed articles. That may be an indictment of how the classes are taught and graded, but it’s not a demonstration that the fields themselves are lacking worth.
But they do mention googling sources and doing literature review, and “Ed Dante” says he will write about anything that does not require him to do any math (or animal husbandry.) For original research in hard sciences, there’s probably not going to be much of anything that doesn’t at least require some statistics, but for undergraduate literature review papers, it probably wouldn’t be hard to get away with.
EDIT: whoops, Desrtopa beat me to it by a minute. Serves me right for trying to refind that article through my Evernote clippings instead of just googling for it!
Not much to tell really as I don’t do it for a living. I have a lot of free time at my normal job so this just lets me pick up a little extra. It started off with people I knew directly attending those schools and traveled via word of mouth from there.
But the standards at these places really are a joke. I skim the class material, write them in one sitting, and have only had 1 paper get a “B” out of 50 or so.
The part that stops most people is probably the ability to imitate “voice”. Read a paper then try to write a few paragraphs in the same style. Ask a neutral judge if they look like they are written by the same author. It’s a learned skill and if you don’t enjoy writing you’ll probably hate it.
After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today
I would subtract the ‘intellectual’ there. This is true of empirical sciences (cf ever-larger particle colliders), but not anywhere near as true for softer sciences (cf schools of thought). While not strictly inventing ‘genuinely new’ tools, I think LessWrong is definitely one of the first communities where everyone is required to use high-quality power tools instead of whatever old hammer is lying around.
After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. If you were to look at a map of the known world drawn by a member of an ancient civilization, I don’t think all the edges of the map would be regions that were particularly hard to traverse. Maybe they’d be the edges just because they were far from the civilization’s population centers and no explorer had wandered that far yet.
In a similar way, perhaps the boundaries of our knowledge are what they are just because to reach the boundary and make progress, you first have to master a lot of prerequisite concepts.
LessWrong often makes pretty impressive progress in its discussions; I would be thrilled to see that progress made beginning at the edge of a field.
I sincerely doubt that the discussions which began on the leading edge would return anywhere near the same amount of progress as those which start in the scholarly middle. After all, those problems are on the edge because they’re difficult to solve given the intellectual tools we have today. Though Less Wrong is often insightful, I suspect it’s the result not of discovering genuinely new tools, but of applying known tools in ways most readers haven’t seen them used. For Less Wrong to make progress with a problem that a lot of smart people have been thinking about in detail for a long time either requires that the entire field is so confused that no one has been able to think as clearly about it as we can (probably hubristic), or that we have developed genuinely new intellectual techniques that no one has tried yet.
Voted up, but I think that there are LOTS of fields that are that confused. Possibly every field without regular empirical tests (e.g. chemistry, engineering, computer science, applied physics, boxing) is that confused.
i ghost write papers for lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions and my experience has been that the soft sciences are a muddle of garbage with obscenely little worth given the billions of dollars poured into them that could be saving lives.
I, for one, am dying to hear more about this “ghost write [soft science] papers for lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions” business. Probably far more than you would be willing to tell, especially if you plan to keep this gig for any length of time.
It’s not exactly a novel business model. You can read the testimony of a worker in that field here.
Another pseudonymous confession from a worker in that field:
http://www.eacfaculty.org/pchidester/Eng%20102f/Plagiarism/This%20Pen%20for%20Hire.pdf
comments by gwern and Desertopa upvoted, their links read.
How long can this go on before the whole thing* comes crashing down? Those of us who are Americans are ruled mostly by people who were “lazy rich undergrads at prestigious institutions” and then became lazy rich graduate students getting J.D.s or M.B.A.s from prestigious institutions, having been admitted based on their supposed undergraduate accomplishments.
The only thing to hope for, it seems, is that our supposed leaders are still getting cheat sheets from underpaid, unknown smart people.
* My impression is that higher education in the hard sciences in America is still excellent.
I’ve complained before about the same thing. My only answer is “it’ll pass eventually, the only question is how much we’ll have to suffer in the interim”.
Fortunately, these ghost writers basically give us a rosetta stone for identifying the lost and valueless fields: anything they consistently produce work on and which can escape detection is such a field.
(Btw, change your last * to a \*.)
With the caveat that low-level undergraduate assignment substance levels are not the same as cutting-edge research substance levels, though they are related.
See my reply to Desrtopa: A non-lost field should have a large enough inferential distance from a layshadow that the layshadow shouldn’t be able to show proficiency from a brief perusal of the topic, even at the undergraduate levels.
I think you’ve started to identify an empirical test to sort the wheat from the chaff in universities. I’ve read your post from June, and agree. My guess would be that the proportions would turn out to show a lot of very expensive (and heavily subsidized) chaff for every unit of worthwhile wheat. This is a big issue, and I think you’ve called it correctly.
Thanks! Fixed!
[NOTE SilasBarta’s point about formatting is right and appreciated—too meta to warrant a whole new comment.]
That’s not what I said! ;-)
Just so you know: the backslash escapes you out of Markdown, so to produce what you quoted, I put a double-backslash wherever you see a \.
I don’t think any field in which they can produce an essay without being detected is necessarily valueless. At an undergraduate level, students in hard sciences are often assigned essays that could reasonably be written by a layperson who takes the time to properly search through the available peer reviewed articles. That may be an indictment of how the classes are taught and graded, but it’s not a demonstration that the fields themselves are lacking worth.
All true, but the shadow authors:
don’t mention doing work for the hard sciences or reading peer-reviewed articles in such fields
are able to learn all they need from a day or so of self-study, showing low inferential distance in the fields and thus low knowledge content
mention high involvement in graduate level work, where the implications of their success are much more significant.
But they do mention googling sources and doing literature review, and “Ed Dante” says he will write about anything that does not require him to do any math (or animal husbandry.) For original research in hard sciences, there’s probably not going to be much of anything that doesn’t at least require some statistics, but for undergraduate literature review papers, it probably wouldn’t be hard to get away with.
You may enjoy this: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
EDIT: whoops, Desrtopa beat me to it by a minute. Serves me right for trying to refind that article through my Evernote clippings instead of just googling for it!
Not much to tell really as I don’t do it for a living. I have a lot of free time at my normal job so this just lets me pick up a little extra. It started off with people I knew directly attending those schools and traveled via word of mouth from there.
But the standards at these places really are a joke. I skim the class material, write them in one sitting, and have only had 1 paper get a “B” out of 50 or so.
The part that stops most people is probably the ability to imitate “voice”. Read a paper then try to write a few paragraphs in the same style. Ask a neutral judge if they look like they are written by the same author. It’s a learned skill and if you don’t enjoy writing you’ll probably hate it.
I would subtract the ‘intellectual’ there. This is true of empirical sciences (cf ever-larger particle colliders), but not anywhere near as true for softer sciences (cf schools of thought). While not strictly inventing ‘genuinely new’ tools, I think LessWrong is definitely one of the first communities where everyone is required to use high-quality power tools instead of whatever old hammer is lying around.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. If you were to look at a map of the known world drawn by a member of an ancient civilization, I don’t think all the edges of the map would be regions that were particularly hard to traverse. Maybe they’d be the edges just because they were far from the civilization’s population centers and no explorer had wandered that far yet.
In a similar way, perhaps the boundaries of our knowledge are what they are just because to reach the boundary and make progress, you first have to master a lot of prerequisite concepts.