Many parts of academia have a strong Not Invented Here tendency. Not just research outside of academia is usually ignored, but even research outside a specific academic citation bubble, even if another bubble investigates a pretty similar issue. For example, economic decision theorists ignore philosophical decisions theorists, which in turn mostly ignore the economic decision theorists. They each have their own writing style and concerns and canonical examples or texts. Which makes it hard for outsiders to read the literature or even contribute to it, so they don’t.
A striking example is statistics, where various fields talk about the same mathematical thing with their own idiosyncratic names, unaware or unconcerned whether it already had a different name elsewhere.
Edit: Though LessWrong is also a citation bubble to some degree.
Something a better , future version of rationalism could do is build bridges and facilitate communication between these little bubbles. The answet-to-everything approach has been tried too many times.
Many parts of academia have a strong Not Invented Here tendency. Not just research outside of academia is usually ignored, but even research outside a specific academic citation bubble, even if another bubble investigates a pretty similar issue. For example, economic decision theorists ignore philosophical decisions theorists, which in turn mostly ignore the economic decision theorists. They each have their own writing style and concerns and canonical examples or texts. Which makes it hard for outsiders to read the literature or even contribute to it, so they don’t.
A striking example is statistics, where various fields talk about the same mathematical thing with their own idiosyncratic names, unaware or unconcerned whether it already had a different name elsewhere.
Edit: Though LessWrong is also a citation bubble to some degree.
“Read the sequences....just the sequences”
Something a better , future version of rationalism could do is build bridges and facilitate communication between these little bubbles. The answet-to-everything approach has been tried too many times.