We can imagine prestige very imperfectly as an asset with a quantifiable value, but while this is fairly (but not entirely) accurate for tournament structures like organized sports, in academia it’s more like being a central location in a canonical reference map; not the sort of thing that’s easy to use in ROI calculations.
If we can operationalize it well I’d likely bet against the claim that Stanford lost a lot of prestige. The centrality of the biggest institutions is hard to dislodge, as they’re sufficiently mutually entangled that problems like this seem to do more to demoralize academia generally, than to specifically discredit any one institution. Nor do I think academia’s losing credit in any straightforward sense, as it’s widely considered too big to fail even by many dissenters, who e.g. are extremely disappointed with standards in scientific academia but still automatically equate academia with science in general.
What happens as a result of the kinds of failures you describe is not at all like a decline in price, a little bit like a decline in the aggregate purchasing power of money, somewhat more like increased vulnerability to speculative attack, and most similar to a decrease in transaction volume as people see fewer and fewer opportunities for profitable transactions within the system. E.g. publishing papers seems less appealing as a way to inform others, reading papers seems less effective as a way to be informed, giving and receiving grants seems less effective as a way to organize efforts to figure things out.
Nor do I think academia’s losing credit in any straightforward sense, as it’s widely considered too big to fail even by many dissenters, who e.g. are extremely disappointed with standards in scientific academia but still automatically equate academia with science in general.
Huh, I do think our world models must differ here. My current sense is societal trust and reliance on academia is dropping pretty sharply, partially though not centrally as a result of things like this, and I similarly expect the market value of things like PhDs to drop relatively intensely in the coming decade (barring major AI disruption making that question moot). I would be happy to bet on this, if you disagree.
What happens as a result of the kinds of failures you describe is not at all like a decline in price, a little bit like a decline in the aggregate purchasing power of money, somewhat more like increased vulnerability to speculative attack, and most similar to a decrease in transaction volume as people see fewer and fewer opportunities for profitable transactions within the system.
I found this set of potential analogies helpful! I do think I still disagree about the relative appropriateness for each one of these analogies to the situation. Not sure how much value I would provide by going through them all in this comment thread, though I might take the opportunity and do it in a top-level post.
I don’t think the central-case valuable PhDs can be bought or sold so I’m not sure what you mean by market value here. If you can clarify, I’ll have a better idea whether it’s something I’d bet against you on.
I would bet a fair amount at even odds that Stanford academics won’t decline >1 sigma YOY in collective publication impact score like h-index, Stanford funding won’t decrease >1 sigma vs Ivy League + MIT + Chicago, Stanford new-PhD aggregate income won’t decline >1 sigma vs overall aggregate PhD income, and overall aggregate US PhD income won’t decline >1 sigma. I think 1 sigma is a reasonable threshold for signal vs noise.
I think that if these kinds of crises caused academia to be devalued, then when the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment revealed the rot in late-medieval scholastic “science,” clerical institutions in the Roman Catholic model like Oxford and Cambridge would have become irrelevant or even collapsed, rather than continuing to be canonical intellectual centers in the new regime.
TBTF institutions usually don’t collapse outside strong outside conquest or civilizational collapse, or Maoist Cultural Revolution levels of violence directed at such change, since they specialize in creating loyalty to the institution. So academia losing value would look more like the Mandarin exam losing value by the civilization it was embedded in collapsing, than like Dell Computer losing value via its share price declining.
I don’t think the central-case valuable PhDs can be bought or sold so I’m not sure what you mean by market value here. If you can clarify, I’ll have a better idea whether it’s something I’d bet against you on.
I was thinking of the salary premium that having a PhD provides (i.e. how much more people with PhDs make compared to people without PhDs), which of course is measuring a mixture of real signaling value, and simply just measuring correlations in aptitude, but I feel like it would serve as a good enough proxy here at least directionally.
I would bet a fair amount at even odds that Stanford academics won’t decline >1 sigma in collective publication impact score like h-index, Stanford funding won’t decrease >1 sigma vs Ivy League + MIT + Chicago, Stanford new-PhD aggregate income won’t decline >1 sigma vs overall aggregate PhD income, and overall aggregate US PhD income won’t decline >1 sigma. I think 1 sigma is a reasonable threshold for signal vs noise.
What’s the sigma here? Like, what population are we measuring the variance over? Top 20 universities? All universities? I certainly agree that Stanford won’t lose one sigma of status/credibility/etc. as measured in all universities, that would require dropping Stanford completely from the list of top universities. I think losing 1 sigma of standing among top 20 universities, i.e. Stanford moving from something like “top 3” to “top 8″ seems plausible to me, though my guess is a bit too intense.
To be clear, my offered bet was more about you saying that academia at large is “too big to fail”. I do think Stanford will experience costs from this, but at that scale I do think noise will drown out almost any signal.
TBTF institutions usually don’t collapse outside strong outside conquest or civilizational collapse, or Maoist Cultural Revolution levels of violence directed at such change, since they specialize in creating loyalty to the institution. So academia losing value would look more like the Mandarin exam losing value, than like Dell Computer losing value.
Hmm, I don’t currently believe this, but it’s plausible enough that I would want to engage with it in more detail. Do you have arguments for this? I currently expect more of a gradual devaluing of the importance of academic status in society, together with more competition about the relevant signifiers of status creating more noise, resulting in a relationship to academia somewhat more similar (though definitely not all the way there) as pre-WW2 society had to academia (which to my understanding was a much less central role in government and societal decision-making).
I would expect PhD value to mostly be affected by underlying demographic factors; they’re already structurally on an inflationary trajectory and I expect that to be more important than whether they’re understood to be fake or real. No one thinks Bitcoins contain powerful knowledge but they still have exchange value.
If there’s a demographic model of PhD salary premium with a good track record (not just backtested, has to have been a famous model before the going-forward empirical validation) I might bet strongly against deviation from that. If not, too noisy.
Variance (and thus sigma) for funding could be calculated on basis of historical YOY % variation in funding for all US universities, weighted by either # people enrolled or by aggregate revenue of the institution. Can do something similar for h-index. Obviously many details to operationalize but the level of confusion you’re reporting seems surprising to me. Maybe you can try to tell me how you would operationalize your “dropping pretty sharply” / “drop relatively intensely” claim.
Less than a sigma seems like it can’t really be a clear quantitative signal unless most of the observed variance is very well explained (in which case it should be more than a sigma of remaining variance). Events as big as Stanford moving from top 3 to top 8 have happened multiple times in the last few decades without any major crises of confidence.
I agree the disagreement about academia at large is important enough to focus on, thanks for clarifying that that’s where you see the main disagreement.
One argument for the TBTF paragraph was in the immediately prior paragraph. The posts I linked to at the end of the first comment in this thread are also in large part arguments in support of this thesis. Pre-WWII the US had a much weaker state. Hard to roll that back without constituting a regime collapse.
At this point I feel that I’m repeating myself enough that I don’t see how to continue this conversation productively; I don’t expect saying the same things again will lead to engagement, and I don’t expect that complaining about the problem procedurally will get a constructive response either. If you propose a well-operationalized bet and an adjudicator and escrow arrangement I will accept or reject the proposal.
I wasn’t trying to say that you had provided no argument for it, sorry! I was just curious whether you had written about this previously with a handy link. It feels like a theme in a bunch of your writing, but you seemed in a better position to remember any specific essay or section.
If you propose a well-operationalized bet and an adjudicator and escrow arrangement I will accept or reject the proposal.
I’ll think about it over the next day or two and see whether I can find something. I am currently skeptical we can find something given that I don’t expect shifts at the scale of “Stanford stop being a top university at all”. But I’ll try for a bit.
We can imagine prestige very imperfectly as an asset with a quantifiable value, but while this is fairly (but not entirely) accurate for tournament structures like organized sports, in academia it’s more like being a central location in a canonical reference map; not the sort of thing that’s easy to use in ROI calculations.
If we can operationalize it well I’d likely bet against the claim that Stanford lost a lot of prestige. The centrality of the biggest institutions is hard to dislodge, as they’re sufficiently mutually entangled that problems like this seem to do more to demoralize academia generally, than to specifically discredit any one institution. Nor do I think academia’s losing credit in any straightforward sense, as it’s widely considered too big to fail even by many dissenters, who e.g. are extremely disappointed with standards in scientific academia but still automatically equate academia with science in general.
What happens as a result of the kinds of failures you describe is not at all like a decline in price, a little bit like a decline in the aggregate purchasing power of money, somewhat more like increased vulnerability to speculative attack, and most similar to a decrease in transaction volume as people see fewer and fewer opportunities for profitable transactions within the system. E.g. publishing papers seems less appealing as a way to inform others, reading papers seems less effective as a way to be informed, giving and receiving grants seems less effective as a way to organize efforts to figure things out.
Huh, I do think our world models must differ here. My current sense is societal trust and reliance on academia is dropping pretty sharply, partially though not centrally as a result of things like this, and I similarly expect the market value of things like PhDs to drop relatively intensely in the coming decade (barring major AI disruption making that question moot). I would be happy to bet on this, if you disagree.
I found this set of potential analogies helpful! I do think I still disagree about the relative appropriateness for each one of these analogies to the situation. Not sure how much value I would provide by going through them all in this comment thread, though I might take the opportunity and do it in a top-level post.
I don’t think the central-case valuable PhDs can be bought or sold so I’m not sure what you mean by market value here. If you can clarify, I’ll have a better idea whether it’s something I’d bet against you on.
I would bet a fair amount at even odds that Stanford academics won’t decline >1 sigma YOY in collective publication impact score like h-index, Stanford funding won’t decrease >1 sigma vs Ivy League + MIT + Chicago, Stanford new-PhD aggregate income won’t decline >1 sigma vs overall aggregate PhD income, and overall aggregate US PhD income won’t decline >1 sigma. I think 1 sigma is a reasonable threshold for signal vs noise.
I think that if these kinds of crises caused academia to be devalued, then when the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment revealed the rot in late-medieval scholastic “science,” clerical institutions in the Roman Catholic model like Oxford and Cambridge would have become irrelevant or even collapsed, rather than continuing to be canonical intellectual centers in the new regime.
TBTF institutions usually don’t collapse outside strong outside conquest or civilizational collapse, or Maoist Cultural Revolution levels of violence directed at such change, since they specialize in creating loyalty to the institution. So academia losing value would look more like the Mandarin exam losing value by the civilization it was embedded in collapsing, than like Dell Computer losing value via its share price declining.
I was thinking of the salary premium that having a PhD provides (i.e. how much more people with PhDs make compared to people without PhDs), which of course is measuring a mixture of real signaling value, and simply just measuring correlations in aptitude, but I feel like it would serve as a good enough proxy here at least directionally.
What’s the sigma here? Like, what population are we measuring the variance over? Top 20 universities? All universities? I certainly agree that Stanford won’t lose one sigma of status/credibility/etc. as measured in all universities, that would require dropping Stanford completely from the list of top universities. I think losing 1 sigma of standing among top 20 universities, i.e. Stanford moving from something like “top 3” to “top 8″ seems plausible to me, though my guess is a bit too intense.
To be clear, my offered bet was more about you saying that academia at large is “too big to fail”. I do think Stanford will experience costs from this, but at that scale I do think noise will drown out almost any signal.
Hmm, I don’t currently believe this, but it’s plausible enough that I would want to engage with it in more detail. Do you have arguments for this? I currently expect more of a gradual devaluing of the importance of academic status in society, together with more competition about the relevant signifiers of status creating more noise, resulting in a relationship to academia somewhat more similar (though definitely not all the way there) as pre-WW2 society had to academia (which to my understanding was a much less central role in government and societal decision-making).
I would expect PhD value to mostly be affected by underlying demographic factors; they’re already structurally on an inflationary trajectory and I expect that to be more important than whether they’re understood to be fake or real. No one thinks Bitcoins contain powerful knowledge but they still have exchange value.
If there’s a demographic model of PhD salary premium with a good track record (not just backtested, has to have been a famous model before the going-forward empirical validation) I might bet strongly against deviation from that. If not, too noisy.
Variance (and thus sigma) for funding could be calculated on basis of historical YOY % variation in funding for all US universities, weighted by either # people enrolled or by aggregate revenue of the institution. Can do something similar for h-index. Obviously many details to operationalize but the level of confusion you’re reporting seems surprising to me. Maybe you can try to tell me how you would operationalize your “dropping pretty sharply” / “drop relatively intensely” claim.
Less than a sigma seems like it can’t really be a clear quantitative signal unless most of the observed variance is very well explained (in which case it should be more than a sigma of remaining variance). Events as big as Stanford moving from top 3 to top 8 have happened multiple times in the last few decades without any major crises of confidence.
I agree the disagreement about academia at large is important enough to focus on, thanks for clarifying that that’s where you see the main disagreement.
One argument for the TBTF paragraph was in the immediately prior paragraph. The posts I linked to at the end of the first comment in this thread are also in large part arguments in support of this thesis. Pre-WWII the US had a much weaker state. Hard to roll that back without constituting a regime collapse.
At this point I feel that I’m repeating myself enough that I don’t see how to continue this conversation productively; I don’t expect saying the same things again will lead to engagement, and I don’t expect that complaining about the problem procedurally will get a constructive response either. If you propose a well-operationalized bet and an adjudicator and escrow arrangement I will accept or reject the proposal.
I wasn’t trying to say that you had provided no argument for it, sorry! I was just curious whether you had written about this previously with a handy link. It feels like a theme in a bunch of your writing, but you seemed in a better position to remember any specific essay or section.
I’ll think about it over the next day or two and see whether I can find something. I am currently skeptical we can find something given that I don’t expect shifts at the scale of “Stanford stop being a top university at all”. But I’ll try for a bit.