Nordhaus’s position to me seems to be stronger than you make it out to be. Here’s the thing: even in the Soviet repression some academics risked their lives to speak out. You’d expect at least that much speaking out then among academics in the relevant fields when all they have to risk is their academic careers. Yet, in the relevant disciplines, one doesn’t see much of any at all.
The trouble is, the situation is fundamentally different here. If there existed some sort of crude open attempt to dictate official dogma, as in the Soviet Union, I have no doubt that a small but still non-zero minority would speak out against it, no matter what the consequences. However, in the modern academic system, there is no such thing—rather, there is a complex system of subtle but strong perverse incentives that lead to systematic biases and a gradual drift of the academic mainstream away from reality. (Of course, the magnitude of these problems varies greatly across different fields.)
In this situation, a contrarian is faced with a situation where making fundamental criticism of the state of the field won’t invite any open persecution and accusation of heresy, but it will lead to professional marginalization and ruined career prospects without making any useful impact at all. After all, is there a more surefire way to get derided as a crackpot than to claim that accredited experts are failing to appreciate your insight? (Of course, in a field where the mainstream is correct, like in most of the hard sciences, this is a perfectly good heuristic.) So the choice isn’t between conformity and heroic defiance, but between conformity—best achieved by internalizing the mainstream biases—and becoming a marginalized crackpot who invites only ridicule by anyone of any consequence.
Now, all this may sound like theorizing without evidence. However, in practice we do see whole academic fields where even a basic rational scrutiny of the academic mainstream shows that it’s seriously divorced from reality—and yet, we see no academic insiders screaming this awful truth from the rooftops. The occasional contrarians who mount fundamental criticism do this with a tacit understanding that they’ve destroyed their career prospects in the academia and closely connected institutions, and they are safely ignored or laughed off as crackpots by the mainstream. (To give a concrete example, large parts of economics clearly fit this description.)
Similarly, if repression of some form were serious, one would expect that the tenure system would cause more people to be free to speak out and one would expect a lot more vocal expressions of dissent from tenured professors than non-tenured faculty, but there doesn’t seem to be such a pattern.
This is true only under the assumption that the tenure process doesn’t screen thoroughly for people who have internalized all the mainstream biases deeply and honestly.
Mind you, this isn’t as outrageous as it may sound. Consider for example a physics department that grants tenure to someone who is in fact a secret (say) relativity crackpot, and who then proceeds to peddle his nonsense with an inalienable academic title and departmental affiliation. This would be an absolute disaster, so physics departments can be expected to weed out prospective tenure candidates ruthlessly if they show any inclination for believing crackpot ideas, and you can’t blame them for it.
Now, consider the same problem in a field where the mainstream is heavily biased. A department in this field is faced with the same problem, except that now the dangerous “crackpot” ideas may in fact be closer to reality than the mainstream. However, there is no independent outside authority that could ever confirm this: the biased mainstream consensus is, by definition, what all the credentialed high-status experts will say, and what the general public will use to decide who is an expert and who a crackpot. So a tenure candidate again gets weeded out at the slightest sign of ideas outside the mainstream bounds, except that now these bounds are seriously remote from reality.
Of course, it’s always possible in principle that a contrarian might completely hide his views until he gets tenure, but such a grand feat of duplicity would be far beyond ordinary human powers. (Note that the bias of the mainstream experts doesn’t at all mean that they are stupid!) It’s also possible that a tenured exponent of the orthodoxy might change his mind under the weight of evidence, but people will very rarely accept a truth that places their life’s work and accomplishments in a negative light. (Not to mention all the positive incentives, far beyond the guaranteed professorial title and job security, that tenured professors have for maintaining good standing with the mainstream.)
In medicine, John Ioannidis has basically built his career around exposing unpleasant truths that the perverse incentives have led the field away from. He has gotten several of his papers to various top journals, is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and been cited over 30,000 times. Isn’t that evidence that you can make fundamental criticisms of the state of the field without sacrificing your career?
My intuition suggests that both in the case of Ioannidis and other somewhat similar cases—such as the WEIRD paper, which seriously questioned the generalizability of pretty much all existing psychological research, and which has been cited almost 300 times since its publication in 2010 - is that when a field is drifting away from reality, most of the people working within the field are quite aware of the fact. When somebody finally makes a clear and persuasive argument about this being the case, everyone will start citing that argument.
I certainly don’t deny that the self-correcting mechanism you describe has worked to some extent in some fields in recent past. However, it also seems evident that in certain other fields nothing like that is happening, even though their mainstream has long been drifting far from reality, and the only people making cogent fundamental criticism are outsiders completely out of grace with the establishment. I don’t have anything like a complete theory that would explain when correct fundamental criticism will be acclaimed as an important contribution, and when it will trigger a negative career-killing response from the establishment.
Now, of course, one possibility is that I have simply acquired crackpot beliefs on several subjects and I’m completely misdiagnosing the situation. Clearly, I would disagree, but examining the problem further would require getting into a complex discussion of each particular subject in question.
That said, regarding the specific question of fields that have bearing on the global warming controversies, my current positions are (mainly) ones of confusion and indecision. They are not among the examples of clearly pathological fields that I have in mind. In the context of this thread, I merely want to point out that the arguments such as that advanced by Nordhaus aren’t enough to give much certainty about the health of these areas.
This paper looks to me like it accurately criticizes a basic and important methodological flaw in some of the climate change literature; my impression is that the authors haven’t suffered from it, but that they also haven’t been listened to all that much. Note that although Annan disagrees with the more extreme predictions, he also explicitly disagrees with climate skepticism, which helps convince me that skepticism is probably wrong (since he seems pretty reasonable), but which also leaves Vladimir free to argue that an actual skeptic would face greater career risks. Your examples look only questionably relevant to me, because those fields aren’t politicized in the same way that climate change is.
(Is there a set of conditions that would convince/enable you to write posts explaining to LessWrong how to engage in meta-level Hansonian/Schellingian analyses similar to the one you did in your comment? Alternatively, do you know of any public fora whose level of general intelligence and “rationality” is greater than LessWrong’s? I can’t immediately think of any better strategies for raising the sanity waterline than you or Steve Rayhawk writing a series of posts about signaling games, focal points, implicit decision policies, social psychology, &c., and how we should use those concepts when interpreting the social world. But of course I have no idea if that would be a good use of your time or if it’d actually have any noticeable impact. Anyway it seems possible there’d be a way to raise funds to pay you to write at least a few posts, Kickstarter style, or I could try to convince Anna and Julia from the new/upcoming Center for Modern Rationality to write up some grants for you.)
Thanks for the kind words, but I wouldn’t be able to allocate enough time for such a project at the present moment. In fact, I’ve had plans to write something along these lines for quite a while, but original articles take much more time than comments. (And I’ve barely had any time even for comments in recent months.)
Also, realistically, I’m not sure how successful the product would be. I don’t have much talent for writing in an engaging way, which is further exacerbated by English not being my native language. So I think that even with the best possible outcome, not very many people would end up reading it.
Just noting that I would certainly read such a thing. You seem to have a knack for insight, regardless of your linguistics (which are anyway, if only in my opinion, quite good).
The occasional contrarians who mount fundamental criticism do this with a tacit understanding that they’ve destroyed their career prospects in the academia and closely connected institutions, and they are safely ignored or laughed off as crackpots by the mainstream. (To give a concrete example, large parts of economics clearly fit this description.)
I don’t find this example concrete. I know very little about economics ideology. Can you give more specific examples?
The trouble is, the situation is fundamentally different here. If there existed some sort of crude open attempt to dictate official dogma, as in the Soviet Union, I have no doubt that a small but still non-zero minority would speak out against it, no matter what the consequences. However, in the modern academic system, there is no such thing—rather, there is a complex system of subtle but strong perverse incentives that lead to systematic biases and a gradual drift of the academic mainstream away from reality. (Of course, the magnitude of these problems varies greatly across different fields.)
In this situation, a contrarian is faced with a situation where making fundamental criticism of the state of the field won’t invite any open persecution and accusation of heresy, but it will lead to professional marginalization and ruined career prospects without making any useful impact at all. After all, is there a more surefire way to get derided as a crackpot than to claim that accredited experts are failing to appreciate your insight? (Of course, in a field where the mainstream is correct, like in most of the hard sciences, this is a perfectly good heuristic.) So the choice isn’t between conformity and heroic defiance, but between conformity—best achieved by internalizing the mainstream biases—and becoming a marginalized crackpot who invites only ridicule by anyone of any consequence.
Now, all this may sound like theorizing without evidence. However, in practice we do see whole academic fields where even a basic rational scrutiny of the academic mainstream shows that it’s seriously divorced from reality—and yet, we see no academic insiders screaming this awful truth from the rooftops. The occasional contrarians who mount fundamental criticism do this with a tacit understanding that they’ve destroyed their career prospects in the academia and closely connected institutions, and they are safely ignored or laughed off as crackpots by the mainstream. (To give a concrete example, large parts of economics clearly fit this description.)
This is true only under the assumption that the tenure process doesn’t screen thoroughly for people who have internalized all the mainstream biases deeply and honestly.
Mind you, this isn’t as outrageous as it may sound. Consider for example a physics department that grants tenure to someone who is in fact a secret (say) relativity crackpot, and who then proceeds to peddle his nonsense with an inalienable academic title and departmental affiliation. This would be an absolute disaster, so physics departments can be expected to weed out prospective tenure candidates ruthlessly if they show any inclination for believing crackpot ideas, and you can’t blame them for it.
Now, consider the same problem in a field where the mainstream is heavily biased. A department in this field is faced with the same problem, except that now the dangerous “crackpot” ideas may in fact be closer to reality than the mainstream. However, there is no independent outside authority that could ever confirm this: the biased mainstream consensus is, by definition, what all the credentialed high-status experts will say, and what the general public will use to decide who is an expert and who a crackpot. So a tenure candidate again gets weeded out at the slightest sign of ideas outside the mainstream bounds, except that now these bounds are seriously remote from reality.
Of course, it’s always possible in principle that a contrarian might completely hide his views until he gets tenure, but such a grand feat of duplicity would be far beyond ordinary human powers. (Note that the bias of the mainstream experts doesn’t at all mean that they are stupid!) It’s also possible that a tenured exponent of the orthodoxy might change his mind under the weight of evidence, but people will very rarely accept a truth that places their life’s work and accomplishments in a negative light. (Not to mention all the positive incentives, far beyond the guaranteed professorial title and job security, that tenured professors have for maintaining good standing with the mainstream.)
In medicine, John Ioannidis has basically built his career around exposing unpleasant truths that the perverse incentives have led the field away from. He has gotten several of his papers to various top journals, is currently a Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and been cited over 30,000 times. Isn’t that evidence that you can make fundamental criticisms of the state of the field without sacrificing your career?
My intuition suggests that both in the case of Ioannidis and other somewhat similar cases—such as the WEIRD paper, which seriously questioned the generalizability of pretty much all existing psychological research, and which has been cited almost 300 times since its publication in 2010 - is that when a field is drifting away from reality, most of the people working within the field are quite aware of the fact. When somebody finally makes a clear and persuasive argument about this being the case, everyone will start citing that argument.
I certainly don’t deny that the self-correcting mechanism you describe has worked to some extent in some fields in recent past. However, it also seems evident that in certain other fields nothing like that is happening, even though their mainstream has long been drifting far from reality, and the only people making cogent fundamental criticism are outsiders completely out of grace with the establishment. I don’t have anything like a complete theory that would explain when correct fundamental criticism will be acclaimed as an important contribution, and when it will trigger a negative career-killing response from the establishment.
Now, of course, one possibility is that I have simply acquired crackpot beliefs on several subjects and I’m completely misdiagnosing the situation. Clearly, I would disagree, but examining the problem further would require getting into a complex discussion of each particular subject in question.
That said, regarding the specific question of fields that have bearing on the global warming controversies, my current positions are (mainly) ones of confusion and indecision. They are not among the examples of clearly pathological fields that I have in mind. In the context of this thread, I merely want to point out that the arguments such as that advanced by Nordhaus aren’t enough to give much certainty about the health of these areas.
This paper looks to me like it accurately criticizes a basic and important methodological flaw in some of the climate change literature; my impression is that the authors haven’t suffered from it, but that they also haven’t been listened to all that much. Note that although Annan disagrees with the more extreme predictions, he also explicitly disagrees with climate skepticism, which helps convince me that skepticism is probably wrong (since he seems pretty reasonable), but which also leaves Vladimir free to argue that an actual skeptic would face greater career risks. Your examples look only questionably relevant to me, because those fields aren’t politicized in the same way that climate change is.
(Is there a set of conditions that would convince/enable you to write posts explaining to LessWrong how to engage in meta-level Hansonian/Schellingian analyses similar to the one you did in your comment? Alternatively, do you know of any public fora whose level of general intelligence and “rationality” is greater than LessWrong’s? I can’t immediately think of any better strategies for raising the sanity waterline than you or Steve Rayhawk writing a series of posts about signaling games, focal points, implicit decision policies, social psychology, &c., and how we should use those concepts when interpreting the social world. But of course I have no idea if that would be a good use of your time or if it’d actually have any noticeable impact. Anyway it seems possible there’d be a way to raise funds to pay you to write at least a few posts, Kickstarter style, or I could try to convince Anna and Julia from the new/upcoming Center for Modern Rationality to write up some grants for you.)
Thanks for the kind words, but I wouldn’t be able to allocate enough time for such a project at the present moment. In fact, I’ve had plans to write something along these lines for quite a while, but original articles take much more time than comments. (And I’ve barely had any time even for comments in recent months.)
Also, realistically, I’m not sure how successful the product would be. I don’t have much talent for writing in an engaging way, which is further exacerbated by English not being my native language. So I think that even with the best possible outcome, not very many people would end up reading it.
Just noting that I would certainly read such a thing. You seem to have a knack for insight, regardless of your linguistics (which are anyway, if only in my opinion, quite good).
I don’t find this example concrete. I know very little about economics ideology. Can you give more specific examples?