i think of the idealized platonic researcher as the person who has chosen ultimate (intellectual) freedom over all else. someone who really cares about some particular thing that nobody else does—maybe because they see the future before anyone else does, or maybe because they just really like understanding everything about ants or abstract mathematical objects or something. in exchange for the ultimate intellectual freedom, they give up vast amounts of money, status, power, etc.
one thing that makes me sad is that modern academia is, as far as I can tell, not this. when you opt out of the game of the Economy, in exchange for giving up real money, status, and power, what you get from Academia is another game of money, status, and power, with different rules, and much lower stakes, and also everyone is more petty about everything.
at the end of the day, what’s even the point of all this? to me, it feels like sacrificing everything for nothing if you eschew money, status, and power, and then just write a terrible irreplicable p-hacked paper that reduces the net amount of human knowledge by adding noise and advances your career so you can do more terrible useless papers. at that point, why not just leave academia and go to industry and do something equally useless for human knowledge but get paid stacks of cash for it?
ofc there are people in academia who do good work but it often feels like the incentives force most work to be this kind of horrible slop.
I hear this a lot, and as a PhD student I definitely see some adverse incentives, but I basically just ignore them and do what I want. Maybe I’ll eventually get kicked out of the academic system, but it will take years, which is enough time to do obviously excellent work if I have that potential. Obviously excellent work seems to be sufficient to stay in academia. So the problem doesnt really seem that bad to me—the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway, and the top 40% occasionally wastes time on status games because of the culture or because they have that type of personality, but often doesnt really need to.
the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway
I disagree with this reasoning. A well-designed system with correct incentives would co-opt these people’s desire to grift and play status games for the purposes of extracting useful work from them. Indeed, setting up game-theoretic environments in which agents with random or harmful goals all end up pointed towards some desired optimization target is largely the purpose of having “systems” at all. (See: how capitalism, at its best, harnesses people’s self-interest towards creating socially valuable things.)
People who would ignore incentives and do quality work anyway would probably do quality work anyway, so if we only cared about them, we wouldn’t need incentive systems at all. (Figuring out who these people are and distributing resources to them is another purpose of such systems, but a badly-designed system is also bad at this task.)
In my experience with magh, to be obviously excellent you need to be more like top 10 % of all grad students, possibly even higher, but might vary a lot on the field.
I suspect that academia would be less like this if there weren’t an oversupply of labor in academia. Like, there’s this crazy situation where there are way more people who want to be professors than there are jobs for professors. So a bunch get filtered out in grad school, and a bunch more get filtered out in early stages of professorhood. So professors can’t relax and research what they are actually curious about until fairly late in the game (e.g. tenure) because they are under so much competition to impress everyone around them with publications and whatnot.
Also, the person who’s willing to mud-wrestle for twenty years to get a solid position so they can turn around and do real research is just much much rarer than the person who enjoys getting dirty.
academia is too broad of a term. most of math, physics, theoretical CS, paleontology, material sciences, engineering, and some branches of economics, biology, engineering, (computational) neuroscience, (computational) linguistics, statistics etc are doing well and overall reward intellectual freedom and deep work. in terms of people this is a small minority of total academics, probably <5%.
It is true that many subfields, or even entire domains of science are diseased disciplines. Most of the research ismarginal, irrelevant, reinventing the wheel, trivial, tautological, p-hacked and often even fraudulent. One can point to the usual suspects in the humanities and the social sciences but disciplines where the majority of research is noise, nonsense or even net-negative plausibly also includes machine learning and (I’m told) medicine.
Is that disappointing? Perhaps. But this still describes hundred of thousands or millions of people all over the world pushing the frontier of knowledge.
I think you are pining for a world that doesn’t really exist. The reason why academia is also ruled by money, status, and power is because it is just a different sector of the economy. The costs and returns will therefore equilibrate with the rest of the economy given the constraints of academia.
If you allow for tenure positions, for example, well there is much reward for having a forever stable high paying and high status job, so you should expect people to pay up to that amount of benefit to get it.
Maybe you pine for the academia of Newton, where scientists could never worry about appearing immediately productive because they had massive amounts of passive income, but that is only possible because of the massive inequality involved, randomly choosing some families to be high class. That academia only existed because of the rest of the economy, which was utter trash, and for the vast majority of history instead pointed potential Newtons toward studying religion instead.
I’m not saying improvements to academia don’t exist, but that you won’t find your solutions by trying to isolate academics from money, status, and power. Or pretending it is independent from the rest of the economy. But by working with these forces, as we do in all other fields we succeed at, to align them with good work.
i think this is a bit overblown, from observing academia you can definitely trade a small amount of status for academic freedom if you’re not 90th-percentile disagreeable. You could go to a slightly lower-ranked but still R1 school, and negotiate for ability to do whatever you want. If the school isn’t trying hard to climb rankings, there’s less pressure to publish or to measure performance based on strange status-y things. You do lose out on some amount of status compared to being at a top school, but if you do good work your peers at top schools will still read/pay attention to it. At top schools, negotiating for freedom is much harder to do because the market is more competitive and ppl play status games to get ahead on the margin.
Agreed and also sad about this (and this seems to be not only true in academia but also industry). I turned down a PhD offer for this vibe. But reflecting generally, at least for myself, I guess if a person does not have enough capital or ability to pursue the intellectual freedom yet, they could take smaller steps, learn and accumulate trust and then eventually explore more out of the box searches. Just need to stay patient, stubborn, and make sure that “eventually” is not too late.
i think of the idealized platonic researcher as the person who has chosen ultimate (intellectual) freedom over all else. someone who really cares about some particular thing that nobody else does—maybe because they see the future before anyone else does, or maybe because they just really like understanding everything about ants or abstract mathematical objects or something. in exchange for the ultimate intellectual freedom, they give up vast amounts of money, status, power, etc.
one thing that makes me sad is that modern academia is, as far as I can tell, not this. when you opt out of the game of the Economy, in exchange for giving up real money, status, and power, what you get from Academia is another game of money, status, and power, with different rules, and much lower stakes, and also everyone is more petty about everything.
at the end of the day, what’s even the point of all this? to me, it feels like sacrificing everything for nothing if you eschew money, status, and power, and then just write a terrible irreplicable p-hacked paper that reduces the net amount of human knowledge by adding noise and advances your career so you can do more terrible useless papers. at that point, why not just leave academia and go to industry and do something equally useless for human knowledge but get paid stacks of cash for it?
ofc there are people in academia who do good work but it often feels like the incentives force most work to be this kind of horrible slop.
I hear this a lot, and as a PhD student I definitely see some adverse incentives, but I basically just ignore them and do what I want. Maybe I’ll eventually get kicked out of the academic system, but it will take years, which is enough time to do obviously excellent work if I have that potential. Obviously excellent work seems to be sufficient to stay in academia. So the problem doesnt really seem that bad to me—the bottom 60% or so grift and play status games, but probably weren’t going to contribute much anyway, and the top 40% occasionally wastes time on status games because of the culture or because they have that type of personality, but often doesnt really need to.
I disagree with this reasoning. A well-designed system with correct incentives would co-opt these people’s desire to grift and play status games for the purposes of extracting useful work from them. Indeed, setting up game-theoretic environments in which agents with random or harmful goals all end up pointed towards some desired optimization target is largely the purpose of having “systems” at all. (See: how capitalism, at its best, harnesses people’s self-interest towards creating socially valuable things.)
People who would ignore incentives and do quality work anyway would probably do quality work anyway, so if we only cared about them, we wouldn’t need incentive systems at all. (Figuring out who these people are and distributing resources to them is another purpose of such systems, but a badly-designed system is also bad at this task.)
well, in academia, if you do quality work anyways and ignore incentives, you’ll get a lot less funding to do that quality work, and possibly perish.
unfortunately, academia is not a sufficiently well designed system to extract useful work out of grifters.
It’s not a perfectly designed system, but it’s still possible to benefit from it if you want a few years to do research.
In my experience with magh, to be obviously excellent you need to be more like top 10 % of all grad students, possibly even higher, but might vary a lot on the field.
I suspect that academia would be less like this if there weren’t an oversupply of labor in academia. Like, there’s this crazy situation where there are way more people who want to be professors than there are jobs for professors. So a bunch get filtered out in grad school, and a bunch more get filtered out in early stages of professorhood. So professors can’t relax and research what they are actually curious about until fairly late in the game (e.g. tenure) because they are under so much competition to impress everyone around them with publications and whatnot.
Also, the person who’s willing to mud-wrestle for twenty years to get a solid position so they can turn around and do real research is just much much rarer than the person who enjoys getting dirty.
Yeah, a big part of my strategy is to ignore this effect and accept potentially being filtered out as a grad student.
academia is too broad of a term. most of math, physics, theoretical CS, paleontology, material sciences, engineering, and some branches of economics, biology, engineering, (computational) neuroscience, (computational) linguistics, statistics etc are doing well and overall reward intellectual freedom and deep work. in terms of people this is a small minority of total academics, probably <5%.
It is true that many subfields, or even entire domains of science are diseased disciplines. Most of the research is marginal, irrelevant, reinventing the wheel, trivial, tautological, p-hacked and often even fraudulent. One can point to the usual suspects in the humanities and the social sciences but disciplines where the majority of research is noise, nonsense or even net-negative plausibly also includes machine learning and (I’m told) medicine.
Is that disappointing? Perhaps. But this still describes hundred of thousands or millions of people all over the world pushing the frontier of knowledge.
I think you are pining for a world that doesn’t really exist. The reason why academia is also ruled by money, status, and power is because it is just a different sector of the economy. The costs and returns will therefore equilibrate with the rest of the economy given the constraints of academia.
If you allow for tenure positions, for example, well there is much reward for having a forever stable high paying and high status job, so you should expect people to pay up to that amount of benefit to get it.
Maybe you pine for the academia of Newton, where scientists could never worry about appearing immediately productive because they had massive amounts of passive income, but that is only possible because of the massive inequality involved, randomly choosing some families to be high class. That academia only existed because of the rest of the economy, which was utter trash, and for the vast majority of history instead pointed potential Newtons toward studying religion instead.
I’m not saying improvements to academia don’t exist, but that you won’t find your solutions by trying to isolate academics from money, status, and power. Or pretending it is independent from the rest of the economy. But by working with these forces, as we do in all other fields we succeed at, to align them with good work.
i think this is a bit overblown, from observing academia you can definitely trade a small amount of status for academic freedom if you’re not 90th-percentile disagreeable. You could go to a slightly lower-ranked but still R1 school, and negotiate for ability to do whatever you want. If the school isn’t trying hard to climb rankings, there’s less pressure to publish or to measure performance based on strange status-y things. You do lose out on some amount of status compared to being at a top school, but if you do good work your peers at top schools will still read/pay attention to it. At top schools, negotiating for freedom is much harder to do because the market is more competitive and ppl play status games to get ahead on the margin.
Agreed and also sad about this (and this seems to be not only true in academia but also industry). I turned down a PhD offer for this vibe. But reflecting generally, at least for myself, I guess if a person does not have enough capital or ability to pursue the intellectual freedom yet, they could take smaller steps, learn and accumulate trust and then eventually explore more out of the box searches. Just need to stay patient, stubborn, and make sure that “eventually” is not too late.