Among the failure modes of martial arts dojos, I suspect, is that a sufficiently dedicated martial arts student, will dream of..
becoming a teacher and having their own martial arts dojo someday.
I think that accademia is also subject to this mode of failure. As an exercise, try to think of great literary figures who were also professors of literature at major universities. Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one: Vladimir Nabokov, and he was notably contemptuous of his colleagues. Can anyone else think up anymore?
Unsurprisingly, Paul Graham has some interesting thoughts on the subject (incidentally, I seem to be developing a reputation on another forum that I post on as the “obligatory Paul Graham link guy”):
Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for quality, and the people running the test really care about its integrity. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are fairly honest, for example. The professors will get whoever they admit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well, and they have a fair amount of data to go on. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be much more hackable. One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there’s almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It’s this end that gives rise to phrases like “those who can’t do, teach.”
In this case, what we should really worry about is developing good tests to distinguish good rationalists from the phonies beyond just “runs a rationality dojo”. Obviously, being able to apply the principles of instrumental rationality inorder to succeed at a field unrelated to rationality is one such test, but is it the only one? I think the issue warrants further study.
I think that accademia is also subject to this mode of failure. As an exercise, try to think of great literary figures who were also professors of literature at major universities. Off the top of my head, I can think of exactly one: Vladimir Nabokov, and he was notably contemptuous of his colleagues. Can anyone else think up anymore?
Unsurprisingly, Paul Graham has some interesting thoughts on the subject (incidentally, I seem to be developing a reputation on another forum that I post on as the “obligatory Paul Graham link guy”):
In this case, what we should really worry about is developing good tests to distinguish good rationalists from the phonies beyond just “runs a rationality dojo”. Obviously, being able to apply the principles of instrumental rationality inorder to succeed at a field unrelated to rationality is one such test, but is it the only one? I think the issue warrants further study.