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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
Social sciences are, in principle, obviously worth funding. Philosophy (Nietzsche was actually a professor of philology), archeology, digging texts out of archives and writing history rank the highest for me, but there's valuable work in a lot of fields. A lot of the best work in economics has directly affected the way we organize the economy and the way businesses do business.
90% of publicly funded 'social science' is not that. It's hundreds of millions of words of repetitive, uninspired analysis of history or literature, like the work of that Ally Louks who blew up on twitter. The thing wrong with her, contra all of RW twitter, isn't that she's too woke or too communist or anything. Michel Foucault was woke for his time, but is obviously worth reading, and thousands of leftist academics have written things worth reading across many different fields. Her work, and 90% of modern humanities academic work, just isn't. And not in the "only 10 experts could appreciate or even understand it" sense, like in research math, but in the sense that there's no interesting content in it at all. There are a hundred thousand academics at various colleges and universities who either aren't smart enough or aren't independent-minded enough to develop good taste about what to research, and are paid (although not paid very much) to write ... really anything, so long as it's topical and isn't too embarassing, and can get published in a junk journal or turned into a book chapter or something.
Now the most valuable work is very valuable, and if you had to choose all or nothing (which you don't!), the best history and economics is still worth funding the garbage. (The money isn't counterfactually going to whatever you think is valuable, it's probably going to more welfare.) Or that's what I'd say in America, but New Zealand probably has a lot less than 5% of the global top 5%, so whatever.
The obvious answer would be to cut 90% of it and only keep the high quality stuff, but the entire problem is that there's no reasonable metric to measure how impactful research actually is without waiting 200 years. And all the ones that people have hacked together are gamed so the useless stuff is actually on top rather than on the bottom.
Going for economic value isn't the worst you could do really. Universities went to shit when States figured out they were important and tried to keep them afloat with free money. What really needs to happen is that universities have skin in the game again and actually have to maintain relevance instead of coasting on their established reputation. Only the fear of death can push institutions to shrink instead of grow. And sometimes not even that.
Disagree. You can't precisely measure quality, but smart generalists can separate bad articles like "How Young People Portrayed Their Experiences in Therapeutic Residential Care in Portugal: A Mixed Methods Study" and "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction" from the kinds of humanities academic work you might want published. One can tell the difference between 'this might be valuable' and 'this definitely isn't'. The problem is the people funding this stuff aren't doing that.
You can't do this at scale because power can't be destroyed.
The day you pick someone to do this is the day that person goes on the road to the corruption that led us here.
Academia was once run by people who were good at detecting bullshit. And then people got free money for producing garbage that follows the theme set by the State.
Remove the free money and stop using the results of academia to prop up the running class. No less than that will fix it.
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I don't have a strong feeling about the social sciences, but NZ is in for a nasty surprise if they think the type of research done in "core science" departments these days is economically useful. Some of the engineering departments are in better shape, but people in the "core sciences" tend to work on flavor of the month stuff that grant agencies think are good (which is often very far from economic usefulness) and then publish large numbers of garbage papers on the subject to inflate their citation counts. It's not clear to me how funding this is any better than the social sciences -- if anything it might be worse because it takes up time, effort, and money from people who might otherwise be doing something useful.
A lot of these departments, even the ones that arent explicitly engineering, do work for industry as a sort of "expensive instruments for rent".
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At least the research done in the harder sciences is based on the scientific method and is factual. That alone makes it at least worth doing. I’m sure it’s at least possible to further direct the funds towards useful research rather than fluff, but even fluff has a use case if it’s based on facts rather than being crafted just-so stories about mermaids in literature or the entire fields of gender studies and race studies.
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I disagree, mostly because the social “sciences” are more or less pseudoscience at this point. Very little science in done in those fields and what little is done rarely replicates. And of course there are topics that nobody will touch because it’s heresy and might lead to a career exterminatus. The entire system is too corrupt to give anything useful, and as such shouldn’t be funded by the government. Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo. To fund social “science” is to pay a guy n a lab coat to find a way to give cathedral propaganda the veneer of science.
If the government is to fund science, it must fund real science. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, biology, medicine, etc. are real sciences that use the scientific method to determine what reality is. They don’t start from their agenda and work to sane wash it.
I’m not sure that social sciences were ever dispassionate inquiry to begin with. I’m pretty sure that very few in those fields have ever done real science and wouldn’t know where to begin. As such I’m inclined to burn it down and ignore it until it can be rebuilt in the mold of harder sciences where the goal is to find truth and to test ideas rigorously. As they sit now, I don’t think they’re so much signal as anti signal— having someone cite sociology or psychology makes me less inclined to believe the claim than one made by anyone else.
Psychology is absolutely "real science", at least potentially. That these fields are filled with 110-IQ women with left-wing biases, who wish not to arrive at any conclusions which contradicts modern morality or politics, is an unfortunate fact unrelated to the potential of psychology as a field.
I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature. We also tend to compare what's "rational, logical or scientific" to ourselves, and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are flawed and wrong, and that they should change to become more rational, logical and scientific. This is a fallacy in that it tells the territory to approximate the map, rather than building maps which seek to approximate the territory.
The Tao Te Ching is still ahead of the consensus of today in multiple areas. "The prince" likely still holds up today (admittedly I haven't read this one). Buddhist meditation and enlightenment still hold research value today. And this is just older Psychology. There's also value in religion, values, wisdom, culture, rituals, etc.
No science, mathematics, nor logic can deal well with these areas at all. They're mere tools. You need to put humanity in the center in order to benefit humanity.
I almost agree with "The social science is so corrupt that it's almost worthless", but that's the fault of academia, politics and well, corruption. Self-help books are still popular today despite them not being hard science, and the lies society create about gender and sexuality has spawned "red pill" groups online which are closer to the truth than the consensus (thought they aren't perfect). In fact, I love psychology because it can explain why this problem happened in the first place (denial/repression of unpleasant parts of reality)
By the way, you don't need the scientific method to approximate truth in the first place. We're starting to forget this as the scientific method is so popular.
I think the problem here is that since science has historically provided many obviously good things, a lot of people think that the word 'science' just means 'good things', so if you say that something is not science, to a lot of people it sounds like you are saying that it is not good. However, you don't need science to decide that you want your society to have public parks, sports stadiums, museums or hospitals. This is also probably the issue with social sciences. As long as people can claim that what social sciences are doing is science, it will sound to a lot of people that what they are doing is good. If you start asking what is it actually good for, people might stop to think and realize that the answer is "not much".
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I’m not suggesting there’s no wisdom in these sources, but I don’t think they should be regarded as factual until actually verified. There’s a lot of wisdom in older practices, I’ll agree with that. But I think funding such a thing through government grants to a university to produce papers that will be treated as factual creates a problem as, again, social sciences as they occur in university are not dispassionate inquiries into the reality of how human beings behave or think or the like. It’s agenda driven, and more often than not the studies are poorly done leading to a crisis of replication.
And furthermore, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it actually works, it doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Outside of CBT, DBT, and modern Stoic approaches to solving problems in your life, most of it frankly is nonsense. It tells people basically what they want to hear — that they’re already awesome, and that if they just reach for whatever they’re wanting, the universe will give the success. Selling people something that they want to be true and that life is easy and they’re destined to succeed is an easy way to print money. However, just as an observation, the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health. It doesn’t seem to actually wrk. In many cases, talk therapy seems to be no better than a long talk with anyone else. I’ll admit to not keeping up with Redpilll, though I think I’m personally politically Yarvin-pilled. I think it similar, though Yarvin Pilling is much more about political science and political philosophy than psychology.
I think some wisdom is of the type which can't be verified. I can rewrite sections of the Tao Te Ching such that it says a lot of things that we consider impressive today. For instance "acting without interest" is wise in that it avoids Goodhart's law and "One who loves the self as the world can be entrusted with the world" makes sense from the point of alignment, at least in humans (recreating human love in AIs might prove difficult, after all).
I agree that agenda driven universities can't be trusted with ancient wisdom. The only reason they can be trusted with math is that the rules are verifiable and because they're symbols which cannot be connected to anything that people have strong feelings about.
This seems to be modern self-help and not something that I brought up. But you're not exactly wrong, for there's a line in the alchemist which says something like "When you want something enough, the whole universe conspires in helping you attain it". But I don't think these statements are supposed to be true. Like "Believe in yourself", it's telling people to have a bias which, on average, works out better than not having said bias. Our belief influences our reality, even though they do not influence objective reality. So quotes like "Whether you think you can or not, you're right" are some degree of true. But most people have a hard time believing in themselves, so they just say "the universe" or ask "god" in their prayers, for they can still believe in something greater than themselves. These things are not intuitive at all unless you're told them.
But newer self-help books are made to make money, and therefore to make you feel good and to feel like you like the book that you paid money for. The claims of these books aren't impossible to achieve, but one does not get there without actual effort, be it conscious or unconscious (tricking your brain into heading towards your goal through visualization techniques and such)
I don't think that's a fair argument, though it's true. I even like the snakiness. But you could also argue that the more medicine somebody has in their home, the less healthy they tend to be. This does not dismiss the value of medicine, right?
By "Red pill" I was most referring to the dating aspects. Men get burned when they follow advice that they're given, especially by girls. Red pill takes are more honest about human nature and about what girls want. But the best dating books focus on "inner game" which is another way of saying "self-improvement", so for a largely unregultated response to men being mislead by society (and women) there's surprisingly little negativity. Of course, there's still some spiteful incels and superficial pick-up artists, but I find that they're a minority.
Yarvin is said to be part of the "Intellectual dark web", and while this is a very loosely defined cluster, I find that anything from there is like a breath of fresh air, no matter the subject in question or the speaker. By the way, since most of what I dislike is modern, I simply just consume older material. I regard the Erhard Seminars Training (1971-1984) books and Og Mandinos "The university of success" (1980) as high quality. Newer self-help is too kind for me, I want to be called out like when I'm reading thelastpsychiatrist
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Your complaint seems orthogonal to whether we define science as only including the objective. I personally think that the true issue is not how we define science, but the almost-religious fervor people have for science. I quite agree that science is not some final arbiter of truth, and that many important things are completely outside the purview of science. I also think it's fair to say that anything which is not objective isn't real science, though. The two aren't in conflict.
I agree, I dislike the statement "anything not objective is not real science" only because it's used to dismiss anything outside of science as "pseudo-science" or "woo", which is to overestimate the utility of science and to create a false dichotomy. Perhaps it's laziness on my part, one just puts themselves in a difficult position if they attempt defending or even explaining the value of unscientific knowledge
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Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.
Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).
Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.
Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.
Maybe we have different definitions of social sciences. I don't think that history, for example, is a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. You can't do experiments with history, but you can certainly use logic to figure out that some theories about what happened in the past are more likely to be accurate than others, you can search for additional primary evidence, and so on.
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History, economics, and political science are real sciences even if they are not as rigorous as physics and it is difficult or impossible to run experiments in them. Sure, there is a lot of ideological bullshit in all three of those fields, but there is also a lot of rational analysis. The typical kind of academic history writing that I have seen isn't some barely disguised attempt to push a political ideology, it is more like a lawyer's arguments in a legal case that revolves around whether something happened on a certain date. It is true that there are taboos that prevent some topics from being widely brought up, but that does not mean that these entire fields are worthless.
Anything that has to include the word “science” in its name is not a science
Materials science
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"Computer science"?
Famously neither a science, nor about computers.
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Correct. Computer science is strictly speaking a branch of mathematics.
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i like this paper (Computer Science: Not about Computers, Not Science) https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/krebsbak/Research/Publications/pdf/fecs15.pdf
Huh. Never thought I would see my alma mater in the wild. The world is small, I guess.
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Harold "Hal" Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Or then there's this piece (from one B. Jacobs) back in 2005: ""Computer Science" is Not Science and "Software Engineering" is Not Engineering"
…
I thought it was common knowledge that computer science is a branch of mathematics. As a computer science major this wasn't really controversial. Although a find that definition of engineering lacking. Engineers build things and study how best to build things, software engineering fits this mold pretty centrally.
Math is where the inverse of "the" logarithm function is eˣ, computer science is where it's 2ˣ, engineering and science are where it's 10ˣ.
More seriously, your definition of engineering is way better than theirs. Half of engineering is figuring out where it is and isn't safe to not bound your model to the laws of physics and chemistry too tightly. E.g. atoms are a pretty big deal, but if your elasticity model is atomistic and you're building something that's not nanometer-scale then you're doing it wrong.
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Social science has never produced good results, afaik. The soft sciences have pretty much always had low replication rates and a general lack of rigor. Things like IQ are more statistics than psychology; even very well established psychological concepts have been falsified.
Seriously there’s any number of pseudoscientific fields which maintain identical or even better rigor than psychology- to say nothing of grievance studies- to show that psychic powers are real and aliens are kidnapping people regularly and ley lines and astrology are part of medical treatment. I would suggest, if the government needs to fund research which isn’t hard science, that it funds aliens and Bigfoot instead of the trollop it currently does- this will at least be interesting to read.
Trollop? like, a prostitute? I don't get it.
I think it's troll op as in troll operation (soft sciences are one big troll op), similar to your typical rdrama stunts.
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I'm going to guess they meant tripe but were auto-corrected.
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I guess this is a question for anyone on The Motte familiar with such things. What is the current state of university reform? Are any universities in the western world simultaneously non-woke and somewhat respected? BYU maybe? I know there are various micro "based" colleges like New Saint Andrews but my impression is these are tremendously expensive for a completely disrespected degree. Are there even any of these types that aren't explicitly religious?
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer as I'm not familiar, but I'd say that being "Respected" is about social ranking, and that leaning "woke" is basically about valuing social reality higher than actual reality. The very way that "woke" operates is by attacking the reputation of the un-woke and making them out to be immoral. Notice this is about how "good" something is, and barely about how "true" it is. In other words, people who care more about truth than signaling and social hierarchies tend to be closer to the truth, but less respected by society. Here, I belive that the assumption "Respected = Good" is dangerous and misleading, since you'd be buying into political manipulation of reality (that sounds a bit dramatic, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it)
By definition, "non-woke" and "respected" seem separate
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I don't know about "based" in the sense users here use the term, but there are some notoriously conservative/un-woke schools out there. UNC, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Stanford, St Johns, Claremont McKenna, all come to mind.
Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.
You're not going to find a school in the state of California that doesn't have the"the full slate of grievance studies" and a "DEI commissariate"
Stanford is on the list for the same reason Claremont is. They're notoriously conservative relative to thier bretheren, get ranked highly on free speech by FIRE and other such groups, and project an all around ruthless disposition towards disruption.
According to the FIRE 2025 ranking (page number 44), Stanford University is 218., while Claremont McKenna College is 6. best out of 251 universities evaluated. These two institutions could hardly be more different, with regard to how FIRE regards them.
That's news to me. I remember them being ranked much higher than that and catching a lot of hate from the media for cracking down on disruptive activists back in 2020 but i also haven't paying close attention the last couple years.
Shit happens i guess.
If you check out Stanford's rankings, it's an odd mix. High "openness" ranking combined with bottom of the barrel "disruptive conduct" after a bunch of attacks on meetings.
Looking at the incident reports, Stanford was prosecuting students through an anonymous "protected identity harm reporting system" for being photographed reading Mein Kampf. Of course, this seems pretty typical for colleges these days
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UNC is not un-woke, lol.
University of North Carolina?
UNC is pretty woke, they were one of the colleges that got sue for DEI-flavored affirmative action along with Harvard.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-university-of-north-carolina/
I don't think that Certiorari proves as much as you think.
SFFA argues that UNC is discriminating against SouthEast Asians by privileging minorities born within the state over minorities born outside the state (not many SE-Asians in NC). I feel thats a bit different in kind, and the court seems to have agreed by splitting the case, and ultimately ruling against Harvard but in favor of UNC.
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There are some fairly highly ranked red state public schools that are probably less-left-leaning than most given the leverage state elected officials have over the institutions: Texas and Florida have both explicitly banned school-sponsored DEI initiatives. At least Texas A&M has a bit of a reputation for conservativism, and at least in the past when I've talked to lefties from Colorado they treat Colorado Springs as a very red part of the state because of the Air Force Academy there, but that may be a bit out of date at that point.
I'd bet any heavily-Greek school is "conservative" in at least a change-averse, slightly-social-conservative fashion that might not map to politica, but I don't have direct experience there. And this isn't to say that these schools are necessarily right-of-center, but more right-leaning than most universities.
University of Texas is not a conservative school, but it’s very willing to tolerate conservatism compared to similarly-liberal schools for straight forwards reasons that benefit itself(enjoying very high rankings and donations in Law and geology, most prominently). Notre Dame has been trending more conservative and was never as liberal you’d have expected, and it’s very highly ranked. Texas A&M is known for conservatism and tbf, it has creationists as a percent of faculty equivalent to BYU, which is indicative of at least allowing a certain type of conservatism.
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The Science post screwed up the link to the announcement, here's one that works. Despite Science's spin, the overall reporting is accurate. Let me de-spin it a bit, with quotes from the original announcement:
An elected government chooses a popular priority--economic growth--and a ministry aligns with that priority.
So the applications to this fund should either make a reasonable case that they will benefit NZ economically, or that they have some potential to lead to that. That's in line with the priority the elected government has established for itself (economic growth).
I can see why humanities and social scientists would be upset: nobody likes to have their source of funding taken away. I have but two questions: (1) do they disagree with the current elected government prioritizing economic growth, or (2) do they argue that the humanities and social science projects funded by this fund lead to economic growth as well as the core science projects?
If the disagreement is with the first question, then the response is: elections have consequences. New Zealand economy is doing poorly, people are worried, they elect a government with a mandate to grow the economy. While other goals have value, they have lost priority.
Is there any argument on the second front? The Science article hints at the possibility:
... but there is absolutely no follow-up or development of this argument. In fact, it's clear that "fundamental science" of the kind that an Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is likely to do indeed will continue to be funded, and likely at a higher rate than before now that the funds are not going towards social science / humanities. Unless, despite the name, that institute is pursuing non-core, non-fundamental-science projects (e..g, "How would an advance in nanotech affect [$historically-disadvantaged-minority]?" or "Indigenous knowledge of microchips").
That brief hint of a beginning of an argument is followed by a conflation of economics and social cohesion, and then by how this will impact Maori-led research. So bupkis.
Your argument is at least more developed: you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population. I wonder, though: New Zealanders adopt science and tech products made elsewhere, and (let's take your claim at face value for the moment) suffer the social consequences anyway. Isn't that strictly worse than having NZ companies develop the product domestically, and at least capturing the economic benefits of the product?
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
I greatly distrust a humanities department's answers to such questions. To the point where I doubt their answers are even net-positive for society.
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What was the last big win for this state-sponsored critical reflection?
There's been a lot of interesting work on illusionism about consciousness in recent years. I don't agree with illusionism, but defenders of the position have made strides in showing how such a seemingly implausible position can actually be coherent, and they've helped clarify exactly what's at stake in debates over materialism.
Definitely not the one idea I'd expect to see grow in strength from my admittedly cursory undergrad study, and definitely much later than any example I could think of.
Thanks!
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I was gonna read the philosophical paper and scoff at its navel-grazing, but turns out it's quite interesting and got me thinking about applications of its ideas to AI.
To argue his thesis (that just cause you "obviously" feel stuff (generalized Moore argument) doesn't necessarily mean that you actually subjectively experience it in the moment), he distinguishes between the subjective experience (phenomenal), the behavioral aspects associated with the experience (functional), and the value we assign to the experience (normative).
I don't know what it's like to be you (or anybody other than myself). So even if the generalized Moore argument feels compelling to me when applied to myself (I feel stuff, so obviously I have phenomenal experiences), it takes a generalizational leap for me to also apply it to you (I am human, and others are human, so their experiences are probably like mine). That's even though I have lots of evidence that other people don't feel like me, and don't experience the world like I do. Still, it's safer to err on treating everyone like Player Characters in their own right and assume that they also feel stuff (phenomenal), because otherwise they'll think badly of me (normative) and gang up against me (functional).
But what about AI? It's not going to think badly of me and gang up on me if I treat it like it doesn't have feelings. I can adjust levels of politeness in my prompts if I think it will make a difference in the output (functional), and disregard the normative notions of proper communication.
(Of course, the same idea applied to animals. Well, I wasn't going to donate to PETA anyway.)
Come to think of it, I have heard versions of these ideas before... in Theravada Buddhism. Does it count as being "state-sponsored" if the founder was a prince?
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I agree that such critical reflection is important, I disagree that government funding is either necessary or sufficient to promote such reflection. If anything, it seems to me that government funding is more likely to corrupt either the critical or the reflective part of it. Such corruption can happen by the State funding its apologists. See, for example, just about anything officially published in the USSR on the well-being of soviet people.
Such corruption can also happen by elite-group capture, which is what is happening now. While I don't know how specifically the Marsden Fund was administered, but I know how other such funds work, and I don't expect anything different here. If they give grants in [$academic field] for [$purpose], they get some prominent people in [$academic field] (as prominent as they can get, at least) to evaluate applications for their worthiness in [$academic field] and their adherence to [$purpose]. So in fact all such Funds purposely start out as elite-group capture: who else would you ask to evaluate a chemistry proposal but chemists? And that's fine, so long as you can trust [$academic field] to fruitfully pursue [$purpose]. But once the field gets an influx of members who are diverting the field from [$purpose], and they rise to prominence within the field, then they will become the evaluators who determine where funding goes, and it will go away from [$purpose].
At that point, if you care about [$purpose], start by turning off the funding spigot.
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No it won't. We reflect on that question right here on the Motte. And, of course, these conversations happen every day within families, friend groups, and churches. We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.
But even so, these credential elites are doing an awful job measuring and promoting human well-being. The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world and stokes social division. Even worse, it often places objective truth-seeking below appeals to authority. That's how you get stuff like "indigenous ways of knowing" being taught in NZ schools as an alternative to science.
The sooner we free ourselves from this corrupt priestly class, the better.
On the Motte, and many similar sites, materialistic view of life are starting to dominate. I've been told many times now on similar websites that well-being is improving "because the GDP is increasing". They believe that an increase in wealth is a direct increase in well-being, and that the two are basically the same thing. They then use this as an argument for "progress" and to dismiss any values, customs and ideals of the past.
I think this is a direct consequence of being an intellectual and liking nerdy things like mathematics. You start thinking "logically" and "scientifically", and eventually you become materialistic as you confuse the map and territory (theory and reality). For instance by thinking that the truth values of logic ('true' and 'false') has anything to do with truth (meaning as 'existing in reality').
I agree with this, but it's difficult to be an intelligent person interested in things like well-being, without encountering material which has been poisoned by the priestly class or somebody who is influenced by them, and if one practices actual psychology, they will find not only the truth but they will also understand why some people avoid the truth. If you have recommendations of works written by highly intelligent people who dare to think for themselves (they can be arrogant, a little bit of mania usually only makes for better writing), I'm all ears!
Hmm. I don't have numbers... I feel like materialism peaked a few years ago in the internet atheism era... has it still been growing since then? If so then its probably just my filter bubbles that have changed. Something to do with my own fall into nihilism and subsequent spiritual journey.
Oh, and my favorite psychology authors are the ones writing Magick Tomes. Much more aesthetic than the other therapy paradigms let me tell you.
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So, shifting the focus to philosophy specifically, since that's where I'm more knowledgeable.
A couple points do have to be conceded. Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions. It's not uncommon for bright undergraduates to anticipate the major positions and lines of arguments when they're first presented with a philosophical problem.
It also has to be pointed out that the modern research university, and with it the concept of the "academic philosopher", is itself a somewhat recent historical invention. Although institutions of higher learning in some form date back to antiquity, not every canonical philosopher has had institutional support - Spinoza was a lens crafter, Kierkegaard was independently wealthy, Nietzsche held a PhD in an unrelated field and did most of his writing after he left the university. So we know that good work can happen even in the absence of universities.
Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.
I love TheMotte dearly, and obviously you can tell from my prolific posting history that I derive a great deal of value from this forum, but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.
It depends on who you're talking about? I suppose the anti-natalists and transhumanists could be plausibly accused of being nihilist, so if that's part of the "dominant ideology" then sure. Wokeists and Marxists in the general case though are definitely not nihilists. You can disagree with them and call them evil, but they're not nihilists. They think that what they're doing is extremely meaningful
Only if the incentives of that work align with not only producing high-quality work on these questions, but also effectively disseminating the results. Current incentives in academia do not.
Yes, some academics still produce great work (aimed at others in their sub-field). The work of disseminating their result even among their sub-field peers is a challenge due of the deluge of poor-quality stuff that everyone (including them) puts out to inflate their publication record.
I have been in enough hiring and promotion committees to witness first-hand that most committee members (a) will count the number of publications, taking into account the frequency and recency of them, and the quality of the journals based on SJR metrics, and (b) will not even bother reading any of the works if the applicant is even in a slightly different sub-field, but instead rely on the blurbs in reference letters / external reviewers, which (b1) tend to be way too nice and uncritical, and (b2) tend to do about as good a job conveying the actual qualifications of the candidate in their field as we professors do when we write a letter of recommendation for a student's grad school application.
(And gods-forbid that the candidate tries something interdisciplinary and we couldn't find a reviewer with decent knowledge of both fields. Or collaborates with someone outside their field. In math at least, that tends to look like this: the mathematician use some low-level mathematics to make a reasonable model in the context provided by other collaborators; if the reviewer is a mathematician without much knowledge of the other field, the reviewer isolates the mathematical model, realizes that it's pretty low-level math, and reports that in the review. The hard part of the collaboration is the endless back-and-forth with the non-mathematicians to get them to elucidate what, specifically, they want to model, and to commit to particular measurements and parameters. None of that work comes through in the review of the final polished publication, and is certainly not apparent to any pure mathematician.)
As a result, those who rise in an academic field must go through several such filters: at least one successful tenure-track hire; successful tenure review; successful full-professor review, and any reviews in-between. The process selects for those who stay firmly in the confines of their sub-field, making numerous and safe publications. By the time one gets through these filters, one might as well stay in that lane where it's safe and comfortable, and where one has already achieved some level of prominence and prestige.
At that point one becomes the cog that perpetuates the system: one gets swamped by requests for reviews (manuscripts submitted to a journal that published your work; external review of a tenure / promotion candidate; letters of recommendation for junior colleague; letters of recommendation for students). That's a shit-ton of work, and one feels obliged to take on some of it (to keep ones connections), so one develops streamline methods for quickly writing those reviews. Which results in more bland, overly-positive-while-saying-little-of-substance reviews that others then rely on for admittance/publication/hiring/tenure/promotion. And because they know (and you know) the worth of those reviews, everyone falls back on something concrete like the JSR metrics, which feeds the Goodhart's law and further dilutes the few high-quality works that do indeed get produced and published.
So no, the current academic system's incentives do not align with producing a few but high-quality explorations into important questions.
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Big doubt.
This is going to be somewhat complicated by the fact that the fields I followed are different from yours, but if economics, psychology, or social science are any indication, the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge don't amount to much. Don't get me wrong, I know what you're referring to, and I agree it exists, but it seems to boil down to a difference in form rather than substance, and the form of showing off your "quality of thought" and breadth of knowledge is mostly used to deflect from obvious questions.
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I wouldn't undersell philosophy as a discipline. In some ways, it is the ultimate discipline. Social science is just applied Biology which is just applied Chemistry... Physics... Math... Philosophy. When you start examining the ultimate questions it gets quite philosophical.
But here's the thing. As a discipline so untethered by constraints, it's difficult to be "good" at philosophy. Breadth matters more than depth. And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford. The modern information network has created polymath monsters of the sort which Thomas Jefferson could never imagine.
This surprises me entirely. Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
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Does New Zealand have a comparative advantage in such questions? Or is it better off trying to materially improve the lives of its citizens and leave those questions for others?
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Are they effective as a counterbalance, though? I'm yet to see a "utilitarian techbroist" excess that the SJ movement could not be made to acquiesce to in return for assurances that it will be wielded in the interest of their political goals, and in fact what seems to happen is that every time such assurances are made (ex: any social media opinion-management tech) the would-be counterbalance becomes another hard obstacle to overcome if you want to put brakes on the technology (ex: the "freeze peach" meme, fielded by SJ in defense of Big Tech getting to do what they wanted to do anyway).
In general, it seems pretty counterproductive to hope for an incumbent ideological movement to rein in an incumbent technological one. As long as the concerns of temporal and spiritual power are orthogonal, they are naturally complementary to each other; what you are proposing is akin to wanting to check a medieval absolute monarchy by investing in the priesthood.
Honestly i'm surprised the founders of google are alive. Weekly meetings in front of the whole campus in a building anyone could tailgate into with no security. Lots of secluded lines of sight to the stage...
I guess noone hates them that much. Well. That and I think those company-wides ended in 2019?
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You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.
Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.
Social sciences vary widely by the degree to which they are affected by ideology. History, for example, is a pretty rigorous field. Economics and political science both have important real insights. There is no such thing as a social science, or perhaps a science in general, that is completely free of ideology, but the idea that all social sciences are just sinecures for left-wing nutbags is simply factually inaccurate.
Let's test the theory by taking away the sinecures.
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Please make your points without the gratuitous insults.
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The most amazing thing about it, was that after the universities were filled to the brim with so many fake degrees, they couldn't employ them anymore, suddenly every company began funding DEI departments. I still can't believe what a coup of a grift that was. And decades of saying "They're just college kids, they'll grow out of it when they get in the real world" was proven wrong to disastrous consequences. Nearly every entertainment property? Ruined. Institutional competence/faith in institutions? Ruined. It's so bad, our President Elect was convicted of 34 felonies, and our nation collectively went "We all know that shit ain't real" and elected him President anyways.
The disillusionment is also just half the issue. The people who haven't become disillusioned may also be suffering direct damage from absorbing whatever fashionable stuff is coming out of academia.
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
The replication crisis (e.g., in psychology) is very good for the field and for humanity: it more accurately reflects the true state of the field, compared to what we thought. The theory of replication is why psychology bills itself a science; the root problem was that replication wasn't done in practice. If every new result required two replications before being tentatively accepted as possibly describing something real, then psychology wouldn't have a replication crisis, it would just have replication, as a science should.
(On the contrary, beware any field that claims the status of science and either doesn't have the practice of replication baked in, or isn't having a replication crisis. I am looking at you, Sociology. Away to the humanities with you.)
The statistic to I like to keep in mind is: 6%. That's the proportion of all proposed medical treatments that start the FDA stage-I trials that successfully make it past stage-III to FDA approval. It takes serious financial backing to start stage-I (which is when one tests the treatment on a handful of healthy adults to check for adverse effects), so only the most promising treatments that have solid theory for why they should work, and which have been extensively tested in the lab and (if appropriate) on animals, even start the FDA medical approval process.
So I recon that the strongest academic theories in psychology are maybe epistemologically on par with the pre-FDA-stage-I medical theories. If someone were to actually put serious money in backing as rigorous a test for an application of such a theory as the one required by the FDA, then I expect that only 6% would make it.
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It's bad but those people are doing science and are subject to review so we are least have some idea when they stray. In theory.
How many people pick up "truthy" ideas from these courses and then just disappear from the perspective of the academy when they graduate and carry those ideas into daily life? How do you count those people or subject their views to some sort of objective discipline?
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The really scary part is we only know about "replication crisis" because there are still old-timers left around who remember how science should have been done. Once they retire, the academia - at least the western one, I have no idea what is happening in China or India - will have bullshitters occupy all the levels and there would be nobody to teach any other way or to object to what is going on. And the public will be under the impression this is how it's done, there's no other way, you have to just trust the experts and if they are wrong sometimes (like almost all the times) it's just how the life is. And even if you feel like something wrong is going on, you won't have any means to express it or formulate it as a consistent critique, unless you go back 150 years and start recovering the science from there (provided the pre-woke sources won't be destroyed or bowdlerized to avoid offense by then).
I don’t think this is true. When I was in academia, most of the replication crisis conversations were being had by the new PhDs. Partly because they had a vested interest in demolishing their elders’ work, yes, but also because they had chosen to become scientists and didn’t like the possibility of being pseudo-scientists instead, whereas their elders were largely comfortable with the status quo.
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Ever heard the expression that an empire can only last 300 years?
Enlightenment thought is an empire. Western scientific rational modes of thinking. It only became dominant at some point in the 1700’s and it’s starting to fade.
Deferring to elders who are very knowledgeable in things that got made up at some point is the historical norm. That’s how ‘western medicine’ used to work. That’s how Chinese examinations used to work. Etc, etc.
An empire only lasts for 300 years.
300 years seems to be too low. Romans need to be given at least 500 if we don't count the republican times, and if we do, then we need to add another 100-150 years. And that's not counting Eastern Roman empire which survived till the Renaissance times.
Rome was 3 empires. Principate, dominate, and middle republic, with a christianized late Roman Empire inheriting decline from the dominate. And Byzantium was a continuation of the late (Christian)Roman empire only for the first few centuries; medieval Byzantium called itself Roman but was essentially a new empire(or rather, succession of empires).
The same thing happened in China, with a succession of empires from the same civilization which are clearly more different from each other than mere dynastic differences.
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Rome and Byzantium both lasted more than 300 years.
And the Assyrians. And the HRH. And the Ethiopian empire. And the Carthaginian empire. And...
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I'm not sure how this would be possible. The departments are all staffed by True Believers and I would expect not much to really change. The past 40 years of "research" in the field has been concentrated on Critical Theory as a way of advancing their field. Without using that as a crutch, I'm not really sure what even is left. All that would be left is demographic studies that is more statistics than anything, and I don't think you need an department to do that.
Even from an ideological perspective, I'm not sure the field makes sense. What is the point of "Women's Studies" when one can't even pin down what a "woman" is, for instance?
Even more broadly, the underpinnings of Critical Theory assumes that various groups are homogenous and can be talked about in aggregate. This might make sense in large populations. However, much of the *-studies fields then perverts this concept into looking at individuals and tries to apply the same analysis techniques without the law of large numbers coming to its aid. It's a house of cards that is built on something I don't think is even rational to start with. You are left with "research" that is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and based mostly on feels.
The second half of this sentence is unnecessary.
Like most ‘studies’ fields, women’s studies was founded to advance a particular ideology(second wave feminism). ‘What is the point of this field’ is thus an inherently relevant question in a way that it isn’t for, say, physics or demography.
I agree with that. I suppose my snark got out of hand.
Similar arguments can be said for other fields of academia as well. Take theoretical physics, for instance. You have an entire field of research like string theory, which makes few predictions and offers no ways of testing validity. The few predictions they've made have all been proven categorically wrong once we acquired more data. Underlying these styles of "study" seems to be looking for pretty math without considering reality. We're five decades in and nothing of value has come of it. This is similar to folks "studying" multiverses or what happened before the Big Bang.
They've fallen into the same trap as the social studies programs: doing something because it feels good, not because it's productive.
If some of these things were taken out as a degree and perhaps packaged up in a class in the philosophy department, I think people would be a lot happier.
I'm not talking about not doing research and science for the sake of it. But it's important not to mix up things that are real vs. philosophical discussions. Philosophical discussions should certainly happen! Hell, that's most of the reason for this site's existence.
Of course, there are also things like esoteric maths (number theory, graph theory, etc.). They tend not to be very "real," but they do have applicability in things like cryptography, computer science, or related fields. Graduates with those degrees can typically find jobs FWIW.
It's pretty telling that in the hard sciences, string theory is always the go-to example, while there are any number of choices elsewhere in academia. So, fine, we shut down string theory along with the other stuff. Although if string theory has really made predictions that were wrong, it's not so bad as that; it should still be shut down, but only for being wrong, not unrigorous.
Sure, string theory is kind of a gimme.
Other things that I would include for being either dumb or dangerous:
I would also take a hard look at the publish-or-perish mindset of academia that is leading to the reproducibility crisis in journal submissions across the board.
The last bullet above is a part of this, and I want to elaborate further. This is one of the things where "studies" are being cranked out that don't advance, and in fact pollute and damage the fields. A good example would be Jonathan Pruitt's publications on spider behavior. It also begs the question that even if the spider behavior studies were valid, what useful information would we glean? Similarly, pulled from recent news, why would anyone spend a million dollars on studying if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active?
This doesn't even touch the insane level of administration positions found in academia, which should also be trimmed, but that's not the focus of this thread.
(If you want to watch a longer YouTube about the spider issue, I highly recommend Angela Collier's telling of the tale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qlas3TOi_CQ. She's a physicist and a great (IMO) storyteller and educator.)
Because both quail and quail eggs are delicious. Farmers raising quail for food, or quail hens for eggs, are definitely interested in what makes quail more sexually active, especially if it can be made economically viable to incorporate into feed.
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Yes, but many cosmological theories can and have been tested.
Gave us the Ebola vaccine
I have been able to find things saying that we now have a couple of Ebola vaccines but nothing for a lay audience about their method of development. Do you have a link for this?
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Conversely why shouldn't someone with a million dollars fund research into whether cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active? How can we know what we will learn from quail or spider behaviour if we don't research it?
I think this new plan in New Zealand is a good idea - we shouldn't get rid of those studies, we should just stop funding them. If they can secure private funding they should be able to study whatever they like.
Absolutely! Anyone can spend their money however they please, and no one has a say in that matter. If I want to fund a study on if meth makes earthworms horny, I should 100% have that right. But insisting that the taxpayer spend that money (in whatever country) is bordering on insane, in my opinion.
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I'd love to see the look on my younger self's face as I agree with this sentiment, but I think you're on to something. Still, I think this is bad politics. The last 8 years has clearly shown there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke. The woke are more than happy to use Big Tech's capabilities to track and censor dissent from it's ideology, and Big Tech is more than happy to provide it. I agree that utilitarian techbroism needs to be countered, but that can only be done by sponsoring groups that are actually opposed to utilitarianism and tech-accelerationism, not just another outgrowth of modernism.
Internet is enormously beneficial to people solving technical problems.
Asked someone I know who worked as a software developer before and after internet. She thinks it's at least an order of magnitude difference in efficiency/ output.
Look, I'm a Luddite, it's not that I don't see the increases in efficiency, it's that I question whether they're good for us in the long term.
Having lived through the same period and worked in the same field, I agree the Internet was a game changer in many ways. There's a world of difference between looking up info in a book, like a barbarian, and just checking Stack Overflow. But I also see the effect it had on me - for example I notice I'm way more frustrated when I have to read a longer explanation, and don't just get served the goddamn code snippet. I also wonder what effect the rise of video tutorials / documentation is going to have on people. I find it frustrating, but just from how common it is, I guess a lot of people have to like it, and I wonder if it doesn't mess with people's heads in a similar way that Stack Overflow messed with mine.
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Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.
Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.
All I'm saying is that your plan to counter Big Tech may just end up giving the Woke (even more) control over it.
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There's an interesting question about what "fundamental science" research (is not practical or applied research) really is in social science, and how/why any country might fund it.
$NZ 75M presumably would fund a lot of work in social science, since research is less reliant on equipment than in harder sciences.
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