site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

The cynical side of me is thinking that there really is nothing of value being generated here. That it’s just another mechanism to funnel more tuition, endowment, and federal funny money into the hands of friends and allies.

What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

To the university, their main value is prestige (but also occasionally lucrative patents). For society as a whole, it greatly depends on the field the researcher works in. In humanities, it is sometimes hard to quantify the worth of a researcher's output but in science and engineering, it is often more clear-cut. To take one recent example, Jennifer Doudna became a superstar researcher for her part in discovering CRISPR, which seems likely to have a lot of value to society.

In my opinion, you have a level of cynicism about academic research that does not seem warranted. I agree that a lot of research is not useful and some is also in service of a political agenda, but over time a lot of tremendously useful/important scientific discoveries and inventions have come out of academia. I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

That was over 75 years ago. What have they done for us lately?

How about the discovery of graphene or the development of quantum computing? Going back a little further, how about high temperature superconductors (not to be confused with room temperature superconductors)?

Graphene brings us up to 1961, though it's small potatoes compared to nukes. High temperature superconductors came out of industry. Quantum computing also largely came out of industry.

  1. I should have said something more like "techniques for producing of graphene" (early 2000s) than discovery of graphene (1961 as you said).
  2. I don't think you can seriously argue that quantum computing "largely came out of industry." The idea was, in the first place, entirely dreamt up by academics like Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, Umesh Vazirani and others. The first truly convincing application of quantum computers was the factoring algorithm discovered by Peter Shor, another academic. Quantum error correction, which is necessary for quantum computers to work in practice, was also developed by academics. And even experimentalists actually building quantum computers for corporations, like John Martinis, were trained by and worked in academia until fairly recently (Martinis was hired by Google in 2014, but had already worked on quantum computing in academia for years).
  3. You're mostly right about high temperature superconductors, but even there, the discoverers were trained in academia.

Thanks for answering. I’d suggest that cynicism does seem warranted after the past few years.

Someone downthread suggested that there’s not a lot of difference between the superstar researcher and the median researcher. I really have no way to know if this is true or not. Your response talks about all the benefits of university research. I’m not suggesting that there is zero benefit to university research. I’m just highly skeptical that the marginal benefit of this spousal hire policy is realy worth the cost. Of course academics will defend the policy. From the outside though, it sounds like bullshit.

I don't totally disagree with you. As I said, I think academia produces a lot of things of zero, or even negative, value and a lot of humanities research doesn't impress me much. I'm also pretty open to arguments that as a society we invest too much in academia or that academia should be greatly reorganized to be more cost-effective. I could even understand someone who believes that the net benefits of academic research are not worth the cost (though I disagree). But the view you seemed to express above, that superstar researchers don't produce any deliverables and that academia produces nothing of value, seems clearly wrong to me. My experience has been that in science and engineering, superstar researchers generally do have impressive achievements (though this is not quite the same thing as claiming that their achievements are worth the amount of money spent on them; I believe that too, but it's a different claim).

As I said in my original post, I personally am ambivalent about spousal hiring.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats