The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004.

The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I'm all in favor of smiting the very dangerous contrapositive to that assumption: that unpopular ideas therefore must also lack value. I support this author as far as he is attempting to raise awareness of this trap -- lest someone else have to go through the same fate as Ignaz Semmelweis, Guglielmo Marconi, or James Allison.

But I felt like this article did little to present valid mechanisms to mitigate the risks of fashion, and instead spent most of the text attacking fashionable ideas simply for being fashionable, operating under the assumption that fashion itself necessarily lacks substance and causes problems on its own. I think this sort of hipster approach is as big of a risk as blindly following fashion -- both premises assume that popularity is necessary and sufficient to determine the value, or lack of value, of an idea.

But maybe I'm just a blind fashion follower myself, since I felt so personally attacked when the author criticized MOOCs as just another fashionable fad -- despite the valid criticisms he linked to, I felt like I got a lot of value out of them, after all.

[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

> As every freshman course in “critical thinking” reminds us, the dull, unhappy burden of the rational mind is to follow the evidence where it leads, not the bandwagon.

If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another. This effect is so reliable that if you meet someone who isn't extremist about anything it's safe to say that they don't think for themselves, rationally or not.

As a corollary if you agree with all of the mainstream positions of your (aspirational or actual) social group, whether you realize it or not, you've probably arrived there via social pressure rather than an open, honest, rational method.

So I don't hold an accusation of extremism as an insult, but more a prerequisite of someone capable of independent thought.

That doesn't mean such a person won't be wrong as much as anyone else, but they're not necessarily more wrong than conventional wisdom, and they tend to be right or wrong in interesting ways. Which is valuable.

Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.

Philosophize This just did a series on Foucault [0] and Deleuze [1] which I got a lot of value out of. Particularly the Deleuze discussion about how post-modernism doesn’t always have to devolve into deconstruction. That was eye-opening and hugely helpful for me. And Foucault’s idea of the panopticon is probably very relevant to anyone interested in surveillance capitalism.

I studied History at Cal so I understand the contempt for the philosophers and their academic followers. They can be personally obnoxious and seem to be intentionally obscure. Post-modernism seems to be creating more problems on campuses than its solving. But when I hear a good, plain English account of their arguments, like in Philosophize This, the ideas help me understand the world, and I’m thankful to them for that.

[0] https://open.spotify.com/episode/1tcYLy2ILoRoDddvR56Kxy?si=O...

[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0E80qwTOz41UruHfyZMc2P?si=n...

It's a bit too much to ask him to provide a "cure for fashion".

That's just difficult.

I guess if he could do that it would be an exciting new research area and it would quickly become fashionable fashionable by itself, until it turns into a farce.