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The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

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Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#91

Post by Fede_V »

dannykwells wrote: post #79
Fede_V wrote: post #33

I am as anti-pomo/critical theory as it gets, but, sadly, this phenomena is very much present in the hard sciences as well. For example, about 10-15 years ago, the big craze in biology was microarrays, and the early papers made crazy promises about everything that they would deliver. With hindsight, it turned out almost all the early papers were fatally flawed and were drastically statistically underpowered: it turns…

Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this. With things like microarrays and other tech, sure there were promises that were too big. But the underlying idea (gene expression matters, there are lots of genes, we should measure them all) is correct. To wit, RNA-seq has transformed cancer biology. And Nanostring is now offering a microarray-like technology with extremely impressive signal to noise. And we still use lots of tools…

I don't have issues with the technologies, I have issues with the early papers that came out with 'gene signatures' based on maybe 40 or 50 patients.

I think in general it's actually quite easy to tell which results are hype and which are not. Do a power analysis and estimate what kind of sample size would be required to measure the effect the researchers estimate - if they are off by an order of magnitude, reject.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#92

Post by shrimpx »

hirundo wrote: post #4

> 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…

I think the crux of what you're saying is that if you're a member of group A and you do some "critical thinking", you might find yourself associating with the ideas of group B instead. But you're still a member of group A, so some members of group A will find your new ideas to be incongruent... Of course if you leave group A and hang out in group B instead, nobody will disagree with your "extreme" ideas.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#93

Post by [deleted] »

aalleavitch wrote: post #69
hirundo wrote: post #4

> 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…

At pretty much every point in time prior to today, in essentially every field, a large portion of the broad academic consensus was either flat-out wrong or missing a large amount of vital nuance, and eventually a fringe idea developed prominence and replaced it to make academic consensus closer to the truth (we hope). We'd be daft to think the same is not true today. It is very likely that there is some fringe positi…

[deleted]

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#94

Post by dfgdghdf »

hirundo wrote: post #4

> 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…

> If you do that you frequently end up with a position that is "extremist" to someone or another.

This is a big claim. Evidence?

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#95

Post by 13415 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #54
13415 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly wrong, because there is only one reality. As trivial as this may sound, if you're interested in reality, then you will invariably get to the same conclusion as many other people. Of course, there will always be some shifts in knowledge and at that time a fringe position can be the right one, but these are rare - very rare, indeed. Generally, the fact that there is one reality means that scientific opin…

There's entire books written which contradict every point you've brought up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_and_Refutations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imre_Lakatos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ego_and_Its_Own (his stuff on epistemology not the rest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_probl…

I know most of these books and issues, I'm a philosopher myself. Most of them do not contradict anything I've said, so you'd need to be a bit more specific. You will not get me very warm with Feyerabend and Kuhn, though.

On a side note, what you're doing is appeal to authority. Not every successful author in philosophy is really an authority, philosophy doesn't work that way.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#96

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

Zarath wrote: post #63
bitwize wrote: post #34

The "furious exchange of proper nouns" made me lul. "Derrida and Badiou at Tanagra!" It's like this because like the Tamarians, everyone in the discussion is assumed to be familiar with all of the background material -- and if you are not, then what the hell are you doing here? I saw this kind of elitism unfold here on Hackernews once. Someone once asked for an explanation of what deconstruction was and was told basi…

I wrote a long response to this and deleted it, so I'll just say this. Politics and philosophy are one of the few things where everyone feels qualified no matter how pedestrian or unqualified they are. So you'll have to forgive people for not bothering to listen to someone who hasn't read a book on politics or philosophy maybe in their entire life yet feel like their regurgitated Fox News talking points should be tak…

It's close to elitism, maybe better called gatekeeping. Everyone has their own philosophy. While I agree it's fair for people not to care or listen to someone else's philosophy, people also shouldn't be gaslighted for musing about philosophy either, regardless of which or how many books they've read.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#97

Post by mistermann »

dang wrote: post #90
api wrote: post #42

One peeve of mine is these sorts of folks complaining about the popularity of people like Jordan Peterson. Sure I agree that Peterson is confused, pseudo-profound, and misogynistic, but maybe if academics churned out more philosophy that spoke to the concerns of real people Peterson would have less of an audience. People like him are popular because academia produces only impenetrable walls of irrelevant jargon.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375846 and marked it off-topic.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable and prudent approach (assuming those who are interested can still navigate to it) - this allows these important conversations to take place without disrupting the community mood in the main thread.

In the longer term, I believe strongly that with some effort (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375985), perhaps HN might one day be the one place where such things could be discussed in an objective manner, and perhaps once we iron out the kinks in how that can be accomplished, the outside world might even be able to learn these skills and we could finally start to discuss these topics in a reasonable manner before time runs out (as seems to be the case with many of them, such as global warming).

Sincere thanks for allowing the discussion to take place.

EDIT: It seems others can't navigate to it from the main thread. Dang, if you read my reply (within the disconnected thread), I hope you can start to see why I believe this phenomenon is an important problem. Society is at a point of impasse on too many important issues. Our technological capabilities have been developing at a parabolic rate, but our cultural and language/communication developments have been largely static.

This imbalance is starting to become an existential threat on several different fronts, and I think it is time that people with "great" power should be starting to consider whether a moral obligation to at least try to do something comes with that power.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#98

Post by wisty »

paultopia wrote: post #39
ex3xu wrote: post #2

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 cont…

Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth: The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages: 1. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make p…

> part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it

I think this is the irrational part people are detecting. Yes a few thousand idiots on the internet believe some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and a few more joke about it, but it's simply not something anyone remotely normal accepts. People also say that gingers don't have souls, but even that's not something that would be healthy to worry about.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#99

Post by 0815test »

username90 wrote: post #89
pmyteh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My part of political science has been (attempting to) follow scientific method since the 1940s. Its results have been... underwhelming. The main reason for this, bluntly, is that people are really damned complicated . They're difficult to model, they behave irrationally, even a minimal model has way too many variables. Hell, they don't even vote using the same heuristics that they did 50 years ago. There's a reason w…

Right, the scientific method is mostly useless for social science which is why it is in such a dire state. My point is that we need something of equal significance for social science before it will start make noticeable progress, until then it will be on the level as Aristotelian physics.

And yet the Chinese are successfully using real actual Scientific Socialism ("with Chinese characteristics" - but Scientific Socialism nonetheless!) to raise hundreds of millions of their fellow countrymen from the most extreme sort of poverty. You don't get any less "woolly and unsatisfying" than that!

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#100

Post by lowdose »

aalleavitch wrote: post #84
brighter2morrow wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you redefine extremism to something that is acceptable, and most people defines far-right as extremism, you are defining the far-right as something that is acceptable. That is the danger of redefining words. Your premise here being it's good to ostracize people? Those who fall into far-right and far-left politics should be talked with because society is far-less isolating than they have been lead to believe. Extr…

This simply doesn't work in a bipolar system. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the opposite party's extremists is directly counter to either party's political goals, as it encourages mainstream opinion to shift in the opposite direction of where they want it to. The only winning play is to demand that extremists be ejected from the dialog altogether.

Are you against freedom of speech?
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