The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#121

Post by barry-cotter » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

renox wrote: post #113

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…

>> 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. Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much? That said when talking about soci…

> Especially in the USA with its huge number of religious followers, in Europe (depends on which part) maybe not so much?

The unity of views on many, many different topics among followers of a single political party would be vanishingly unlikely unless they were taking their beliefs and talking points from their fellow party members rather than thinking for themselves. This is not a US specific thing. Normal people don’t reason from principle, they reason coalitionally, based on the two most important questions in politics

Who, Whom?

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#122

Post by marcosdumay » Sun, Jul 07, 2019, 11:52 PM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #55

marcosdumay wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly no issues fall on 2 sides. Is there a time of pregnancy where abortion is ok? What guns do you want to control, and what kind of control do you want to have? Are your taxes progressive or proportional? How progressive? Where does progressiveness stop? Do you create product-specific taxes? Anyway, take 10 issues that fall on exactly 2 sides, and you should never meet two people that agree with them all.

Does the pigeonhole principle not apply anymore? Surely you will find at least 2 people who agree on 10 binary issues in any group of 1025 people, unless this is some roundabout way of saying there are no binary issues.

Do you know how 1024 people stand on 10 issues?

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#123

Post by roenxi » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:00 AM UTC

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…

> Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still.

Which goes to a real problem that is easy to overlook - using a rational method to make decisions is extremely risky. If you get any of your assumptions wrong, it will cause a cascade of stupid-but-logical decisions and conclusions. And basically everyone believes something that is untrue in some sense, so it seems almost pot luck whether the untrue things are relevant or irrelevant in practice. There are a lot of geniuses in history who also believed some clearly stupid things.

Decisions made via social pressure are very tolerant of bad assumptions. If people don't understand why they are doing things but follow the crowd, they probably aren't going to end up anywhere too scary. If they try and make rational decisions from bad assumptions they could end up doing things that are profoundly foolish.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#124

Post by ausbah » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:06 AM UTC

username90 wrote: post #62

Social sciences has yet to find their scientific method. Natural science was mostly bullshit before the scientific method and it set them straight. So in my opinion listening to social scientists today is kinda like reading Aristotle to learn about physics. A lot of thoughts for sure, and it sounds smart, but it totally lacks any connection to reality.

why shouldn't social sciences use the scientific method? seems like all the issues with using it in social sciences arise from messy implementations

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#125

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #123

aalleavitch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Don't get me wrong; the majority of fringe positions are even wronger still. Which goes to a real problem that is easy to overlook - using a rational method to make decisions is extremely risky. If you get any of your assumptions wrong, it will cause a cascade of stupid-but-logical decisions and conclusions. And basically everyone believes something that is untrue in some sense, so it seems almost pot luck whether…

But every other method of reaching conclusions has the same flaw: reaching entirely false concliusions.

Rationality paired with empiricism offers not a foolproof alternative, but at. least one with verifiable checks at evert stage of observation and reason along the way. If it's been found that either (evidence or reasoning) are flawed, then the entire derived chain of conclusions is called into question.

And we cannot dispense entirely with reason, observation, or trust in participants and process. Reason allows leaps beyond (but hopefully eventually validated by) observation, and trust enables a provisional belief to be extended to that which our eyes or minds have not, or can not, seen or grasped.

Groupthink's many failures are merely proof that truth is not a popularity contest.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#126

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

My view of fads is that they are endemic to domains in which the underlying structures are complex and deep, but in which being able to rapidly assess tribal affiliation IFF[1], evident, costly, and at the least not trivially donned-ordoffed signifiers are required.

I've noted the similarities previously across a number of domains: clothing, music, food and diet, fitness, art. To a certain extent architecture. Automotive and other equipment or product design. Fandoms around books, or films, or comics. Theories of political economy. And management fads. See:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/62uroa/clothin...

Add to that software languages, development methodologies, and academic fashions.

The inderlying reasons are information theoretic as well as tribal. We're working in complex multidementional dynamic spaces with diverse worldviews and incomplete, inconsistant, variably understood-and-applied vocabularies (and other symbolic references) scrabbling for a small pie and limited prestige slots. Simply understanding a common language (or choosing which to adopt) is a high-risk decision made under highly imperfect knowledge.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Indentify friend or foe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#127

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:55 AM UTC

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…

Politics and philosophy aren't physics.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#128

Post by LanceH » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 2:09 AM UTC

btrettel wrote: post #72

autokad wrote: post #22

A company was holding a competition for 'a great new idea to solve heart disease' with a huge million $ prize. our research group of 30+ people consisting mostly of faculty wanted to win it, so we broke our group into 6 or so sub-groups to come up with ideas and submit it to the greater group. my group wanted to submit as an idea 'tax on soda'. I was adamantly against the idea. Ignoring the fact that I don't think it…

To comment on a tangential issue... > there was over 300 years (3 centuries) of higher education among the groups I don't think simply adding up the total number of years of education is meaningful. Most of that education is redundant. If it were humanly possible I'd be more impressed by 300 years of education for a single person as it wouldn't have the same amount of redundancy. You'll see this cumulative strategy a…

As much as I would like to hate on lawyers, 200 years of trial or contract experience is meaningful. They have seen countless variations on whatever theme they practice, they know the jurisdiction, they know the judges, the opposing counsel, etc...

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#129

Post by pmiller2 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #122

pmiller2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the pigeonhole principle not apply anymore? Surely you will find at least 2 people who agree on 10 binary issues in any group of 1025 people, unless this is some roundabout way of saying there are no binary issues.

Do you know how 1024 people stand on 10 issues?

I don’t have to. That’s the point: there are only 1024 possible positions on any 10 binary issues. Therefore, in a group of 1025 individuals, two must hold the same position.

Re: The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia

#130

Post by spaced-out » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 2:24 AM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #117

glennpratt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This seems rather self indulgent when you've set the criteria so vaguely. Perhaps an example of an extemist view would be beneficial.

The tax system is incredibly poorly designed everywhere . Rather than the hodgepodge of different races, levied at different places and times for different reasons by different levels of government a single tax is best. I’m partial to either a Georgist Land value tax or a consumption tax but I’m sure there are other good options. Large scale immigration is incompatible with a welfare state unless immigrants are highl…

> The tax system is incredibly poorly designed everywhere. Rather than the hodgepodge of different races, levied at different places and times for different reasons by different levels of government a single tax is best. I’m partial to either a Georgist Land value tax or a consumption tax but I’m sure there are other good options.

So you don't agree with how taxes work and think you could do better? I challenge you to find someone who DOESN'T think that.

>If the US continues its march to open borders the welfare state will be dismantled or citizenship law will change to have multiple categories of rights for different types of citizens and residents.

This is already the case. There are many services open to only US citizens, and others open only to citizens and lawful permanent residents.

>Civic nationalism is incoherent unless people can be expelled from the community.

In the US we refer to this as "jail".

>A group where people had to sign on to an explicit statement of values makes sense because then there’d be a very clear signal of whether you were in or out.

Many Protestant Christian denominations refer to this as "confirmation". I believe there is an equivalent concept in Catholicism; Bar/Bat mitzvah serves this purpose in Judaism.

...

My point being, all of these views are completely mainstream.