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So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

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Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#51

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

User23 wrote: post #9
dasudasu wrote: post #3

This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a way.

It’s difficult for me to take any discussion of imposter syndrome seriously that doesn’t consider the possibility the subject feels like an imposter because he is. Having been personally acquainted with several such imposters and having never seen such a discussion I’m left to conclude the entire concept is deeply unserious. Edit: sibling is making much the same point. The concept is only useful if actual imposters c…

You can't have impostor syndrome if you don't care about your ability to do your job.

Likewise if you believe - probably correctly - that your failures don't matter because you can bullshit and bluster your way through them. And if that doesn't work, a quick word with your sponsors will sort out your problems.

Impostor syndrome is the opposite - caring about quality, feeling you fall short (because quality is hard), and relying on substance not superficiality to get ahead.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#52

Post by leto_ii »

roenxi wrote: post #43
viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry

I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-faire etc. The exact opposite of government control over industry.

> no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies for example

This is (probably) true, but the reasons are again quite simple and don't involve the state very much. Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible. Since academic economists are often beholden to big capital owners (in one way or another), they will of course promote theories that justify and encourage concentration of ownership, not its dispersal among the workers.

> it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory

MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. I would say most economists consider it at best "heterodox" and often either don't know much about it or strongly disagree with it.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#53

Post by vkou »

roenxi wrote: post #43
viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

> The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents.

If this were the case, the United States would have adopted full-on UBI socialism decades ago. Or at least, the net taker states would have prioritized advocating for that sort of thing. What we've actually seen is the complete opposite to your theory.

The actual incentives that politicians have are not to their constituents, but to their sponsors.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#54

Post by ahdeanz »

kevinskii wrote: post #32
Myrmornis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think that's right. That was my initial impression also, but what's going on is that people are ridiculing the academic advisor who is working at the Council of Economic Advisors at the Whitehouse because his agency (a) released a tweet about Covid with childishly absurd mistakes in it and then (b) he vigorously defended it in a follow-up tweet. The problem they are ridiculing is mainly that an observed t…

I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.

Sorry but you’re completely wrong.

If an analysis is making a reasonable effort to use the best or even some sort of relevant methodology in the field maybe. There is an entire field built around the learnings and failures of previous work that informs how we do things now.

In this circumstance the economist came in with no understanding or desire to understand any of that and through some random excel function at the problem to get the answer out they wanted for political expediency.

Not to mention the prediction was ridiculously stupid and anyone with common sense let alone an epidemiology degree could see it was going to be wildly incorrect within days.

THAT is the model being talked about at the highest levels of government when you have the entire field of the world class epidemiologists at your fingertips.

Trying to “both sides” this one because scientists who have spent their whole lives trying working on this got a little snarky is just missing the boat.

There are plenty of other places where epi Twitter is having productive cordial discussions.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#55

Post by HugeAcumen »

cma wrote: post #33
viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.

Not as much as I'd distrust the advice of the squeeziest.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#56

Post by rayiner »

roenxi wrote: post #43
viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses.

Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc.

I don't like the implications of that, but I see little evidence pointing in the other direction.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#57

Post by dragonwriter »

leto_ii wrote: post #52
roenxi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…

> MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory.

AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#58

Post by adamsea »

rayiner wrote: post #56
roenxi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc. I don't li…

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And the jury’s still out on Apple.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#59

Post by kevinskii »

Aperocky wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #4

Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.

As someone who took statistics in college and worked in data science for a period of time, I understood very easily. But I don't blame someone who never fitted a curve to not understand - and that is most of America. The problem of today is not most of America have never fitted a curve and not understand the difference between training accuracy and prediction accuracy. But that they choose to not believe or even hear…

The issue itself is easy to understand, once you know what it even is. It's not clear from the original tweet alone that the CEA was actually claiming what they were being accused of claiming. Establishing that requires some further reading, and the snark makes that part unnecessarily difficult.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#60

Post by leto_ii »

dragonwriter wrote: post #57
leto_ii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-fa…

> MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which te…

Hmm, interesting. Do you have a few references from let's say top five journals that incorporate MMT descriptive aspects? I'm genuinely curious.
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