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Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

mattsclancy.substack.com

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Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#61

Post by Gareth321 »

nvr219 wrote: post #53
Gareth321 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should speak with some researchers. Entire categories are off limits because DEI politics. I could cite many examples, but one which comes to mind now is that of Noah Carl, formerly of Edmund's College, Cambridge University in England: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-noah-carl-is-fightin... He deigned to research politically contentious topics like migration and IQ. He wasn't just defunded. He was fired.

I speak with researchers all the time. Most agree that Noah Carl's pseudoscience is what got him canned, not any DEI initiatives.

His work is published and peer reviewed. Which work was "pseudoscience"? I think you're only making that accusation because it's vague and sounds authoritative, but you don't have any examples.

Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#62

Post by Gareth321 »

chalst wrote: post #51
Gareth321 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should speak with some researchers. Entire categories are off limits because DEI politics. I could cite many examples, but one which comes to mind now is that of Noah Carl, formerly of Edmund's College, Cambridge University in England: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-noah-carl-is-fightin... He deigned to research politically contentious topics like migration and IQ. He wasn't just defunded. He was fired.

The racist overtones to Noah Carl's work certainly did his case no favours, but he was doing scholarship whose poor quality is easy to see. Before you get tenure (or the watered-down approximation that the UK has), academia offers essentially no job security: only around of 1/4 of researchers starting their first post-doc will succeed in getting a permanent academic position. I wonder what he was thinking?

Science should be immune to "overtones." Overtones are subjective and based in emotion and personal experience. I don't see any racist overtones at all.

Which work was poor quality? His work is published and peer reviewed. It should be easy to point at the work you're referring to.

He has conducted interviews about what he was thinking: he wanted to research migration and IQ, even though he received a lot of political pressure not to. He knew that this was a potential consequence, but believed that scientific and educational institutions would uphold Enlightenment ideals and allow free research. He was wrong. Politics have won in academia, and some subjects are off limits now.

Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#63

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

>> To measure the novelty of a paper, they rely on the notion that novelty is about combining pre-existing ideas in new and unexpected ways. They use the references cited as a proxy for the sources of ideas that a paper grapples with, and look for papers that cite pairs of journals that have not previously been jointly cited. The 11.5% of papers with at least one pair of journals never previously cited together in the same paper are called “moderately” novel in their paper.

"If I assign numbers to each of these things then it becomes data and I can do maths on it!"

https://xkcd.com/2610

Also see: ad-hoc assumptions that become axioms of a theory without any attempt to justify them ("novelty is about combining pre-existing ideas in new and unexpected ways"... the Lego Brick Theory of Novelty, I presume).

Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#64

Post by falcor84 »

pvaldes wrote: post #56
falcor84 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense, but I like the idea of longevity, and wouldn't want to their the baby with the bathwater. Maybe instead we could have some "term limit" for academic work?

Not, definitely a bad idea. You need a lot of resources, money and time to train an expert. Wouldn't be impossible to recover the investment.

Interesting angle. Would you have any empirical data on the amount of years of academic work needed to "break even"?

Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#65

Post by pvaldes »

falcor84 wrote: post #64
pvaldes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not, definitely a bad idea. You need a lot of resources, money and time to train an expert. Wouldn't be impossible to recover the investment.

Interesting angle. Would you have any empirical data on the amount of years of academic work needed to "break even"?

It depends in the issue, but IMAO on academia is not uncommon to spend about ten years studying a theme to became an expert on it. Plus university years. Plus school years. And there is a lot of inertia to not change your study subject.

Researchers in some parts of Europe spend around 25 years of their life (if I remember correctly the article) just trying to have a stable job, and this is criminal.

If you put an upper limit, the interval that remains is just too small to be profitable for the society and specially for the scientist. Nobody would want to do science.

Academics also spend a lot of time teaching, doing bureaucracy, and finding funds. So you have a highly trained people spending most of their expensive time not doing research.

Re: Some of the forces blocking new ideas in science

#66

Post by chalst »

Gareth321 wrote: post #62
chalst wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racist overtones to Noah Carl's work certainly did his case no favours, but he was doing scholarship whose poor quality is easy to see. Before you get tenure (or the watered-down approximation that the UK has), academia offers essentially no job security: only around of 1/4 of researchers starting their first post-doc will succeed in getting a permanent academic position. I wonder what he was thinking?

Science should be immune to "overtones." Overtones are subjective and based in emotion and personal experience. I don't see any racist overtones at all. Which work was poor quality? His work is published and peer reviewed. It should be easy to point at the work you're referring to. He has conducted interviews about what he was thinking: he wanted to research migration and IQ, even though he received a lot of politica…

> Science should be immune to "overtones."

This sounds nice, but given that science is done by humans, it seems entirely unrealistic to me.

If you had said: we should try to minimise the influence of this kind of politics on science, I would agree, but I rather think that is best achieved by keeping think-tank-class ideologues like Carl far away from tenure.

The tide of politics waxes and wanes in academia. Your whitewashing of Carl's record does not help reduce the role of politics in academia.

> Which work was poor quality?

Carl was spending his time publishing in a 'journal' that was published by a friend that had essentially no quality controls, where the content contained provocative racist claims not backed up by argument or evidence instead of doing the hard work of quality scholarship.

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