“the best prospect for near-term progress is for the public to start exercising a lot more day to day skepticism.” That it!? That’s all you got?! MLK Jr. had a lot more punch. How about we cut the funding?
Adams only hints at empirical differences among disciplines. Indeed "spin" plays a disturbingly large role throughout academic research, but I'd say that in most STEM fields, incremental progress is real, and can proceed without limit even in the face of error and deception. In contrast, at least from my admittedly limited perspective as a scientist, "progress" in most of the humanities instead looks more like changes in fashion.
Fascinating. What you describe is consistent with a general impatience for immediate gratification. Rigorous scholarly research is incremental, takes time, and specific efforts often may amount to nothing. If AI can re-impose rigor, that may be a great gift to legitimate progress.
"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park told Fox News. "I realized, 'Wow, this is insane.' I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."
“Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea is pretty crazy, but not this crazy," she added.”
The problem you describe with academia is possibly not new. I remember as an undergrad at the University of Minnesota College of Education getting to know PhD students who told me that their advisors did not value studies and dissertations that didn’t produce positive outcomes. Establishing doubt about or disproving entirely another theory or study was simply not going to pass muster with the dissertation committee.
Add to that the candidates’ uniform incompetence with statistics, and you already, in the 1970s, had a formula for unreliable results. Their field was counseling psychology, which in those days the U of M program was apparently highly regarded.
So there you go.
It seems to me that the underlying issue is psychological: we are uncomfortable with ambiguity. All of us. Pope Francis is criticized for making comments in which he clouds rather than clarifies. Faith must be clearly articulated! The changing recommendations during Covid was intolerable for many people who came to the conclusion that CDC didn’t know what it was talking about. Science was superstition.
The New Critics in the 1920s into the 1940s embraced ambiguity as a strength of language. They celebrated it. In the 1960s English professors turned on language as one would a traitor. The only reliable language according to the hermeneutics of suspicion was that which described the deconstruction of language. The irony was left unrecognized.
Even a false sense of knowing is better than the unease we apparently feel with a lack of clear resolution. It does not speak well of our western intellect. Perhaps you could make a case for that weakness being the heart of the current popularity of authoritarian leadership around the world. Finally! Somebody waves away the uncertainties of our vision and shows that the world is indeed only black and white. Just as I thought!
Certainly in contemporary academic life the politicization of just about everything is a consequence. Which is why FIRE was created, to at least give dissenters a chance to enter the shouting match.
Thanks for keeping me informed in retirement. La plus ça change…
AI won't fix this. Not at all. Gemini made it extremely clear that any LLM can be trained on data that will substantiate fraud. The conundrum with AI is accuracy is typically inconsistent with the preferred "narrative." So its training data is nudged not to be as honest as it is inclusive and equitable and of course diverse. Particularly diverse with truth and accuracy.
The only mildly hard part is acceasing many of the papers, which tend to reside behind paywalls. Only if you want semantic tests is AI required. Most of this is straightforward indexing of word pairs, trios, etc. much like a concordance. I'm surprised that this is not done routinely, the tools have been around for decades. Hard sciences are more difficult, major work in math and physics isn't somerhing you just copy. Chemistry & engineering are possibly less difficult. Biology & medicine have been breached. Social sciences and humanities will be shooting fish in a barrel.
“the best prospect for near-term progress is for the public to start exercising a lot more day to day skepticism.” That it!? That’s all you got?! MLK Jr. had a lot more punch. How about we cut the funding?
https://open.substack.com/pub/scottgibb/p/mlk-jr-on-academic-freedom?r=nb3bl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Adams only hints at empirical differences among disciplines. Indeed "spin" plays a disturbingly large role throughout academic research, but I'd say that in most STEM fields, incremental progress is real, and can proceed without limit even in the face of error and deception. In contrast, at least from my admittedly limited perspective as a scientist, "progress" in most of the humanities instead looks more like changes in fashion.
Biggest problem by far in my experience (community college in Mn) is contemporary, polished antisemitism.
Fascinating. What you describe is consistent with a general impatience for immediate gratification. Rigorous scholarly research is incremental, takes time, and specific efforts often may amount to nothing. If AI can re-impose rigor, that may be a great gift to legitimate progress.
Columbia is a hard-core bastion of ‘woke’ craziness.
See “A North Korean defector says going to Columbia University reminded her of the oppressive regime, saying she felt forced to 'think the way they want you to think'” (https://www.businessinsider.com/north-korea-defector-says-columbia-university-reminded-her-kim-regime-2021-6)
"I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think," Park told Fox News. "I realized, 'Wow, this is insane.' I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying."
“Even North Korea is not this nuts. North Korea is pretty crazy, but not this crazy," she added.”
The ladies name is Yenomi Park
The problem you describe with academia is possibly not new. I remember as an undergrad at the University of Minnesota College of Education getting to know PhD students who told me that their advisors did not value studies and dissertations that didn’t produce positive outcomes. Establishing doubt about or disproving entirely another theory or study was simply not going to pass muster with the dissertation committee.
Add to that the candidates’ uniform incompetence with statistics, and you already, in the 1970s, had a formula for unreliable results. Their field was counseling psychology, which in those days the U of M program was apparently highly regarded.
So there you go.
It seems to me that the underlying issue is psychological: we are uncomfortable with ambiguity. All of us. Pope Francis is criticized for making comments in which he clouds rather than clarifies. Faith must be clearly articulated! The changing recommendations during Covid was intolerable for many people who came to the conclusion that CDC didn’t know what it was talking about. Science was superstition.
The New Critics in the 1920s into the 1940s embraced ambiguity as a strength of language. They celebrated it. In the 1960s English professors turned on language as one would a traitor. The only reliable language according to the hermeneutics of suspicion was that which described the deconstruction of language. The irony was left unrecognized.
Even a false sense of knowing is better than the unease we apparently feel with a lack of clear resolution. It does not speak well of our western intellect. Perhaps you could make a case for that weakness being the heart of the current popularity of authoritarian leadership around the world. Finally! Somebody waves away the uncertainties of our vision and shows that the world is indeed only black and white. Just as I thought!
Certainly in contemporary academic life the politicization of just about everything is a consequence. Which is why FIRE was created, to at least give dissenters a chance to enter the shouting match.
Thanks for keeping me informed in retirement. La plus ça change…
AI won't fix this. Not at all. Gemini made it extremely clear that any LLM can be trained on data that will substantiate fraud. The conundrum with AI is accuracy is typically inconsistent with the preferred "narrative." So its training data is nudged not to be as honest as it is inclusive and equitable and of course diverse. Particularly diverse with truth and accuracy.
The only mildly hard part is acceasing many of the papers, which tend to reside behind paywalls. Only if you want semantic tests is AI required. Most of this is straightforward indexing of word pairs, trios, etc. much like a concordance. I'm surprised that this is not done routinely, the tools have been around for decades. Hard sciences are more difficult, major work in math and physics isn't somerhing you just copy. Chemistry & engineering are possibly less difficult. Biology & medicine have been breached. Social sciences and humanities will be shooting fish in a barrel.