i think to some extent we can evaluate a field independent of is immediate utility. a society, a human culture, that is wealthy but does not fund or cultivate any advanced mathematics seems to me to be missing something. this isn't universal; the greeks thought pure mathematics was a deep metaphysical enterprise, while it had a much lower status in china.
but what about various cultural studies which are very new? i think unlike mathematics or history or philosophy these disciplines haven't really proven themselves as edifying nor are their methodologies really validated.
i guess i would just say it depends on the field, and we know domains worthy of knowing when we see them (speaking as someone who has been asked my whole like "why would anyone want to know that!")
Thanks so much for your comment and restack, Razib! I agree that there are independent issues in various cultural studies - I plan to publish more on that in the near future.
I'm in the odd position of disliking Ally Louks because of her shallow online presence, but seeing her research as basically valid, and probably better than most humanities dissertations, which are so full of postmodernistic garbage as to be incomprehensible. The backlash against her actually reveals why many rely on postmodernism: a lot of people, when shown gibberish, assume they aren't smart enough to understand it. Her thesis is not gibberish so people feel entitled to criticize it. But it would be better to criticize the gibberish.
In terms of the overall point, I think far too many people are getting degree at every level. Colleges need to roll back grade inflation and become a lot more selective.
Nice piece! Some open-ended Qs/thoughts in case they are useful:
* Seems like there's some elision here between "information" and "knowledge". Are those the same things?
* Seems like there's a separate set of concerns when it comes to value of basic research in STEM (like Tao) vs. in the humanities etc (tho agree they also have some commonalities). Like when it comes to basic research in STEM, we know from economic theory that private incentives will systematically underinvest in basic research and general purpose technology development, since the benefits of these things are definitionally not internalized by the private developer. So even if you only care about economic notions of welfare, seems like there's a clear case for public funding of basic research. Further, it seems like there are plenty of cases historically where (STEM) research that had "no practical applications" at the time when it was developed, but then later turned out to be highly valuable for some future application (you allude to some of these)
* You mentioned: "To the vast majority, the only “worthy incentives " for pursuing information are curing an awful disease we are afraid may kill us(or our loved ones) or making lots of $$$." However, we also saw huge cultural backlash to covid vaccine, no? Trump admin seems likewise perfectly happy to disrupt highly practical & commercializable scientific research (i.e. not just the less-applied Taos etc). So it seems like rejection of rule by experts might go beyond backlash to the decadence/irrelevance of academic research, no?
* In general, it seems like there's a big question about governance of science & tech behind a lot of this. Who should get to decide (and how / on what basis) which academic questions are worthy of investigation? What should be the role of experts in making those decisions?
* This is an interesting thread i haven't seen explored elsewhere in this way: "production of more information leads to less overall cohesion"
I agree there's some difference between knowledge and information. When I first conceived of this post, I thought of information in a much more abstract manner; however, I intended to write about information (and knowledge) in the sense of ideas about the general world.
As for the COVID thing - I agree. I think on one hand, there's a tinge of anti-intellectualism that is very present in mainstream American culture. I also think there's a bigger contention at hand, which is naturalism/bio-essentialism vs. technologism (lulz?). I think COVID vaccines were just one example, but I see this underlying issue in a lot of really partisan debates of our time.
Last, I think your point about governance makes sense. I think if institutions (or people) are receiving state funding, it absolutely makes sense that folks would be curious about where their money is going. I will have to read more on that topic to have more of an opinion on it tho!
Agreed that this is an interesting and substantive thread of things going on in covid case.
But also I think you can see backlash against expertise across a huge range of areas, including areas that can't be explained by that particular naturalism vs technologism cleavage.
For example, we see all sorts of rejection of economic expertise by Trump admin as well: implementing tariffs, firing BLS head, fighting w/Jerome Powell. See also: climate, mask mandates, pharma/medicine; probably others.
Anti-intellectualism could be one way to assimilate these examples, though that would also absolve experts from any role in this breakdown. I guess to me it seems like there is a broader cultural breakdown in the relationship between academic "experts" and "the public", and also a misunderstanding by experts about how their ideas gain and retain public credibility and acceptance.
On the one hand, I think "stamp collecting" research is valuable for its own sake, and there's a healthy lineage of argument for seeing it as a divine, spiritual activity. Intuitively, the guy asking about the economic impact of Tao seems myopic.
On the other, these humanities fields seem asleep at the wheel. First world countries are, to a first approximation, rich enough - the bottleneck is now coordination mechanisms, identity, meaning, ennui, etc. 2xing US GDP per capita or supersonic civil aviation is not going to solve this. This is a humanities problem, but the work coming out of these fields seems like the equivalent of Los Alamos building gizmos to hypnotize fish in 1942. Amateurs are the ones at the cutting edge of social innovation. (Of course, I am a pot calling the kettle black here, but I think we should hold Cambridge or Harvard to higher standards).
I think it's actually pretty sloppy and disingenuous to compare Louks’ work, which most people can't even properly explain nor show the utility of, with space exploration or elaborate mathematics. Also she's a low-key not great person.
I don't really care about what sort of person she is, as that is beside the point of my argument. Feel free to replace her with another academic who isn't from a STEM field.
You picked who you picked. Your argument is your argument. I think both have problems tbh. The former informs and highlights the weaknesses of the latter. All due respect.
I see what you mean by cyber balkanization, but I don't think I agree that it's because culture has drowned in too much information. That that leaves out human motivations and kinds of information. I don't think we got here because too many PhDs were written, there are still so few that most people have no interaction with that world. I do think we got here because our cyber communities got bigger and self-selected, in a way not feasible with geographic communities, so that status competition got more severe and more consequential. The information we're drowning in isn't PhDs, it's the mostly useless waste product of constant, widespread status seeking. Sadly, like what I just wrote, I suppose.
I view media as a form of information, or rather, synthesized information. Therefore, with the rise of cyber "balkanization," I believe it is largely due to the excessive amount of information that is ideologically opposed by others. To be fair, industrialized mass culture is pretty abnormal and has not been the case for the majority of human history. However, the numerous tribes of people producing/sharing information via the internet are likely to cause major upheaval. More than we've seen so far.
Yeah, I agree with all all that. One of your takeaways was "A true measure of a society’s prosperity may be the ability to study underwater basket weaving to one’s heart’s content", and I think it applies in reverse also. When studying underwater basket weaving becomes controversial, it indicates that society is not prospering. I think that's where we are now. The cyber balkanization is online ritualized combat leaking into the real world, where having online followers translates into income, status and power. The overabundance of online opinion is being accentuated by the scarcity of those things IRL.
i think to some extent we can evaluate a field independent of is immediate utility. a society, a human culture, that is wealthy but does not fund or cultivate any advanced mathematics seems to me to be missing something. this isn't universal; the greeks thought pure mathematics was a deep metaphysical enterprise, while it had a much lower status in china.
but what about various cultural studies which are very new? i think unlike mathematics or history or philosophy these disciplines haven't really proven themselves as edifying nor are their methodologies really validated.
i guess i would just say it depends on the field, and we know domains worthy of knowing when we see them (speaking as someone who has been asked my whole like "why would anyone want to know that!")
Thanks so much for your comment and restack, Razib! I agree that there are independent issues in various cultural studies - I plan to publish more on that in the near future.
I'm in the odd position of disliking Ally Louks because of her shallow online presence, but seeing her research as basically valid, and probably better than most humanities dissertations, which are so full of postmodernistic garbage as to be incomprehensible. The backlash against her actually reveals why many rely on postmodernism: a lot of people, when shown gibberish, assume they aren't smart enough to understand it. Her thesis is not gibberish so people feel entitled to criticize it. But it would be better to criticize the gibberish.
In terms of the overall point, I think far too many people are getting degree at every level. Colleges need to roll back grade inflation and become a lot more selective.
Nice piece! Some open-ended Qs/thoughts in case they are useful:
* Seems like there's some elision here between "information" and "knowledge". Are those the same things?
* Seems like there's a separate set of concerns when it comes to value of basic research in STEM (like Tao) vs. in the humanities etc (tho agree they also have some commonalities). Like when it comes to basic research in STEM, we know from economic theory that private incentives will systematically underinvest in basic research and general purpose technology development, since the benefits of these things are definitionally not internalized by the private developer. So even if you only care about economic notions of welfare, seems like there's a clear case for public funding of basic research. Further, it seems like there are plenty of cases historically where (STEM) research that had "no practical applications" at the time when it was developed, but then later turned out to be highly valuable for some future application (you allude to some of these)
* You mentioned: "To the vast majority, the only “worthy incentives " for pursuing information are curing an awful disease we are afraid may kill us(or our loved ones) or making lots of $$$." However, we also saw huge cultural backlash to covid vaccine, no? Trump admin seems likewise perfectly happy to disrupt highly practical & commercializable scientific research (i.e. not just the less-applied Taos etc). So it seems like rejection of rule by experts might go beyond backlash to the decadence/irrelevance of academic research, no?
* In general, it seems like there's a big question about governance of science & tech behind a lot of this. Who should get to decide (and how / on what basis) which academic questions are worthy of investigation? What should be the role of experts in making those decisions?
* This is an interesting thread i haven't seen explored elsewhere in this way: "production of more information leads to less overall cohesion"
Thanks so much for your comment, Jeff!
I agree there's some difference between knowledge and information. When I first conceived of this post, I thought of information in a much more abstract manner; however, I intended to write about information (and knowledge) in the sense of ideas about the general world.
As for the COVID thing - I agree. I think on one hand, there's a tinge of anti-intellectualism that is very present in mainstream American culture. I also think there's a bigger contention at hand, which is naturalism/bio-essentialism vs. technologism (lulz?). I think COVID vaccines were just one example, but I see this underlying issue in a lot of really partisan debates of our time.
Last, I think your point about governance makes sense. I think if institutions (or people) are receiving state funding, it absolutely makes sense that folks would be curious about where their money is going. I will have to read more on that topic to have more of an opinion on it tho!
> if institutions (or people) are receiving state funding, it absolutely makes sense that folks would be curious about where their money is going.
for sure agreed; would and *should* be curious, and *should* have a say IMO.
> naturalism/bio-essentialism vs. technologism
Agreed that this is an interesting and substantive thread of things going on in covid case.
But also I think you can see backlash against expertise across a huge range of areas, including areas that can't be explained by that particular naturalism vs technologism cleavage.
For example, we see all sorts of rejection of economic expertise by Trump admin as well: implementing tariffs, firing BLS head, fighting w/Jerome Powell. See also: climate, mask mandates, pharma/medicine; probably others.
Anti-intellectualism could be one way to assimilate these examples, though that would also absolve experts from any role in this breakdown. I guess to me it seems like there is a broader cultural breakdown in the relationship between academic "experts" and "the public", and also a misunderstanding by experts about how their ideas gain and retain public credibility and acceptance.
On the one hand, I think "stamp collecting" research is valuable for its own sake, and there's a healthy lineage of argument for seeing it as a divine, spiritual activity. Intuitively, the guy asking about the economic impact of Tao seems myopic.
On the other, these humanities fields seem asleep at the wheel. First world countries are, to a first approximation, rich enough - the bottleneck is now coordination mechanisms, identity, meaning, ennui, etc. 2xing US GDP per capita or supersonic civil aviation is not going to solve this. This is a humanities problem, but the work coming out of these fields seems like the equivalent of Los Alamos building gizmos to hypnotize fish in 1942. Amateurs are the ones at the cutting edge of social innovation. (Of course, I am a pot calling the kettle black here, but I think we should hold Cambridge or Harvard to higher standards).
I think it's actually pretty sloppy and disingenuous to compare Louks’ work, which most people can't even properly explain nor show the utility of, with space exploration or elaborate mathematics. Also she's a low-key not great person.
I don't really care about what sort of person she is, as that is beside the point of my argument. Feel free to replace her with another academic who isn't from a STEM field.
You picked who you picked. Your argument is your argument. I think both have problems tbh. The former informs and highlights the weaknesses of the latter. All due respect.
I see what you mean by cyber balkanization, but I don't think I agree that it's because culture has drowned in too much information. That that leaves out human motivations and kinds of information. I don't think we got here because too many PhDs were written, there are still so few that most people have no interaction with that world. I do think we got here because our cyber communities got bigger and self-selected, in a way not feasible with geographic communities, so that status competition got more severe and more consequential. The information we're drowning in isn't PhDs, it's the mostly useless waste product of constant, widespread status seeking. Sadly, like what I just wrote, I suppose.
I view media as a form of information, or rather, synthesized information. Therefore, with the rise of cyber "balkanization," I believe it is largely due to the excessive amount of information that is ideologically opposed by others. To be fair, industrialized mass culture is pretty abnormal and has not been the case for the majority of human history. However, the numerous tribes of people producing/sharing information via the internet are likely to cause major upheaval. More than we've seen so far.
Yeah, I agree with all all that. One of your takeaways was "A true measure of a society’s prosperity may be the ability to study underwater basket weaving to one’s heart’s content", and I think it applies in reverse also. When studying underwater basket weaving becomes controversial, it indicates that society is not prospering. I think that's where we are now. The cyber balkanization is online ritualized combat leaking into the real world, where having online followers translates into income, status and power. The overabundance of online opinion is being accentuated by the scarcity of those things IRL.