Tismguide
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2020
I think that academia is less removed from the Christian Scholastic tradition than most give it credit for. The scientific method is solid, but the institution, like any other, is imperfect. Going against the consensus isn't impossible but it is hard, especially without tenure. By the time you are tenured, you will mostly be supervising students, not doing research yourself. I'm not arguing academia is worse than other institutions, just that it is not magically immune.
Even if you can take a risk, your students can't, and you're going to have trouble getting grants. Most funding still comes fro NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc, even in engineering and the applied sciences to study specific questions. Given the toxic political climate at most US universities, even if they can't get you fired, they can still cripple your ability to actually do research by going after your students. Topics that are currently unfashionable are challenging to work on in practice as a junior researcher, let alone actual political controversy.
So as a tenured professor you can probably get away with shooting your mouth off, but you will (correctly) be shot down for lacking scientific rigor, since you don't have time, funds or students to do the research to support your position. As a junior researcher, you will need to desperately compete to publish or perish in an environment where professors, especially your committee/advisor, have incredible ability to fuck you over, sometimes accidentally through inaction/prioritizing their attention to other students.
It's true that essentially all publication and most grant applications are going to be blind, along with applications for the use of larger resources (think observatories, supercomputers, etc) which limits the ability to gatekeep who may study it, but the committees will gatekeep what topics are of interest. There is a double standard for going against consensus, but it's not absolutue -- I think the more important bias comes from forcing you to ask the wrong question. If you're applying for an economics grant to study how to reduce the gender pay gap, and your argument is that the pay gap is better explained by other factors/doesn't exist once you correct for confounders, it is more likely to be rejected as off topic/a poor fit for the grant than for "wrongthink". Even putting controversy aside, reaching a conclusion that opens a door to future work in the same area is important to your career, and that of your students.
Even if large resources have a blind review process, you may find that your requests to get parts made in the machine shop, or time on the local science machine or whatever just doesn't get prioritized if the person who controls it doesn't like you. It's hard to do any job if your colleagues don't like you. Academia is no different.
What I'm trying to say here is that the institution will tend to have a bias toward the average belief due to the discretion over allocation of resources even if every single person involved is doing their best to be "apolitical", which of course they are not.
I still hold a great deal of respect for STEM academia as an institution that does a better job upholding its values than many, but it has its blind spots and is subject to the general political climate, just like anything else, and its high prestige in the public consciousness, insular nature of an elitist peerage, and dependence on funding via grants make it a vulnerable target for anyone who wants to control or reshape society.
Also are you referring to the popsci IFLS type crap or actual academic publications? Because the former has always been shit for every field.
Even if you can take a risk, your students can't, and you're going to have trouble getting grants. Most funding still comes fro NIH, NSF, DARPA, etc, even in engineering and the applied sciences to study specific questions. Given the toxic political climate at most US universities, even if they can't get you fired, they can still cripple your ability to actually do research by going after your students. Topics that are currently unfashionable are challenging to work on in practice as a junior researcher, let alone actual political controversy.
So as a tenured professor you can probably get away with shooting your mouth off, but you will (correctly) be shot down for lacking scientific rigor, since you don't have time, funds or students to do the research to support your position. As a junior researcher, you will need to desperately compete to publish or perish in an environment where professors, especially your committee/advisor, have incredible ability to fuck you over, sometimes accidentally through inaction/prioritizing their attention to other students.
It's true that essentially all publication and most grant applications are going to be blind, along with applications for the use of larger resources (think observatories, supercomputers, etc) which limits the ability to gatekeep who may study it, but the committees will gatekeep what topics are of interest. There is a double standard for going against consensus, but it's not absolutue -- I think the more important bias comes from forcing you to ask the wrong question. If you're applying for an economics grant to study how to reduce the gender pay gap, and your argument is that the pay gap is better explained by other factors/doesn't exist once you correct for confounders, it is more likely to be rejected as off topic/a poor fit for the grant than for "wrongthink". Even putting controversy aside, reaching a conclusion that opens a door to future work in the same area is important to your career, and that of your students.
Even if large resources have a blind review process, you may find that your requests to get parts made in the machine shop, or time on the local science machine or whatever just doesn't get prioritized if the person who controls it doesn't like you. It's hard to do any job if your colleagues don't like you. Academia is no different.
What I'm trying to say here is that the institution will tend to have a bias toward the average belief due to the discretion over allocation of resources even if every single person involved is doing their best to be "apolitical", which of course they are not.
I still hold a great deal of respect for STEM academia as an institution that does a better job upholding its values than many, but it has its blind spots and is subject to the general political climate, just like anything else, and its high prestige in the public consciousness, insular nature of an elitist peerage, and dependence on funding via grants make it a vulnerable target for anyone who wants to control or reshape society.
I agree that much of anthropology has become a joke as you describe. I would be interested to learn why you think that it has fallen apart, lost prestige, etc. In other words: how to reject the null hypothesis "It was killed as a legitimate science/never was one and is being successfully used as an argument from authority to reshape society". Similar question about the other social sciences -- how respected/influential are they, exactly? I know many consider them jokes, but many others consider those people idiots.
Also are you referring to the popsci IFLS type crap or actual academic publications? Because the former has always been shit for every field.
