this is so good, I may just literally print it out and pin it to the wall https://t.co/rZpQjNBzDc
this is so good, I may just literally print it out and pin it to the wall https://t.co/rZpQjNBzDc
I call this the deluge of crappy papers. A recent article in Nautilus comes up with a more visually-arresting term - “zombie science”. This is apt, because zombies eat brains. Zombie science also consumes brains, or specifically, brain’s attention. Scientist’s time is one of the most precious resources we have and more and more is being wasted cond... See more
Dan Elton • The deluge of crappy papers must stop
In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse. In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutio... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
The cases of two scholars, Rebecca Tuvel and Bruce Gilley, immediately come to mind. Tuvel wrote a paper for the feminist philosophy giant Hypatia, exploring parallels between transracial and transgender identities and advocating transracial identity statuses. However, for Theory, race and gender are profoundly different. To claim transgender statu
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Despite that, academics have little incentive to produce outstanding explanations of complex ideas that can speed up the education of everyone coming up in their field. And some even see the process of deciphering bad explanations as a desirable right of passage all should pass through, just as they did.
Robert Wiblin • Chris Olah on working at top AI labs without an undergrad degree
A century ago, the philosopher Simone Weil admonished against this fragmentation of the problem of reality into parochial questions addressed by disjointed scientific disciplines — “villages” of thought, she called them — each too blinded by its own axioms to make headway on illuminating the whole. “The villagers seldom leave the village,” she wrot... See more
Maria Popova • The Great Blind Spot of Science and the Art of Asking the Complex Question the Only Answer to Which Is Life
Intellectualism is the belief that one can separate an action from the results of such action, that one can separate theory from practice, and that one can always fix a complex system by hierarchical approaches, that is, in a (ceremonial) top-down manner. Intellectualism has a sibling: scientism, a naive interpretation of science as complication ra
... See more