Academia UK: just another PC think tank

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Recently rejected two papers ... from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
Professor Phil Jones, head of CRU, email 31 March 2004

[One of the two papers refereed by Jones was by Lars Kamel who] claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data ... The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.
Guardian, 2 February 2010

Wikipedia defines a think tank as an organisation that “conducts research and engages in advocacy”. Roughly speaking, a think tank is a collection of people sharing a certain belief, who seek to present research that will promote that belief. Objectivity and the pursuit of knowledge tend to take second place to the desire to provide support for a particular viewpoint or policy programme.

More specifically, think tanks could be said to possess the following characteristics.
(1) They are usually mixed up with politics.
(2) Because they are driven largely by policy considerations, criteria such as intellectual progress, or correspondence to reality, tend to matter little or not at all.
(3) In view of (2), the innate ability of its members (to make genuine intellectual progress) tends to matter little or not at all.
(4) The detailed content of the think tank’s output has to look good, but it does not have to mean much. The putative conclusions and policy implications are what count.
(5) Diligence, truthfulness and attention to detail are not necessary. All that is required is that it should not be too easy to pick holes in what is published.
(6) Since criteria such as truth and objectivity are relatively unimportant, internal politics becomes very important. This applies to (a) jockeying for position between different think tanks, and (b) jockeying by individual players within think tanks.
(7) Hence what is prized and promoted in terms of personal characteristics are social and political skills, including the ability to be dishonest. Also desirable is an ability to reproduce jargon and other aspects of academic technique such as pseudo-mathematicisation. What is not particularly prized, provided the other criteria are satisfied, is a desire to make genuine progress, or the ability to do so.
(8) What looks impressive on paper — qualifications, training, number of publications — is likely to carry more weight than potential, or actual, contribution to culture.
(9) Think tanks make no pretensions about the ‘elitist’ pursuit of pure knowledge for its own sake. What matters is that their output should be, or rather be seen to be, ‘useful to society’.

In some cases, imputing to a think tank even so modest an aspiration as the generation of useful policy ideas may be overly romantic. Some think tanks produce output merely as a kind of exercise in self-assertion, or to justify their existence to their audience or their sponsors. “Look at us,” they are saying. “Look at the length of our publications list. We are clearly being very useful and important.”

* * * * *

Looking over my recent posts, I see I may have been a little rude about think tanks [1]. Perhaps I appeared to imply that they compared unfavourably with academia. If so, then I need to correct that impression. Because, of course, modern academia has become largely indistinguishable from think tanks. Universities have abandoned academic objectivity and neutrality in favour of pursuing an ideological agenda. Or, more generally, in favour of whatever is expedient for purposes of gaining funding or promotion.

In modern academia:
• Pure quantity has become a key measure of productivity, regardless of whether the units being counted have any merit whatsoever.
• Quality has become impossible to assess since the underlying dodginess of any actual data is concealed, and because excess technicality creates an impenetrable cover.
• In any case, quality no longer matters much in practice; few people care, since it is tacitly accepted that the bulk of research serves no real purpose [2].
• Pseudo-quality is assessed mutually, by insiders rating one another. Like a system of NHS nurses giving one another gold stars, the most that can be said about the "best" is that they are probably not quite as awful as the "worst". (Though in many cases, a high rating simply reflects current fashion.)
• In a similar way to student intake, research positions are now offered partly on the basis of whether candidates comply with ideological requirements. Like any other form of redistribution, this apparent generosity to some who would previously been excluded has a cost: the exclusion of others who would previously have been included.
• ‘Usefulness to society’ has become a slogan, but in practice this is an inversion, since genuine usefulness — whether on a short or long term basis — is the last thing that concerns insiders.

* * * * *

In February 09, after someone wrote to the Telegraph to argue that we should assume global warming is true because the effects of doing so are the ones we should want, I suggested that this attitude might be found among researchers themselves.

In some cases, this ideological bias — wanting research to support the creation of a ‘fairer’ world – may have effects only at the margin. For example, when a result is ambiguous, the choice of how to present it is made in the direction that is most supportive of the preferred belief system ... This is quite apart from the question of whether research goes on that deliberately falsifies its results in the direction most likely to be approved of. I have little doubt myself that this also happens; the only question is the extent to which it does.

Perhaps someone was paying attention, and felt inspired to do a little digging, because in November we were treated to a look at the inside workings of one of the components of the academic establishment, the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Were people surprised by the somewhat sordid revelations? But surely they did not think that the mediocratic tactic of giving up on old-fashioned standards in favour of expediency, and playing the power/money game, was something only bankers and MPs did. Regular readers of this blog will recognise Climategate as a perfect example of a familiar phenomenon. A paternalistic elite conceals or distorts information to manipulate its audience, on the basis that it knows best and that what it is doing increases ‘social justice’ [3].

The clandestine peek at the entrails of academia has been illuminating and useful. Now I am going to make a prediction about how much impact the scandal will ultimately have on the consensus about climate change. None.

I do not want to discourage those sceptics who are genuinely concerned with truth rather than politics, and who have no firm position themselves [4]. No doubt you should go on, fighting the good fight. But what ultimately counts is not what the blogosphere thinks, or even what the public (at the moment) thinks, but what people in power think [5]. And those people are, by a large majority, either convinced of the evidence for the human warming theory, or simply do not care about the niceties of evidence and just think we should assume it is true because doing so appears to legitimise what they regard as morally desirable actions.

* * * * *

On one level, the hacked emails — looking beyond the veneer of superficial politeness — give one the feeling of having stumbled upon the interactions of a bunch of 13-year-olds [6].

“Hey, Jonesy.”
“Yo Micky.”
“Hear about Johnny – popped his clogs.”
“Yeah, cool. Those Blues are nuts, they got it coming.”
“Right on, man. Greens rule.”
“I’m tempted to beat the crap out of that Pat.”
“Is he still out there? Someone should seriously deck him.”
“Yeah. Hear about Sonia trying to get on the school honours board?”
“No way man, we need to stop that. I’ll fix it with Kevin to get that blocked.”
“We gonna destroy those Blues.”
“Yeah. Anyone who supports them will get beaten up or I’ll fix it with the Head to give them detention for a year!”
“By the way, the results for the play-offs have come in, and they’re crap. It’s a travesty we aren’t higher in the table. I don’t think we should release the results yet, it’s dirty laundry.”
“Don’t worry, we can truncate the data to stop our worst losses showing up. I know this cool trick which will hide the decline.”
“Fantastic, let’s do that.”
“Did you get asked to approve submissions for the school mag?”
“Yeah. One of them, by a Blue, disses my poem from the last issue. What a prat! I really went to town on the guy’s essay, if it appears I’ll be really surprised.”
“Confidentially, Jonesy, I need help rejecting a submission from a Blue which I’ve been asked to approve.”
“OK, today. Promise. Kevin and I will keep stuff by Blues out – even if we have to redefine the school mag’s policy. If necessary, we’ll get the prefects to boycott it.”

The whole sorry saga might almost be comical, were it not for the fact that what lies bleeding on the floor is academic neutrality, detachment, disinterestedness, and so forth. All those things which once put university research on a higher level than that of consultancies, corporate back rooms, or policy wonks.

It is of course a question of degree. It is not that scientists as a group were ever as purist as one might ideally like. Historical evidence suggests that applying selectivity to data may on occasion even be helpful to the discovery process. It is simply that the modern academic institutional environment brings out the worst in this respect. It is certainly not the case, as we are encouraged to believe, that this environment, with its system of quality-control-by-peer-approval, guarantees that minimum standards of objectivity and fair play are observed, let alone that any actual progress is made.

* * * * *

There seems little reason not to assume that the research style and ethics evident at CRU is representative of academia in general, not just climatology. That seems to have been Professor Jones's general line of defence to the Commons committee (and the line taken by his apologists). Things he and his colleagues did, which may have appeared dodgy to outsiders, are merely "standard practice".

I felt I should dig out the following quote from last year’s posts, where I responded to someone’s suggestion that current academia places too much emphasis on conscientiousness, and not enough on wild, free, idiot-savant-style creativity.

conscientiousness is not something I would have said particularly distinguishes the modern academic ... Academic output may look stunningly diligent — partly because of its high level of technicality — but dig a little deeper and you find that cutting corners and sloppiness are as prevalent in academia as in the modern ethos generally.

Old-fashioned diligence is a tad ‘gay’, don’t you know. So much more manly to maintain your office at such a level of chaos that you couldn’t tell your charts from your elbow, let alone find a crucial data set.

It is, incidentally, less than pointless to single out the hapless Jones and Mann for attack. They are probably model academics by the going standard. If you ran a check on the emails of every academic institution, considerably more shocking things would no doubt come to light. The attempt to make scapegoats of Jones et al should be resisted; it is a standard mediocratic evasion tactic. (Allow the collective to identify an individual or two as the supposedly isolated rotten apples, ruining their lives in the process, as though that somehow cleansed the Augean stables of their entire load of horse manure.)

* * * * *

The development of an internal politics which means that progress within a discipline becomes a matter of whom you know, rather than what you know, is linked to the presence of ideological pressures such as the global warming creed, but it is not dependent on such pressures.

Clearly some subjects have more obvious focal points, where there appears to be a ‘correct’ answer, than others. In these cases, the paradigm which becomes dominant will be relatively predictable, and the dominant power group which blocks out rivals will be associated with that position. In other subjects, the precise intellectual position of the dominant coalition will be more arbitrary. In stem cell research, for example, where a few brave souls recently dared to complain about the self-perpetuating behaviour of that subject’s dominant party, the position associated with the party seems to be arbitrary as far as one can tell, and not determined by any particular political or moral bias [7].

The institutional factors which lead to disciplines becoming self-referential — to the point that, were one able to look at the internal processes leading up to the public image of glossy journal articles, academic prizes and all the rest, one would (if one were not yet desensitised by mediocracy) experience hair-raising horror — were briefly discussed by me in an earlier post.

* * * * *

The fundamental reasons for the transformation of academia into a factory for producing ersatz research on a sort of conveyor-belt model, with anything that deviates in the wrong way from accepted paradigms being effectively blocked, are diverse, but can mostly be linked to mediocracy themes. In the broadest sense, these can be seen as derived from a kind of collectivism: asserting that culture is a group activity, not dependent on exceptional ability, and insisting that individuals be subordinate to the will of the collective.

Among external pressures, market forces were until recently most often tipped as the villain, though this had little basis in reality. By now, even the most anti-market ideologues among academics find it difficult to avoid the fact that far more obvious pressures are being exerted by the state. Kenneth Minogue commented on these in 2001.

[State subsidy] is the first step towards state control ... By the 1990s, universities were unmistakably merely a part of a comprehensive state system of instruction for those above eighteen years of age. They were inspected and controlled as such ... The new system of ‘academic audits’ mechanised undergraduate teaching, and a similar homogenisation has been promoted by the research councils in graduate studies. Independent reflection gets crowded out. [8]

One of the reasons why the state’s encroachment on academia has progressed so rapidly is, as Minogue pointed out, the “supine response of the dons themselves”. Take the ‘participation’ issue. New Labour has bullied the universities for years to generate more proportional representation across the social classes in their student intake. One obvious reaction might have been to tell the government where to go, particularly given that its demand rests on the unsound assumption that there is no inherited component to ability — an assumption which of course is rarely spelt out. Instead, the almost universal response has been of the kind “please sir, we have been trying as hard as we can to get more working-class/state-school/etc. students in, honest.” [9]

As far as research funding is concerned, the pressures of the state are similar to those of any Big Client with ideological preferences who wants to see ‘value for money’. The incentive to generate the right kind of research, with implications that will not upset Big Client, creeps insidiously into the system of research bodies, umbrella organisations, funding committees, vice-chancellors, governing bodies, lead researchers and so forth, until people barely notice they are being bought and sold like so much cattle. If Big Client does not like the answers one scientist is giving, it can just sack him and get another.

The biases in the money-bestowing process will of course be largely unwritten. They arise in practice as a result of the unstated but well-known prejudices of individuals (e.g. within funding bodies such as ESRC) rather than due to any explicitly formalised rules. It is not going to be written in any document: preference will be given to applicants whose work will suggest that climate trends are such as to require government intervention. Nevertheless, everyone — except perhaps a few naively idealistic souls, who quickly fall by the wayside — will know the deal and play the game accordingly.

Ultimately, however, the more important pressures leading to the destruction of the academic are not external. They are those of mediocratic ideology, which largely originate from inside the academy itself. When the Principal of one of the top Oxbridge colleges asserts, apparently on the basis not of research but preferred belief, that “initial genetic endowment is pretty much random across social classes”, the case for resisting pressure from the state about admissions is clearly undermined. But denial of genes is not the only academic contribution to anti-academic ideology.

* * * * *

In part 2 of this article, we shall be looking at the key ideological themes which have driven debasement of academia to the level of think tanks, and beyond.

Meanwhile, let me leave readers with this thought. Now you have seen an example of what lies behind the facade of academic certainty. On the theatre stage: “there is no doubt about man-made global warming”. Behind the scenes: corner-cutting and under-carpet-sweeping on a scale that would put a dodgy Chinese catfood manufacturer to shame. Consider this: What about all those other claims of doubtlessness made by various academic disciplines? In philosophy, for example, dualism is said to be debunked. In psychology, a form of behaviourism is de rigueur. In biology, we are told that the theory of evolution has a lot of supporting evidence [10]. In physics, there is supposedly no possible alternative to Heisenberg uncertainty and the rest of the quantum theory apparatus. I can think of many other examples where research is said to have 'established' something or other. How much confidence do you think should now be placed on such positions being justified by reference to old-fashioned standards of academic rigour?

Oxford Forum is a research organisation which was set up to oppose declining standards and increasing ideological bias in mainstream academia. Its aim is to expand into an independent college cum university which would generate and publish research in several areas including philosophy, the psychology and physiology of perception, and theoretical physics. We are actively seeking potential patrons to provide funding for its activities [11].

• The title of this post is not intended to imply that I necessarily think British academia is any worse than, say, American or Italian.
• Sources for the quotes at the top of the post are here and here.
The Guardian says that Kamel "was leaving academic science" and that he "never tried to publish [his research] elsewhere". Well, is it likely he would, with the kind of review he would have got from Jones? What is not explained is why Kamel left academic science. Perhaps there were other ostensible reasons, but can it have helped to find that producing what he thought was (and what probably is) important research was never going to be enough to form the basis of a career?
[1] See posts from July and August.
[2] My reading of the inclusion in a key IPCC report of 'data' loosely based on a sentence in a World Wildlife Fund publication from two years earlier, itself repeating a speculation reported in the New Scientist six years before that, is that it is akin to a Freudian slip: it probably reveals underlying attitudes. If vigilance about keeping pseudo-data out of the academic debate appears to be low, this is not necessarily due to mediocracy per se but because it is realised that the reliability of current academic research is actually on a par with the trustworthiness of anecdotal data reported in popular magazines.
Incidentally, this article on the issue seems decidedly biased and rather like a PR whitewash exercise. I have noted a Wikipedia bias in this area previously. Note to administrators: you need to get your act together on this one, guys. NPOV rating: 2/10.
[3] I do not mean to suggest that the motives here are necessarily benevolent. More simply, we can postulate that deceiving/manipulating people is a satisfying expression of power, and in this case just happens to be regarded as semi-legitimate. This is in addition to any financial incentives offered by state funding bodies to generate the ‘right’ answers.
[4] The truth — whatever that may turn out to be. Truth can be fuzzy, particularly in climatology, and especially once you stop trying to impose a preferred theory on the data. It may of course be that the greenhouse camp have it roughly right, but it is now surely clear that we can no longer assume they do, simply on the basis of the “overwhelming evidence” which is said to exist even without CRU. Here’s a simple mindbender: if you take a sample of one apple from a population of 20 and find it is rotten, how safe is it to assume that more than half the others are good to eat? Answer: not very.
[5] By "people in power" I am of course talking about those who control or otherwise significantly influence the media, as well as those putatively in charge in Westminster or Brussels.
[6] Needless to say, this is not the real thing but a parody, loosely based on the actual emails, copies of which currently seem to be residing at eastangliaemails.com. In writing this article I drew on predigestive research by Andrew Montford and Fred Pearce.
[7] In referring to bravery I am being semi-ironic. No doubt it takes some gumption to complain even when you have a couple of "internationally renowned" experts on your side, although their presence is unlikely to be sufficient for the challenge to have much effect. With the complaints being dismissed by heavyweights Nature and Science, it looks as if the whole thing will quickly slide into obscurity. When even a couple of prestigious supporters are insufficient to prevent complaints being pooh-poohed, can you imagine what would happen if a group of junior academics, probably already tainted by being at second-tier institutions, where they would have been forced to settle due to being associated with unfashionable ideas or topics, were to make a complaint against the great and good of their subject without any senior supporters?
[8] 'The collapse of the academic in Britain', from Buckingham at 25, IEA 2001.
[9] The only significant exception to this bending-over-backwards approach that I can recall was the President of Trinity College’s demand in 2004 to “keep the tanks off our lawns”.
[10] Now that one really is a joke. I am not advocating intelligent design as an alternative — one of the tactics of the MA (mediocratic academia) crowd is to force debates into crude dichotomies — but to suggest the standard theory of evolution has a few holes is a little like saying Norway has a couple of fjords.
[11] Those who are unable to contribute financially can help in other ways. (Of course, if every salaried academic in the UK donated an average of £100 per annum, Oxford Forum would be adequately set up, for starters at least. Most would not even have to be out of pocket on the exercise if they reduced, by an equivalent amount, other donations that in practice are probably financing arms deals or child abuse.)
Buying our books, all of which are available, and in stock, from Book Systems Plus via Amazon, helps.
So does giving us links or other kinds of publicity. The latter point is aimed particularly at academics who may think it is a wheeze to use our ideas as the basis for (e.g.) magazine articles. One doesn’t expect ethical behaviour from journalists, but those receiving a salary for doing research might at least observe the niceties of acknowledging input, and do so more in the case of fellow academics unfairly deprived of status and salary, not less.
Coming to Cuddesdon to work for us for a week or more in the vacations would also give us a boost in our efforts.

PVC towers (part 2)

In my previous post, I commented that we should not expect academic insiders to have much incentive to expose the deficiencies of their own subjects or of academia in general.

If anyone on the inside ever suggests even mildly that there might be defects in the way academia operates, e.g. Robin Hanson:

academia is no more about making useful intellectual progress than advertising is about informing consumers. Professors seek prestigious careers, while funders and students seek prestige by association. Academics talk and write primarily to signal their impressive mental abilities, such as their mastery of words, math, machines, or vast detail. Yes, contributing to useful intellectual progress can sometimes appear impressive, but the correlation is weak, and it is often hard to see who really contributed how much. Progress happens, but largely as a side effect.

they are liable to get a reaction like this:

your post doesn't deserve [a serious response]. It so reeks of bitterness and agenda and is so divorced from what one has to suffer through to obtain the marginal reward of an academic position that I'll leave it to others to mire their way through your mis- and preconceptions.

No, to get a more informative and unbiased assessment, you probably need to go to someone who has turned their back on the academic world. Before reading Mencius Moldbug, I would have thought that computer science, being an eminently practical subject, was immune to the full-blown mediocratic disease, but apparently this is not so.

My Navrozov moment* at Berkeley came from the one and only paper I published, which was a clever way of reducing the time it takes for an operating system to "context switch," or shift between working on different processes.

... this same problem was popular at the time — the only real way to succeed in CS is to invent a new problem which generates more employment for your peers — and other people at Berkeley were working on it. Two of these were a pair of third-year grad students ... 'Sacco' and 'Vanzetti' [pseudonyms] came up with an entirely different solution ...

At some point during this period, however, I realized that the entire problem was a complete and utter pseudo-problem ... The lily needed no gilding at all, and it certainly did not need to be nanofabricated from isotopically pure, individually selected gold atoms ...

So I am very confident that neither of these techniques, neither mine nor Sacco and Vanzetti's, has ever been used in practice. There is no need for them, there has never been any need for them, and there will never be any need for them. And this was quite obvious in 1993.

My Navrozov moment, of course, was when I approached one of the two ... and attempted to have an intellectual discussion of this realization. The story is basically the same as Navrozov's, so it would be boring to repeat, but basically I came away with the feeling that I'd told someone his Sicilian grandmother liked to get drunk and f*** her own goats. Which, in fact, I had. Because I'd essentially told him his research was fraudulent. (Unqualified Reservations)

When I first read this, I found the similarity with my own postgraduate subject, economics, uncanny. Clearly there is a syndrome at work here which has nothing to do with the specificities of a particular subject. I had conversations with economics faculty members at Oxford which were remarkably similar to his with the fellow graduate students. There was a similar apparent shock value in daring to question whether there was really a point to some of the pseudo-theory being generated.

A system of the kind described in part one may be quite good at generating work which is 'clever' (see earlier definition), and some of the time may even produce some mildly worthwhile ideas. What it certainly will not promote, except perhaps by accident, is work of the kind which Kuhn termed 'revolutionary'. Now when people still regarded academia as a non-exclusionary locus for intellectual progress, and capital-owners considered it their role to subsidise culture, that didn't matter too much. Much of the revolutionary work was done outside academia, or by people who notionally had positions in it but who were not financially dependent on it, and academia contributed by doing the follow-up work — the kind Kuhn termed 'normal'.

Nowadays, however, academia is supposed to be the alpha and omega of all research. The creed goes as follows: research outside academia does not exist, should not exist, and should not be supported. Little wonder that progress on key conceptual issues has been on the low side for the last fifty years. Even insiders are starting to complain about it, though of course their diagnosis is going to preferentially involve any explanation that isn't a fundamental indictment of the academic system per se.

[Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics] portrays string theorists as tending toward arrogance, insularity, and groupthink; they value technical ability over original thought, follow faddishly the ideas of a few top physicists, and look down on adherents of other theories. This culture, in Smolin's telling, eschews the philosophical bent of Einstein and quantum theory's founders, preferring the "shut up and calculate" attitude of later particle physicists ... Smolin is right that science needs both "craftspeople" and "seers," the former focused on technical problems, the latter on deeper meanings and new ideas. He makes a plausible argument that physics institutions have become too geared toward producing crafts­people rather than seers. The way for young physicists to get jobs, tenure, and grants, he notes, is to fill in the details of research lines established by their elders.

Theoretical physics has indeed, as Smolin points out, become obsessed with formalism and calculation at the expense of conceptual understanding. His explanation for this phenomenon, however, seems unconvincing.

One reason ... is that universities are no longer growing as fast as they did for decades after World War II, so there is more competition for physics posts and less room for nonconformists. Furthermore, theoretical physicists rely heavily on financial support from just a handful of federal agencies, with some private foundation money thrown into the mix. These limited funding options provide further incentives for conventional thinking. Observing that such incentives are not limited to physics, Smolin warns that intellectual sclerosis could be developing throughout the sciences. (Review of The Trouble with Physics in Reason Magazine.)

Pace Smolin, there is a simpler and more obvious reason why sclerosis develops in an academic discipline: the same reason it develops in any monopoly that has become largely self-referential.

A similar recent complaint about absence of meaningful conceptual progress, and about the bias against models that are clear and comprehensible rather than technically impressive but vacuous, can be read at Shtetl-Optimized. This particular one is about computer science (again), but the comments to the post confirm this phenomenon is not confined to CS. (Via Overcoming Bias, where there are some more comments on the same issue. Robin Hanson's criticisms of academia are also worth looking at. See also David Thompson's blog, which regularly highlights instances of il-liberal bias in North American academia.)



(*) Mencius: "A Navrozov moment is a moment when you realize that the university, which was established as a refuge whose purpose was to pursue truth without regard for the opinions of the world, has become a power center whose purpose is to impose its own opinions on the world. As such it has no more use for independent thought than a dog has for beets ... The name honors [a piece] by Andrei Navrozov ... from his Gingerbread Race"

Update
Some comments here.

PVC towers

What happens to a service which becomes disconnected from the preferences of those who need it? We know the answer to that one: we get something like Communist medicine, or milder versions of the same effect e.g. nationalised utilities. But at least in most such cases, users have ways of expressing dissatisfaction outside the supplier-user framework (e.g. by getting their complaints reported by the press) and a clear incentive to do so.

What if the service doesn't have any users who really need it, so that there is no such incentive? And what if there is no easy way of telling whether the service is usable? You are liable to find that the service develops in strange ways, according to the complex internal workings of the supplier group, and has increasingly little relation to anything that is actually useful or wanted by anyone outside the supplier group.

Judging by my experience of working for accountancy firms, this disconnect between suppliers and users occurs even for services which do face competitive pressures. A surprisingly large part of what happens inside professional firms (meetings, courses, human resources initiatives, etc.) seems to have precious little to do with what will actually provide clients with what they want — or 'need', though I avoid the use of this word, as it is often used to imply that suppliers are better placed than consumers to decide what's best.

However, competitive pressure at least places a limit on how far this disconnect can go, before a firm goes bust because its clients decamp to another one which can do the necessary work for less money and/or with fewer distracting frills. How much worse can it get when there is no competitive pressure from users?

Imagine the following scenario. A bunch of intelligent people get together and create — using funding that is more or less unconditional — a system for generating intellectual output. However, this output does not have to pass any particular test except whether a majority of system insiders agree it is worthy. So the members of the system are entirely insulated from assessment other than their own. Like any social group, they create a hierarchy of rank, in which some are allowed to progress to the top of the ladder depending on criteria which the group as a whole decides on. What is the likely outcome? And what happens if there also starts to be an ideology which places pressure on them to produce results which fit with, rather than go against, that ideology?

It depends on the different motivations present, and which are strongest on an aggregate basis. The desire to (a) advance knowledge probably doesn't occur that frequently, but perhaps we should allow that it occurs among at least some of the members. However, there is also likely to be (b) the usual range of motives which in a collective setting typically outweigh any more idealistic aims: desire for career advancement, desire for power, desire to do down your rivals, the formation of power cliques, it mattering more whom you know than what you know — and all the other usual aspects of office politics. Of course, the 'business' in question being intelligence and creativity, the criteria for advancement will be superficially based on cleverness, innovation, and so forth. It's just that this won't necessarily have much to do with real usefulness or progress.

Given the implausibility that (a) will triumph over (b) and continue to do so, what is the likely outcome? Probably something that looks rather like contemporary academia, as in the following description of management studies.

Chief executives ... pay little attention to what business schools do or say. As long ago as 1993, Donald Hambrick, then president of the US-based Academy of Management, described the business academics' summer conference as "an incestuous closed loop", at which professors "come to talk with each other". Not much has changed.

[An academic writing in] The Academy of Management Journal says: "Most of what we publish isn't even cited by other academics." ... In article after article in the Journal, the business school professors lament their inability to research and write about their work in a way that real-life business people understand.

... A scroll through the most recent issues demonstrates why managers may be giving the Journal a miss. "A multi-level investigation of antecedents and consequences of team member boundary spanning behaviour" is the title of one article. Why do business academics write like this? ... to win tenure in a US university, you need to publish in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. Accessibility is not the key to academic advancement.

Similar pressures apply elsewhere. In France and Australia, academics receive bonuses for placing articles in the top academic publications. The UK's Research Assessment Exercise, which evaluates university research and ties funding to the outcome, encourages similarly arcane work. But even without these incentives, many business school faculty prefer to adorn their work with scholarly tables, statistics and jargon because it makes them feel like real academics. (Financial Times)

With the exception of applied sciences, this description probably applies reasonably well to most other academic disciplines.

But it's not much good expecting confirmation on this score from insiders. "Yes, I am a paid academic, dependent for my career on the approval of my peers, but I can tell you good people at the Times/Guardian/whatever that my department is useless at promoting genuinely progressive work, rather than work which will reinforce the prevailing paradigms." Not very likely to happen.

Part 2

Surviving in a mediocracy: final thoughts

In earlier instalments of this article, I argued that much of contemporary academia is characterised by vacuous technicality and/or ideological bias, with the result that genuine progress is being blocked in favour of recycling the prevailing dominant paradigms.

Why does any of this matter? For two reasons. First, a society which stifles intellectual innovation is not a healthy society. Second, certain types of people — e.g. intellectuals not in tune with the dominant ideology — find it impossible to exist in such a society. They will either depart for a country which is less stifling, such as the US, or they will live lives of misery and deprivation. (Here are the real victims of ‘social exclusion’.) Or, as in my case, they’re forced to try to make significant amounts of money by investment, in the hope of one day being able to fund an institutional environment.

Some of my fellow academics say, “why whinge about it, just suck it up. Be grateful you can get paid to have an intellectual career at all”. They themselves do 'suck it up', and enter into the spirit of New Academe, helping to perpetuate a system that is basically rotten. It is not that I haven't tried. For a while I laboured hard to produce the kind of technical economics which is now de rigueur. But although I learnt well enough how to use the system of arcane jargon and techniques, it was never quite correct enough in the required way. I couldn’t quite disabuse myself of the desire to say something interesting or meaningful. “Don’t try to be original,” I was advised. “Crank the handle, copy someone else’s work, but with a slight variation.” “Technique it up” was another frequent suggestion. I.e. wrap up what you are saying in jargon and presentational gimmicks. Ultimately, my desire to be clear and consequential proved to be too much of a handicap: I realised I was never going to be permitted to be anything more than a C-list academic, and left Oxford. (A severe disappointment, given my supervisor at Cambridge had once described me as one of the people most suited to research he had ever encountered.)

Of course, even in the most repressively dogmatic system there will be the odd lucky exception who somehow slips through the net. So we get the occasional academic prepared to question the orthodoxy of their own subject. Usually they do this fairly late in life, after first having made careers out of supporting the orthodoxy. Recently, for example, we had a couple of senior academics criticising the economics of happiness (some months after I had first done so).

Sometimes I wonder whether these 'rebels' are promoted in order to undermine the claim that there is anything wrong with academia. "See, it's perfectly possible to be a maverick and still have a respectable Professorship." Apart from the fact that criticism by such individuals is generally on the dilute side, the ability to point to a handful of 'dissident' insiders doesn't really bear on the issue of whether it's possible in general to make a career in academia if you are sceptical of the orthodoxy to begin with. Especially if you do not have a taste for recycling what you realise is vacuous, for the sake of climbing the professional ladder — with the possible compensation of making a secondary career from criticising what you previously endorsed, thirty years down the line.

* * * * *

Massification of degrees is said to be inevitable because everyone now aspires to higher education. Fine, but instead of letting the market provide this extension to the old model, it’s taken to mean turning the university system into an arm of the welfare state, rather like the NHS. I.e. run by the state, with everyone having equal entitlement to a low grade product, and subsidy based on poverty rather than ability. With the concept of academic selection increasingly regarded as unacceptable, and selection in any case becoming impossible as exams are engineered to achieve egalitarian outcomes, it is not surprising that the idea of university entrance by lottery is becoming a plausible option.

I have never seen a meaningful case made for a majority needing to go to college; this is now simply assumed in the most handwaving way (no substantive argument required) by both Left and Right. The hidden assumption that ability is not inherited is used to discriminate against people from social groups considered to be over-represented. The fact that little of benefit is acquired by most undergraduates is concealed by ensuring that everyone receives a qualification at the end of the process.

The net result is that academics are being forced to become badly paid handmaidens to a system which will be primarily about promoting equality and inclusion, like state school teachers already are. They are now also required to comply with increasing levels of state bureaucracy, and are monitored and assessed by government auditors — not that this is any more conducive to quality than its counterpart in the NHS.

The modern academic is expected to narrow his or her focus to a tiny detailed area. Specialisation is usually said to be an inevitable feature of modern research, but it’s partly a consequence of massification, and the implicit assumption that the whole academic enterprise should operate as a kind of a hive mind with every cog playing its small part. Democratisation demands that everyone get 'training' and have a go, and egalitarianism stipulates that no one is better than anyone else. This creates a system in which everyone is expected to find a tiny insignificant niche in which to make themselves comfortable. The level of support is cut, while the number of 'researchers' is increased.

Few people with influence appear to have much incentive to speak out about this. There are too many vested interests involved. And being honest for its own sake has become unfashionable. A small minority of journalists manage to make careers out of criticising the prevailing cultural ideology, but are apparently unwilling to do the slightest thing to help exiled academics like me or my colleagues at Oxford Forum, e.g. by mentioning dissident publications in their newspaper columns. Though being quite happy, in some cases, to make use of the ideas in their own writings.

It has of course become distinctly unfashionable to criticise contemporary culture. It’s been done, the story goes, now get over it. (Though the criticism we’ve had has been principally about the dumbing down, rather than about the vacuous technicality.)

It doesn’t help that there’s an awful lot of 'academic' activity out there these days. There are, for example, said to be ten thousand academic philosophers in the US. This creates the misleading impression that, whatever requires support at the moment, it is not intellectuals.

* * * * *

Some think the web will break the stranglehold of the cultural establishment. Systems like Wikipedia, run largely by intelligent amateurs, can offer alternative viewpoints, and even criticise some of the more obvious prejudices of the establishment. (I believe Wikipedia’s success derives partly from the fact that much of the cultural establishment no longer generates material that is usable or useful.) The long tail effect may also help to preserve unfashionable products already in existence whose influence would otherwise be lost.

But technology by itself can only go so far: it can preserve but it cannot create. Significant cultural innovation requires some individuals to be free from the usual pressure of earning a living, and that still depends (as it has always done) on private capital — for which few on the Left or Right have anything good to say these days. There’s a tendency to confuse (a) the capacity of the web to criticise nonsense with (b) the 'wisdom of crowds', and to assume that it’s sheer numbers which make the web valuable. Look for example at the comments section of online Guardian articles (much heat, little light) and you’ll realise the folly of this.

Some people (including some outside the academic establishment) try to be professional intellectuals on the web, e.g. by having blogs with an academic flavour. I haven’t bothered myself, because I know the best payoff I could hope for would be a part-time career on the fringes of journalism. Any blogger expecting that society will recognise and reward their intellectual activity on its own merits will certainly be disappointed. The modern world does not work like that.

When my colleague Celia Green tried years ago to demonstrate her aptitude for research by pioneering several topics of research in psychology via her own research organisation, all that happened was that people already in the academic system used her ideas as the basis for their careers. And that was before the obsession with certification and institutionalisation had become as pervasive as it is now.

No longer necessary to be 'left'

Terry Eagleton has used the revised Introduction in the latest edition of his book Ideology to criticise Manchester University colleague Martin Amis, implicitly accusing him of lurching to the right. (It would be interesting to get some insider insight on this academic quarrel, say from a fellow Manchester luminary ...)

Eagleton is quoted in the Sunday Times as saying:

The left was in the ascendant [in the 70s] and there was a sense we might break through.

He was quite right of course; the Left did break through, and came to rule the cultural roost. Nowadays, however, leftist philosophy has become absorbed into mainstream culture. More or less everyone in the cultural establishment is (effectively) a leftist, compared to the perspective that was the 'centre' in the seventies. You can see it in 'conservatives' from David Cameron to Gabriel Rozenberg. It has become passé and unnecessary to identify yourself as 'socialist', which is why, in some ways, Eagleton is seen as a bit of a dinosaur. (In spite of this, he is still highly influential.)

With a score of four, Eagleton is the third most quoted individual in the Mediocracy book, after Tony Blair with seven, and Catherine Belsey (via her primer on poststructuralism) with five.

With respect to this incident, Professor Eagleton seems to be aptly demonstrating this particular quote from him:

There is no possibility of a wholly disinterested statement. *

His attack on Amis certainly does not seem disinterested or 'value-neutral'. My favourite among the four Eagleton quotes I used in my book is the following:

Pointlessness is a deeply subversive affair. **

This could be inverted: 'subversion' (the restricted kind approved of by the il-liberal elite) is a deeply pointless affair.

* Literary Theory: An Introduction (Second Edition), Blackwell 1996, p.12.
** After Theory, Penguin 2004, p.39.

Update
Someone left the following comment for me at MyBlogLog, providing a fascinating insight into contemporary lit.crit.
"I loved the thing you wrote about Eagleton. Absolutely on button. I often like to think I can’t get a job in academia because of academics such as him. The mention of Catherine Belsey reminded me of one of the oddest experiences of university when she turned up to give a lecture. Another academic tore into her after a particularly poor lecture on gender and images of cherubs in Renaissance literature and art. He pointed out that she was talking rot, given that you couldn’t actually see penises on any of the Cupids she’d shown us. She was blushing at the end of half an hour after the whole room had spent their Q&A time looking for mythical dicks on angels."

Liberal posturing

President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger:

this is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself ... [In] universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth. We do not have access to the levers of power. We cannot make war or peace. We can only make minds. And to do this we must have the most full freedom of inquiry.

On Monday, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia. This, not surprisingly, aroused some controversy. Columbia claimed its right to invite whom it likes, as part of its remit of promoting free debate. Fair enough.

But claiming that this demonstrates the perfect liberality of the contemporary academic community, and its tolerance of the full range of viewpoints? "In universities, we have a deep and almost single-minded commitment to pursue the truth"? Excuse me if I'm a little sceptical. Bollinger claimed that they would have invited Hitler if he had been willing to engage in debate. This seems disingenuous. I cannot imagine Columbia inviting (say) Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider — or, come to that, anyone with seriously non-PC views.

Stanford cannot even elect Donald Rumsfeld to a Hoover Institution fellowship without faculty members being up in arms about it. Harvard could not bear its President Larry Summers suggesting that inequality between the sexes might have something to do with genetic endowment.

In January 2005 Summers suggested ... the possibility that many factors outside of socialization could explain why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering positions. He suggested one such possible reason could be men's higher variance in relevant innate abilities or innate preference ... On March 15 2005, members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a motion of "lack of confidence" in the leadership of Summers. (Wikipedia)

The US is one of the few places where an explicitly conservative academic body (Hoover) is permitted to exist in association with an A-list university (Stanford). In Britain, the kind of hoo-ha over Rumsfeld couldn't happen: someone of an obviously right-wing persuasion would never be considered for faculty in the first place.

A mediocracy likes to take pride in its supposed tolerance and liberality. What it is actually tolerant and liberal towards may be rather specific, e.g. sex, rudeness, brutality in movies, certain types of crime, resentment of inequality, other cultures (provided they are large enough).

On the other hand, things which mediocracy tolerates only grudgingly if at all include: capital accumulation, celibacy, non-egalitarian ideologies, non-proletarian versions of masculinity, private medicine, business, Christianity, hierarchy, and aristocracy. What distinguishes mediocracy, then, is not greater tolerance per se, but an ideological shift accompanied by promotion of some things and disapproval of others.

If you want some ideas about why Islam seems to pass ideological criteria for being tolerated better than Christianity does, see this post at Protein Wisdom.

More scepticism about Columbia's moral high ground here.

Some ideas are more peddleable than others

Bryan Appleyard interviewing novelist V.S. Naipaul:

He realised the extent of [his] isolation when, after publication [of Among the Believers] he was invited to Harvard. “They wanted to have a discussion with me — that’s what they said. They wanted no such thing. They wanted the fellows of their institute to all say their piece of rage and criticism. It was such a shocking occasion." ...

Harvard — and many other experiences — convinced him that nothing was to be expected of academia. And he has, ever since, been one of the harshest critics of universities. “I think academics are bad. They spread ideas about things that they are determined to get one to accept. They have their ideas about multiculturalism, for example, or about Africa. They distort publishing to some extent. They publish the books for these courses, and it gives an illusion for great popularity, of ideas sweeping the world. But they’re not.”

Rage masquerading as "discussion"; viewpoints which must be accepted; distortion of publishing — this all sounds fairly familiar to me.

Politically, he inspires intense unease. When he won the Nobel prize, in 2001, no invitation arrived from Downing Street. Blair was, perhaps, not big enough to overlook Naipaul’s past rudeness. “I said he was a pirate in 1999, or whenever it was. I said something about the dangers of encouraging a popular culture that honours only itself. These are good thoughts, interesting thoughts.” Big chuckle.

But the point is that Blair was something of a pirate, radical Islamism is an anti-intellectual creed of mad delusions, and academics do peddle ideas for the sake of it.

Mr Appleyard seems to be missing the point here. The problem highlighted by Naipaul isn't that academics "peddle ideas for the sake of it", but that there is now a stringent selection system about which ideas they are allowed to peddle, and what kinds of politics or worldview those ideas are permitted to support.

Another kind of pseudoscience

Imagine an economy in which the following hold true: (a) it is ruled by a dictator who has unlimited powers of intervention, (b) this dictator likes to think of himself as maximising the welfare of his society, (c) he thinks many market participants have some kind of bias (e.g. sexism) which he believes results in a suboptimal economic outcome, (d) he wants to know: how much of society’s resources should be allocated to fighting bias?

Now clearly the answer, given those assumptions, is going to be “some”, with the details depending on the benefit versus cost of fighting bias, which will probably exhibit diminishing returns. Any more specific answer will be sensitive to the precise parameters, in ways which are likely to be fairly predictable. (E.g. the longer it takes to shift bias, and the more impatient the average person is, the less we should devote to fighting it.)

So you might think that mathematicising the problem is not going to prove particularly illuminating. However, this is to misunderstand the role of modern academia, which is not to illuminate but to provide an ersatz product that will conceal the absence of genuinely progressive intellectual activity. This object is achieved by demonstrating technical expertise in a way which is difficult to criticise by outsiders and which also provides, where possible, incidental reinforcement for the prevailing ideology.

Here is how a trained economist ⁽¹⁾ would nowadays be expected to present the above problem:

Now this looks very clever. And anyone except another trained economist would find it difficult to recognise that the mathematics does not really add much. This model, which is fairly typical, suffers from several flaws:
a) It does not really contribute anything to understanding the problem.
b) The conclusions it yields cannot go beyond what could be ascertained by non-mathematical logic.
c) It conceals its most crucial assumptions ⁽²⁾, e.g.
- that individuals are homogeneous,
- that a meaningful ‘welfare function’ can be constructed as a proxy for an aggregate ‘good of society’,
- the presupposition of a 'benevolent dictator',
- and the idea that the choices of an exogenous welfare-maximiser shed light on what is desirable in practice for a real economy.

As someone who was on the inside of academic economics not so long ago, I can confirm that much of contemporary economics is like this. And I suspect many other areas of social science suffer from similar pseudo-scientification. Now wouldn't it be interesting if Professor Dawkins had a go at that?

(1) Although the author of this model appears to be a young economics graduate — whom I certainly do not mean to single out for criticism — his model is a variation on a fairly standard workhorse of economics 'research'.
(2) When I say the most important assumptions are concealed, I don't mean specifically in the context of the blog post from which this model is taken, which I realise is not intended to be a full-blown academic contribution. Nevertheless, the assumptions I list are ones which are typically not stressed and heavily signposted (as they should be) in papers that use such models.

Update: trained economist Gabriel replies.

"Technical specialists"

Friedrich Hayek wrote in The Counter-Revolution of Science:

[In the early nineteenth century] that new type appeared which, as the the product of the German Realschule and of similar institutions, was to become so important and influential in the later nineteenth and the twentieth century: the technical specialist who was regarded as educated because he had passed through difficult schools but who had little or no knowledge of society, its life, growth, problems and values, which only the study of history, literature and languages can give.

I believe what Hayek meant here is that (e.g.) a highly trained climatologist would not necessarily know much about history or politics, and that this might be regrettable.

Peter Klein, commenting on this, writes:

In economics especially but also in sociology, political science, psychology, and other social sciences we have trained many generations of such “technical specialists.” Is this wise? Put differently, would a typical PhD student in one of these fields benefit more, on the margin, from taking a course in history or literature or philosophy instead of one more course in quantitative methods?

But this seems to me to be comparing apples and oranges. The nineteenth century specialists Hayek was referring to in the quote actually had some expertise that was useful, even if they knew about very little outside their field. It is questionable whether the modern average PhD economist has anything much to contribute. That is, apart from dodgy models designed to appear impressive by being presented using abstruse mathematics, which are incomprehensible to more than a handful of insiders, and don't generate any useful conclusions. Probably ditto for sociologists and political scientists. What do these people actually contribute to our understanding of real phenomena?

The answer to Klein's question is, the typical PhD student — and economics in general — would benefit more from taking no quantitative courses whatsoever, and instead spending time thinking about fundamental issues. And not just "at the margin".

PS
Having queried this post by Klein, I should in fairness mention that he does (elsewhere) at least allude to the over-technification of theoretical economics, and therefore represents a distinctly abnormal exception to the rule of contemporary academia. Here, he doesn't quite dare to criticise the 'economist' (= game theorist) Ariel Rubinstein, but at least he draws attention to the fact that for Rubinstein, "economics is primarily an intellectual game, an exercise in puzzle-solving, an attempt to construct clever fables". Fine, but could we please shift people such as Rubinstein (Jean Tirole, Philippe Aghion, Oliver Hart, etc. — i.e. the bulk of the modern Western economics faculty) into a new discipline "mathematical fables for intellectual trivialists", and re-build economics on the ruins of the old neoclassical stuff? Which wasn't that wonderful but at least was reasonably coherent and lucid.

The bias of cognitive bias theory

This article strikes me as a textbook illustration of the fact that much of post-war academic research in the humanities has a tendentious character. That is to say, it appears to be motivated by ideological considerations. And not in the sense which most humanities academics mean when they talk about "ideology". (They confine their use of this term to criticisms of capitalism.)

What I mean is that such research, although not incorrect, and sometimes even illuminating, appears to be motivated by a desire to make anti-individualist points. And is duly used for this purpose. Sometimes, as in this case, the use may be inappropriate, but it doesn't really matter. The object — to create a different worldview in which the old concept of 'the individual' is undermined — has been achieved.

The article by Professor Norman Siebrasse, on the Oxford-University-associated blog Overcoming Bias, invokes two classic examples of such anti-individual research: (i) the concept of "cognitive bias" and (ii) the Prisoner's Dilemma model.

The idea of cognitive bias is fashionable because it allows society to question the decisions and preferences of the individual. You may observe that it is particular popular with commentators of a leftist persuasion. By contrast, the idea that the state is biased by the motivations of its agents has hardly been explored. To the extent it has, by people like James Buchanan and Eric Nordlinger, the research in question is distinctly unfashionable. Enthusiasm for cognitive bias theory in its usual form could therefore itself be regarded as a form of cognitive bias.

The Prisoner's Dilemma, as I explained here, has received the massive exposure it has — not, as Adam Curtis of The Trap ludicrously suggested, because it promotes the idea that people behave mechanically (although he is right that this mechanistic ideology has been widely peddled by academia) — but because it is one of the few basic models of microeconomics which suggests, at least at first sight, that markets could fail.

Siebrasse invokes these two concepts in critically considering the right to privacy. He complains that "in much of the debate as reported in the media no argument at all is made in favour of privacy — it is just accepted as presumptively good", and that he has "never come across a sound policy argument that justifies a general presumption in favour of privacy".

But to put the argument in this form (i.e. "please give a social justification") already predetermines the type of answer you are going to get. The point is that everyone wants the right to privacy, for themselves, other things being equal. It is a freedom to choose. If you have the right, you can if you wish expose yourself exhibitionistically on the internet (for example). Without the right, it is other people who will determine if you have privacy in practice.

Like any other liberty, privacy should be regarded as a basic right which does not need justification. It may then need to compete against other claims, e.g. the need to detect crime. Demanding that there be utilitarian justifications for the basic right is pointless. If you must pursue that line, take it back to the question of whether there are good enough arguments for liberty per se. Although I happen to think doing so is to be equally avoided, since that too is a type of question the mere posing of which — "can we justify this in terms of the good to society?" — to a large extent shapes the answer.

Having decided that privacy doesn't make a lot of sense, Siebrasse reckons it must be a cognitive bias. This is rather a popular line among contemporary intellectuals. We don't quite approve of what people seem to want? It doesn't fit with normative ideals as formulated by humanities professors? Must be a cognitive bias.

Of the two possible cognitive biases which Siebrasse considers as explanations of the preference for privacy, he leans towards the hypothesis that we have been hardwired for a type of Prisoner's Dilemma.

Suppose that free flow of information is in fact that the best social policy. This would set up a classic prisoners’ dilemma: the best case overall is if no one keeps information private, but the best case for me is that I keep my information private and everyone else reveals theirs. Since everyone has the same reasoning, everyone elects to keep their information private, even though free flow of information would be substantively desirable.

Now labelling the preference as a Prisoner's Dilemma sounds good, because it implies a type of tragedy of the commons in which everyone is worse off, but could be made better off by means of intervention by an outside agency (i.e. the state). But I find the use of PD here somewhat implausible. In PD-type situations, individuals are typically aware of what they are missing out on. Those overgrazing a piece of land would surely say, "yes, it's a shame we can't cooperate about this". Or they would create a framework for cooperating; that is after all the purpose of many aspects of civil legislation. But I see no reason to think that most members of the public would regard current information-sharing between them as seriously suboptimal. Not pre-9/11, and not even now. Suggestions that it would be in our interest to reduce privacy seem to come largely from government representatives or their mouthpieces.

There may of course be a demand from one section of the population that more information about members of another section (e.g. the rich and famous) be made available. That, however, is not a Prisoner's Dilemma.

Surviving in a mediocracy (part 5)

Parts 1 to 5 in full here.

Daring to question the consensus

Fairly or unfairly, Robert Fisk is a man not much loved by the blogosphere. Yet perhaps there is something to be said for him. When doing research for the Mediocracy book I scoured the pages of dozens of publications, looking for criticism of the prevailing state of academia and its "high on technicality, low on content" approach. Surely there were some journalists or intellectuals out there, not academics themselves, prepared to question this ludicrous state of affairs? In fact, with the exception of a few people like Ophelia Benson pointing out the absurdities of one specific area (postmodernism), I found not a single instance. Except this one allusion to there being a problem — by Mr Fisk.

It's a new and dangerous phenomenon I'm talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past 20 years; after all, any non-university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or '30s and — however Hegelian the subject — fully understand its meaning. No longer.

Other mainstream commentators don’t question this state of affairs, perhaps because they no longer think of research as something which is capable of being done outside academia, but simply as whatever happens to be done at universities. The definition of e.g. philosophy has become, “whatever is done under that name at a recognised academic institution”. Certification has become more important than content, and quality is no longer seen as assessable by an untrained person. The fact that many of the key innovations in the history of knowledge were made outside universities is conveniently forgotten. Someone working outside a university today can be ignored, since by definition they cannot be doing research.

An alternative response for critics — particularly popular among the Right — is to belittle academia in toto, and support demands for it to be selectively dismantled (e.g. keep applied sciences, ditch humanities), pseudo-marketised*, de-funded, monitored or otherwise penalised. One American columnist has even suggested that "by having leftist academics on college campuses, the rest of us have them right where we want them." A possible (though short-sighted) response for non-academics; not so good for those of us whose chance for making a living out of being an intellectual has gone down the sewer.

The few within the academic system who are still prepared to criticise publicly the changes being forced upon them (e.g. Antony Flew, Anthony O’Hear, Frank Furedi, Kenneth Minogue or Larry Summers) come from the older generation. When they’ve gone, there may be no one to remind us how things could be different.

[to be continued]

* The issue of whether it would do good to marketise the university system is a complex one, not least because any strategy would almost certainly involve partial marketisation. For some background to this, see here.

Surviving in a mediocracy (part 4)

Parts 1 to 4 in full here.

Nonsense on stilts

There are certain academic disciplines, such as applied chemistry or cell biology, where the criterion of generating testable hypotheses still dominates. As for the rest, you can more or less take it as read that they've been infected by left wing ideology and/or what I have called "technicality" — unnecessary (and often totally vacuous) technical complexity. There is something curiously universal about the quality of technicality, so that you often can't tell just from the isolated content whether you are dealing with supposed economics, or maths, or theoretical physics, or philosophy, or even literary theory.

PROPOSITION 3.2 The model has a stationary perfect equilibrium. If the game is symmetric, then there exists a symmetric stationary perfect equilibrium.

PROPOSITION 3.3 Suppose that P_A = P_B and c_A = c_B. Then symmetric equilibrium is unique if one of the following conditions holds:
(i) c_A(z) = c_B(z) = z_μ for some μ > 1;
(ii) N ≤ 3 and Assumption C3 holds;
(iii) N ≤ 5, c_A = c_B is twice continuously differentiable, and c″_A = c″_B is monotonic non-decreasing.

An organisation called the Post-Autistic Economics Network (PAECON) has formed around a group of 'deviants' who don't want to keep quiet about the fact that economics has become blighted by mathematical gobbledygook. Unfortunately, PAECON have got this issue mixed up with the claim that modern economics is biased in a right wing direction. They seem to believe this because economics tends to focus on markets. I think that's nonsense. It seems to me that the majority of post-war economists have been pretty desperate to find models which would justify intervention, it's just that it hasn't been easy. There's not much that can be proved with economics beyond the perfect competition model, which — unfortunately, from many people's point of view — is supportive of free market philosophy. That is why economists, and other social scientists, got so excited about the Prisoner's Dilemma (which allegedly demonstrates a market failure) and about game theory generally, and why John Nash is a much more prominent character in current economics textbooks than Ronald Coase.

The PAECON problem illustrates the curious fact that, even when it becomes impossible to suppress awareness that something is seriously wrong with some area of academia, the fallout is remarkably limited. Everyone seems to keep on going in pretty much the same old way.

Another area which it has become positively fashionable in some quarters to deride (because it's easy to do so), but where the effect of the derision has been minimal, is postmodernist philosophy. However, a dodgy system ridiculing its own excesses can easily end up being a way to sweep the more endemic problem under the carpet. It can be awfully convenient to identify some useful scapegoats, in order to pretend you're on the side of the critics. (A propaganda device employed by communist regimes, among others.)

The fact that the most prominent critique of postmodern academia, Intellectual Impostures, has come from academia itself is taken by some as a healthy sign. It could equally well be a sign that criticism of academia, even when any (intelligent) fool can see the nonsense for what it is, is now only permitted for those who have received 'training'. (Even so, the authors of Intellectual Impostures were castigated by some reviewers for not sticking to their own area of expertise.) I also find it ironic that the book essentially consisted of two physicists ridiculing the uses to which modern physics has been put by certain philosophers, when what has made this possible is the fact that much modern physics has the quality of gobbledygook to begin with.

A tiny proportion of academics still generate material of appeal to the layman, disguising the fact that the bulk of contemporary research is vacuous. For the most part they do so by (a) rehashing old material (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Paul Davies), (b) recovering old truths which had become unfashionable (e.g. Steven Pinker), or (c) making assertions which are tendentious to the extent they’re not trivial (e.g. Daniel Dennett, Simon Baron-Cohen, Jared Diamond).

People like me, who don’t want to generate pointless theory, or tedious data supportive of a pro-intervention agenda, or otherwise to reinforce the prevailing ideology, cannot get on in modern academia. Perhaps until recently they could, if they were willing to accept third class status by working in areas or institutions which (career-wise) meant the kiss of death. But even that option has practically disappeared, at least in Britain.

[to be continued]

Excerpt from: Professor Sir John Vickers and Professor Christopher Harris, ‘Racing with uncertainty’, Review of Economic Studies 54 (1987), pp.7-11.

Update
David Thompson — himself a regular critic of fashionable nonsense — mentions this post, and generates some interesting responses.

More on academic phoneyness

Further to this.

3) Academia, but not as we knew it

Sad, but true: this reflection from Madsen Pirie, President of the Adam Smith Institute, on how to get by in a mediocratised university system.

Lecturers solemnly assure [students] that they want [them] to be able to articulate and argue for their own views, and will not be marked down because they disagree with the views held or the conclusions reached by their teachers. Although they say this, and many of them believe it, I have encountered innumerable cases where it is not true. In some university departments there is a general presumption in favour of collectivism, and sometimes even of Marxism. ...

Many students quietly pay lip-service to their teachers' views, collect the marks, and forget about it afterwards. This is what I usually advise. If students express conflicting opinions, some teachers conclude that their understanding is deficient, or that they are in error rather than disagreement. ...

... the grades gained [at university] often have consequences in later life, perhaps providing entry into higher level jobs. The safest course is probably to do what it takes to get the good marks. ... I asked an investment banker how he coped with graduate recruits who might have been filled with ideas of little merit. Did his firm need to deprogramme them? He laughed and said, "No. The real world knocks that stuff out of them within three months." I wonder if it does?

In answer to Madsen's question, I would say: yes, in the sense that graduates don't apply any of the ideological teachings directly in their work (at least not in the private sector) or they'd soon be pulled up short by economic reality. But no, in the sense that those teachings probably colour their political views for the rest of their lives. Which may help explain why, for example, there seems to be general apathy about the proposal to strip 17-year-olds of their freedoms — although it strikes me as naive not to worry that this might be the thin end of a new wedge.

Madsen's counsel to students may seem cynical, but I might well give the same advice to people who don't have the stomach for making a fuss and evoking hostility. Which means the vast majority of people, in practice. (I made a fuss, sort of, but it didn't do me any good. Not that I'm sorry I did.)

On the other hand, I have considerable sympathy with the following comment on Madsen's post, by Shelagh Shepherd.

I think we all know this happens on a huge scale. The interesting question is what should the independent-minded student do about it. The answer is definitely not, as Madsen advises, to pander to the examiners’ prejudices in order to collect good marks. What ever happened to the idealism of youth? How will anything ever change if we don’t all speak out against this left-wing monopoly in education? If a young person starts on the slippery slope of compromising their principles while still at school/university, just think how practised and comfortable they are going to be with that process by the time they reach positions of power and influence.

"Think how comfortable they are going to be with compromising their principles by the time they reach positions of power." Yes, well, certain people come to mind, including certain leaders of certain opposition parties.

Update
Chris Dillow writes that he found the 'ideological teachings' of his Marxist economics tutor "tremendously helpful". What he actually means, I think, is that he found the offbeat economic models of Michal Kalecki, which his tutor imparted to him (partly, it appears, because said tutor shared Kalecki's Marxist sympathies), interesting and potentially useful. That's not really what I meant by 'ideology' though ...