[dwaltrip]

Sure, our academic institutions have issues. We can argue about the exact severity, but that isn't terribly interesting. We can make efforts to improve this. We can try to learn more about where we go wrong.

I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understanding, and culture, and these imperfect institutions have played an important role. It is easy to forget that sometimes.

[NotAnEconomist]

> I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understanding, and culture, and these imperfect institutions have played an important role. It is easy to forget that sometimes.

This is a deep fallacy, and why the "halo effect" works.

The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues. Their downfall was much longer, but it's clear that in many cases, adherence to "politically correct" dogma has replaced genuine inquiry and the standards to which these institutions used to adhere.

Some of which, while we're on the topic of Russian political interference (as a society), was originally sponsored disruption by the USSR now spawning child political movements in the US.

[dwaltrip]

I'm not advocating blind trust or the ignorance of any problems. In my first paragraph I made that quite clear by saying we should continually work to find where we can do better. For example, it is clear that new problems are arising as our scientific efforts scale up and become larger and more formalized.

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues.

This is a dramatic claim -- literally all of academia is utterly ruined?

It seems to me that things are not so apocalyptic. Do you have anything to back this up?

[barry-cotter]

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues. Their downfall was much longer, but it's clear that in many cases, adherence to "politically correct" dogma has replaced genuine inquiry and the standards to which these institutions used to adhere.

This is wildly overstated. Things were never “good” and the institutions of which you speak were never pure. Most of the world think Joseph McCarthy was a madman sniffing at ghosts when he was right, the US government was riddled with Soviet spies from top to bottom.

The US and the West more generally are still well ahead of any conceivable competition in scientific and technical fields. China is doing well and will improve even more but they’ve passed peak Chinese workforce and demographic momentum means that absent artificial wombs there will be fewer Chinese in 2060 than there are now.

[leereeves]

It would also be unwise to blindly trust these institutions, or to grant them respect or credence as a whole without considering the problems and biases of specific fields.

And it should be remembered that the amazing gains in knowledge humanity has made have often been opposed by academia, as Max Planck observed: science advances one funeral at at time.

[ben_w]

If you trust it blindly, it’s not science, it’s a cult of title and rank.

Unfortunately, trusting it blindly is also necessary when you’re not active in the field. Even worse, nobody can spend enough time to be active in all fields.

I don’t know how best to balance Mr (formerly Dr) Andrew Wakefield versus Dr Ignaz Semmelweis.

[roenxi]

> If you trust it blindly, it’s not science, it’s a cult of title and rank.

A true but slightly inflammatory first line for something that everyone does. There aren't enough hours in a 70 year lifetime to make every decision using critical thinking - everyone uses title, rank and social proof for shortcuts.

My experience is that there are many people who claim to be arguing from scientific evidence when they are in fact not - and I think it is because they don't realise that (a) being smart is no defense whatsoever against using cognitive shortcuts and (b) thinking non-critically is actually likely to be a better personal strategy for most decisions.

[mistermann]

> Unfortunately, trusting it blindly is also necessary when you’re not active in the field.

This is technically not true. It might be a good idea in the aggregate, but it's not necessary in the aggregate, or necessarily a good idea in more specific scenarios.

[leereeves]

But blind trust is what this article is suggesting by comparing demands for evidence to "denial of service attacks":

> Quickly, the 80% can overwhelm the 20% with demands for explanations and evidence. ... Every minute spent refuting X takes away energy that could be spent refining Y.

Sorry, but providing explanations and evidence to the 80% is necessary. The fact that academia doesn't reward this behavior is a problem with academia, not with the people demanding explanations and evidence.

[dwaltrip]

I agree, blind trust is a dangerous thing. Healthy skepticism is important. However, we also have to choose which battles are worth fighting, and carefully evaluate when and where our skepticism can be most usefully and proportionately focused.