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I think a decent theory of information and institutions is the most mission critical thing not only for academia, but for society in general. With all the resources going to academia, how much of them are focused on understanding the behavior of organizations? It's a reasonably tractable problem that's way underdeveloped, and would allow us to design new institutions that behave the way we want, rather than being beholden to institutions that having to tolerate the ubiquity of organizations with outcomes antithetical to the goals of the members. The first problem to focus on could be assessing the effect of a decade-long induction process to be considered qualified to make the most miniscule contribution to academia. I feel like I've noticed academics getting more and more cloistered, many of them rabidly defensive, completely shunning anyone with the slightest criticism of the process, credentialed and not alike. I'm guessing it has to do with (a) the thinning out of public resources, so more competition, more consequences to being wrong, more emphasis on sounding right rather than being right. (b) the fact that in most fields, the point of diminishing returns has been reached on the foundational axioms that define the field. And yet, defining a new field with new foundational axioms is extremely difficult, with scarce resources to explore it. You could readily define new kinds of mathematics with different axia. The hard part is building off of those axia to make useful theorems. Some axia might lend themselves more readily to proving one theorem versus another, or might make it easier to model one thing versus another. We can see this with ZFC versus category theory. Similarly, analyzing fluids in terms of laminar versus turbulent flow yields distinct benefits. They rely on models with different core assumption. At the foundation of every field (or subfield) is a model & set of core assumptions that allows work to be built on top of them. Market economics versus game theory is a good example. The two models hold fundamentally different assumptions. Game theory is studied in economics departments, though, so its full potential isn't tapped. Any results from game theory can't too directly contradict what's come from market economics if it wants to get taken seriously in an economics department. If game theory had developed as a branch of sociology instead, we might see a very different ideas coming from it. No matter what, it can only be developed in directions is can get funding for. If we really want to get at the truth, for every assumption we make, we should also define and investigate a theory that has the opposite assumption. For instance particles are indistinguishable. Great, that has yielded immeasurable results. Now let's fully flesh out at least one model that assumes they are distinguishable and hammer results out of it until they meet experimental predictions, too. We will likely find that there are some situations it can describe much more richly than our current models. And, that way people aren't going around forgetting it was an assumption to begin with. |