After a few years of being a writer, Chimamanda Adichie — author of my Short Story of the Year — wondered if she should be a professor. (Her father is a statistics professor.) And she wanted to learn more about Africa. So she enrolled in an African Studies program at Yale. In an interview, she said:
I met very lovely people at Yale, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time. . . . After two years of the program . . . academia I discovered — particularly political science as it is done in the US — is not about the real world. It’s about academia. I would joke and say that what they do is they create straw men, and they beat them down. While all this is going on, the real world is going on in a parallel universe. It is completely disconnected from what happens in academia. I didn’t understand most of what I read. It wasn’t written in English, it was written in political-science jargonese.
This is the usual critique, but it is well-put. If you spend enough time in academia, as I have, you can see it becoming that way, disciplines turning inward, becoming less and less interested in reality. Becoming more and more ivory-towerish. Statistics, for example, became less and less concerned with real-world problems; but I could say the same about every other area (engineering, English, etc.).
This is glaringly obvious, roughly as clear as the sun rising in the morning, but some Berkeley professors denied it. “English departments have really lost their way,” I would say. No they haven’t would be the reply.
I’m in the natural sciences and this hasn’t been my experience, though I can see how it would be the case with — particularly — economics and political science.
Jeff, I think the older the science the less clear is the trend — because it has been going on longer. Psychology and statistics are much younger than physics and chemistry.
Astronomy is the oldest of all, and astronomers are off in cloud cuckoo land chasing “Dark Energy”. Physics is second-oldest, and they’re off chasing Strings. Probably those problems turn largely on how much money is at stake. Telescopes and colliders don’t come cheap these days. Surprises are hazardous.
In economics, it costs nothing to study practically anything, so it’s probably the political consequences that mire them. According to Alan Greenspan, ironically, economists in the U.S.S.R. were free to study anything they liked, because no one paid them any attention, and they had no reliable domestic data, so they studied western finance. Paleontologists still seem admirably well connected to the data, although their poverty can make them touchy and moody. Engineering is about as stable as any department can be, because if their stuff doesn’t work, everybody notices.
Yes, paleontologists seem immune from this. Engineering however is a prime example. Engineering profs work on stuff that will — 95% of it, one grad student said — never be used. One engineering asst prof complained to me how little her department cared about actual stuff. They liked theory.
It’s not a problem if 95% of the stuff doesn’t get used if they follow big ideas that have a chance of success of 5% but a potential massive payoff.
It only becomes a problem when you can say with near 100% certainty of 95% of the projects when those projects are started that they won’t be successful.
As a lot of fields grow with Moore’s law and a good chunk of the patents come out of academia engineering works.
Nathan, you clearly have only a layman’s grasp of astronomy and physics. It’s typical for laymen to get caught up in semantics — “dark matter”, “the god particle”, “superstrings”, etc — without having the faintest grasp of what those words represent or their relevance and importance in human intellectual achievement.
Jeff: If you can point to a single prediction subsequently observed from either of the Dark Energy or String notions, I will concede utterly. I didn’t mention dark matter, but that has also not produced testable predictions, except insofar as they have frequently been able to account for anomalous observations by assuming appropriate amounts of it sprinkled about. This might count for something, because it’s easy to imagine cases that couldn’t be accounted for by any such distribution, but I don’t suppose we’d hear much about those cases. Talk of a “god particle” is unadulterated PR; the less said about it the better.
Seth: To ask for “facts supporting” a notion isn’t meaningful, but successful predictions can count for a lot if nothing else predicts the same. Engineering departments rise and fall, but people notice where actual advances come out of.
Nathan, you called Stephen McIntyre and Freeman Dyson “dishonest”, I asked for examples, you have failed to provide them. Duly noted.
Seth: I didn’t say Dyson was dishonest, I said his comments were meaningless. He has been promoting magic tree-breeding for many decades. He has inspired nobody to work on it at all, but magic trees are all he offers. Detailed McIntyre takedowns are easy to google up. If you don’t care what they say, they’re even easier to ignore. Are you aware of the concept of selection bias?
@ Nathan Myers
Could you please clarify somewhat your comment, “Surprises are hazardous.” ?
From the context, you seem to be saying that experimental surprises would be hazardous to continued funding of gigantic equipment — which leads astronomers and physicists to avoid testable predictions. Have I got that right?
Nansen: That’s the theory. Of course the reality is more interesting. Researchers know not being tested leaves them in limbo, but have little choice about what to work on.
See also this excellent article called, “Letter from Yale”, by Helena Echlin:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040427073259/https://www.zmag.org/letter_from_yale.htm
(Give it a moment to load — the original seems to be unavailable, so I’ve posted a link to the Internet Archive.)