I think this is why scientific culture was incubated mostly by "gentlemen" i.e. landowning aristocrats, who had a stable source of income for life that would not be imperiled by anything they said or wrote, hence why you can "trust the word of a gentleman". Our academic tenure system appears to be an attempt to replicate this, but in practice few academics take advantage of the freedom their tenure seems to afford them (perhaps correctly judging that the protection are weaker than they seem). The paradoxical conclusion is that we need to reduce the amount of accountability in research funding, and hand out larger chunks of resources to younger scholars to do with as they please. The All Souls College Examination Fellowship (https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-information) is a good example of this, giving students that win a contest 7 years of funding free from all external pressure.
As you note, America is filled with tenured professors who can say more or less whatever they want. It doesn't help, academia is still a monoculture and still flooded with BS and fraud. As Ruxandra says this is because what academics fear isn't job losses. How often do non-conservative academics lose their job over an intellectual dispute anyway? Approximately never. You can't even get them fired when they're clearly faking data. What they fear is loss of prestige and attention. Making the purse strings even looser won't solve this problem and it's ridiculous anyone thinks it will, yet this is easily the most common suggestion you see academics or academic-adjacent people come up with.
There aren't enough actually conservative academics for them to have much of a share of job-losses. Instead the people being purged for ideological reasons will be people who identify as left of the center of American politics, but who have colleagues who identify as even further left and consider the purged rightists as a result.
I think you drastically underestimate the extent to which yesterdays gentlemen were creatures of status. They may not have worried that their lands would be taken away, but they would certainly have worried that they would fall out of favor with this or that lord or that they would stop being invited to parties or to go hunting. Lower classes have always been willing to be more blunt and crass in their language because they don't hyper focus on status the way that elites do. I think the only difference between today's and yesterday's elites is simply how much more public their writing can be.
Within all wealth brackets are people chasing status, and people who aren't. There are billionaires that have breakfasts at McDonalds, live in moderate houses, drive old cars, wear Gap. Then there are people who will buy a £1000 on a Canada Goose coat on credit and the moment they have a spare £20K would buy a Rolex with it.
Agree that gentlemen were largely status-motivated; but somehow the early scientists created a strange insular status hierarchy where mucking around with lenses and chemicals was higher status than hunting, war, and being witty at dinner parties.
very interesting. John Lilburne's life is quite fascinating in this respect - how he endured so much time in prison i have no idea, (not to mention punishments)at least 5 stints all for ideas, and he never seemed to learn his lesson.
Even at research universities, only abut 1/3 of job listings are for tenure-track positions. Getting tenure is increasingly rare. At least in the USA the idea of professors being tenured and thus able to speak their minds is outdated.
Great point and a really interesting way to think about courage. I teach leadership classes to police managers and one of the things I talk about its the distinction between physical courage and social courage. Physical courage is actually pretty easy (not that everyone has it but of the two its easier). Social courage is much more difficult and a lot of the folks who display social courage are not even really that courageous...they are just disagreeable nature, so it comes easier to them. I suspect what I am calling social courage is closely related to your idea of low upside courage.
I will say that some institutions have set up mechanisms to overcome this. In particular both military and police tactical teams (SWAT Teams or high-speed military units) have developed debriefing systems and planning systems that make it much easier to display the low upside courage you describe. It involves a systematic process that requires some degree of self-criticism, group criticism and acknowledges that conflict in pursuit of the mission is desirable but being contentious just to be seen as right is for dumbasses (i.e., getting it right versus being right)
I agree this is a massive problem, I see it in my own profession (horse training) as well. There are some big problems facing the horse industry as a whole, but very few people really want to be honest about the issues and possible solutions, for fear of becoming persona non grata and losing clients. In this end the inability to honestly discuss the issues means we have no decent methodology for arriving at the truth and I guess we just hope to stumble on it by accident.
I was reading John Keegan's history of the American Civil War (it's one of his less good ones, but it has its moments), and near the end he asks the question of why men would participate in charges in which 30% of them would be casualties. The answer seems to be "because they don't want to look like cowards in front of their friends". I think this, rather than winning anything, is the main reason ordinary people display bravery in battle. Likewise, if you are a young man in Ukraine right now, you have to be thinking that for the rest of your life people will ask what you did in the war. Do you want the answer to be "I hid in my mom's basement from the conscription board until I snuck into Poland at night"? Frankly, I'd rather be killed in battle than have to tell people that.
In other words, I think men fight in wars for the same reason academics avoid rocking the boat: they are scared of social opprobrium. Unless there is some pressure away from conformity, unless you are scared of being seen as subservient to the academic/university establishment instead of defiant towards it, the natural tendency will be to avoid showing intellectual courage.
This is one of the unintended consequences we are now discovering of a concentrated war to stamp out conformity and peer pressure in society in favor of individual empowerment. The net may still be quite positive, but if we’re not the individual freedom-loving absolutists that the empowerment philosophy imagines, the marginal calculus could well be different.
I think that being interdisciplinary has helped me have “more courage”.
So I have degrees from 3 different departments, then left one discipline as I didn’t like its strictures. Now, being interdisciplinary exposes me to a broader range of perspectives, helps me be more critical, as I’m less prone to group think, as I’m not beholden to any gate keepers, so there is less fear of ostracism.
I liken myself to a desert nomad. The city folk can’t threaten to outcaste me, I’m already in the desert! 😛
Poignant stuff; I wish I knew a 'how'. I do think some academics can hide behind the cancel environment to obscure what is actually good, old-fashioned intellectual laziness/cowardice (am I being too harsh?). In my anecdotal experience, academics can be a little bit like loudmouths in pubs (the two not being mutually exclusive, of course). It's easy to tell a table of your mates how you'd 'do that guy in', less so when you're alone in the ring with them.
In some fields, I think this is exacerbated by something you describe in the article: the notion that being an academic is a career and not a vocation. I'm not naive, if we don't want to limit faculties to whatever's left of the leisure classes, people have to earn a decent wage with at least some expectation of advancement. Nevertheless, when people are understandably more concerned with 'getting on', what incentive is there for the courage you describe?
(Basically repeating what you said, but I feel it deeply.)
As a mentor of mine said to a fresh group of history postgrads: "Everything we are going to learn is useless. We are not here to cure cancer, but for a love of scholarship."
I get your point and sympathize. In a time when the smartest people are joining safe industry jobs twiddling hyperparameters at cushy, crazy salaries - we need academics who zig when the leviathans zag. But the issue is that with rare exceptions, academia has become a papal style orthodoxy. Martin Luther (aka the nudge) can't and won't come from within
I think the solution is creating common knowledge and expectation that one has a duty to speak up about your subject and a duty to the truth. People are scared because they don't want to be singled out but if they expect they won't be alone it's easier. And it's less about giving it more upside than just making it what people assume is the way they are supposed to behave (see my comment about going to war taking less courage than not going along).
This is why I'm pushing my idea of a Hippocratic oath for academics. I think that coming up with good wording would be a good start to get it adopted.
I mostly meant common knowledge that speaking up to correct the record doesn't mean you support whoever's argument that helps.
If you talk to philosophers (or any other academic) in private about what they study they will frequently share views they don't raise on social media or other places where the public is likely to encounter them. And it's less disgusting than the understandable desire not to become the center of a controversy they don't want nor are interested in.
For instance, philosophical arguments are often used to justify pro-choice arguments and even though -- at least in my experience -- even most pro-choice philosophers don't think very much of arguments like Thompson's violin much less bodily autonomy as a trump cars the incentive is for those philosophers to say nothing. After all, if they speak up and point out "well, actually, logically speaking the argument made by pro-lifers is just as logically strong as the argument for barring abortion at 8 months if you accept their assumptions" people will assume they are plumping for abortion restrictions.
And the net effect is it all looks extremely shady but in reality it's just everyone doing what you do at Thanksgiving or at dinner with your friends -- chimming in to say things you know will be greated positively while avoiding sore subjects and points of conflict. The problem is that in an age of social media on net that creates wrong impressions.
Hence creating common knowledge that the social meaning of pointing out a mistake might be something other than plumping for the side that observation helps.
I more or less agree...however, imho this sort of narrative runs cover for a very big problem: philosophy is powerful, but we do not harvest its potential, in large part because philosophers are typically unable to actually *practice* their abstracts theories in concrete reality.
> And the net effect is it all looks extremely shady but in reality it's just everyone doing what you do at Thanksgiving or at dinner with your friends
Consider the metaphysical causal force the word "just" is exerting here, and in all other places it is "just" included in casual (and *causal*) conversation.
We are playing this simulation with training wheels on, no wonder we keep losing.
Maybe, but what is truth? Is mine the same as yours? I think openness to different ideas and ways of thinking will work better than telling people to be more truthful.
The problem isn't that they aren't truthful but that they are selectively so. And indeed, it's not even about lecturing people to speak up as much as giving people an explanation for why they spoke up that's not bad intentions -- I spoke up because I believed I had a duty not because I wanted to help that cause.
Going to war is a "crush the outgroup" type of courage: aggressive, but socially respectable (well, it usually is).
This special type of courage is probably a function of intelligence and non-conformism as well as aggressiveness (disagreeable personality). Figuring out how to increase non-conformism would seem to be the crux of the matter, though there might be issues with social stability if radical non-conformists become too dominant in society. Always tradeoffs.
Using warfare as a romantic measurement of courage is misguided. Prior to the uniqueness of America’s all volunteer army conscription was commonplace as a means to escape uncomfortable social situations or jail, and the landscape of warfare was very different. I don’t think existential crises like the great world wars were situations where young men took a lot of consideration of how their involvement would be perceived socially aside from maybe a general condemnation of cowardice for draft dogging. But using that as a comparison for today’s young men who choose call of duty over enlistment is a misnomer.
Also, the overall social milieu is one of overexposure and partisan blaming, most egregiously characterized by the YouTube vigilante who exposes private citizens making unverifiable claims and instigating mob behavior towards their subjects. So this is an absolutely reasonable motive to avoid adversarial action against opposing ideology when the benefits of being “right” come at the cost of public vilification, professional sanctions, and personal attacks. Smart people pick their battles. Kudos to the ideologues and martyrs willing to die on any hill for the sake of truth. But some fictions aren’t worth combating if the personal fallout far outweighs any benefits gleaned from exposing the truth. Especially in niche fields where very few people will be aware of or appreciate the substance. If I’m going to risk my career on a subject I feel strongly about, it better well be something impactful enough to warrant my undoing. Changing the habits and perceptions of an entire species is almost impossible for a single person to do, outside of an extreme event that impacts many. Otherwise it’s a long slog of constant reinforcement requiring a lot of work and involvement.
I think a big issue is money. Although tenure protects the salary, it does nothing to protect the salaries of students or research supplies. You might have the job, but without funding you can't actually do the job.
We live in an age of demoralization. It's not even the institutions half the time. Folks see low hanging fruit and feel compelled to invent vague shadowy authority figures guarding it. You can just do things. There really aren't all that many domains the reality-based community is excluded from.
I think it's worth considering why superforecasting and prediction markets do not solve this problem of intellectual courage.
A prediction market, in principle, incentivizes being better calibrated than other participants. You can achieve this both by being accurate and also by making others inaccurate. Brier scores punish you for improving other people's calibration.
It's fun to imagine an alternative prediction market or forecasting tournament that found a way to incentivize improving market calibration.
Here's one small idea. Imagine that prediction market users had to choose whether to participate in questions as a "forecaster" or as a "calibrator." Forecasters get points by making forecasts more accurate than the rest of the participants, as usual. Calibrators can only participate by sharing arguments and information sources. Each calibrator is seen by only half the forecasters at random, allowing the platform to test the calibrator's causal impact on the accuracy of forecasts and assign points accordingly.
I'm not sure how this could be implemented in practice, but in principle calibrators could be rewarded for activities beyond information sharing. They could directly encourage forecasters to update their predictions in response to new information, for example.
Another, perhaps simpler, possibility would be allocating points to participants in prediction markets not only for their relative accuracy, but also for the accuracy of the market as a whole.
Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem outside of settings where epistemic accuracy is directly incentivized above all else...
A problem with prediction markets is that many questions are regarded as immoral. Robin Hanson's Policy Analysis Market was shut down after accusations that it promoted terrorism, and it remains illegal in the US to bet on electoral outcomes. At least some markets lean right because left-wingers refuse to participate. In theory, it should be exciting to bet against bigots on the benefits of asylum seekers in Europe and take their money. But it is not happening.
You are raising an important problem that academia (and, as you show in the beginning of the article, not only academia) suffers from. Courage-intellectual or else-is always for the few. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it from the majority. What we need, however, is not intellectual courage but intellectual honesty, which you mention in your article as well (after all, this is what we want intellectual courage for). This intellectual honesty can occur only under socioeconomic conditions where people can secure their material needs relatively easy and do not have to worry about the future of their career. To put it differently, intellectual honesty and capitalism, at least at its current form, are almost contradictory—this is what my research has shown thus far at least. There are other aspects that affect the lack of intellectual honesty too, but this is an important one.
Thank you for this! I recently wrote something in a similar vein. What we need is courage and boldness. This is what should be the pinnacle of our civilization. You nailed it.
This piece is very interesting and I kinda agree with it, But I think it lacks two fundamental points;
- Honour exists only when the culture foster honor-seeking behavior. Modern western culture is inherently against this.
- The value of institutions is in their individuals. Academia lacks honour because the demography of Academia is anti-masculine coded. You cannot request honor and sincerity from an organisation full of HR ladies.
- And Ideology is the death of honesty. Academia is an ideological institution.
I think this is why scientific culture was incubated mostly by "gentlemen" i.e. landowning aristocrats, who had a stable source of income for life that would not be imperiled by anything they said or wrote, hence why you can "trust the word of a gentleman". Our academic tenure system appears to be an attempt to replicate this, but in practice few academics take advantage of the freedom their tenure seems to afford them (perhaps correctly judging that the protection are weaker than they seem). The paradoxical conclusion is that we need to reduce the amount of accountability in research funding, and hand out larger chunks of resources to younger scholars to do with as they please. The All Souls College Examination Fellowship (https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/examination-fellowships-general-information) is a good example of this, giving students that win a contest 7 years of funding free from all external pressure.
IMO it's because even if you have tenure, you can still be ostracised by colleagues
As you note, America is filled with tenured professors who can say more or less whatever they want. It doesn't help, academia is still a monoculture and still flooded with BS and fraud. As Ruxandra says this is because what academics fear isn't job losses. How often do non-conservative academics lose their job over an intellectual dispute anyway? Approximately never. You can't even get them fired when they're clearly faking data. What they fear is loss of prestige and attention. Making the purse strings even looser won't solve this problem and it's ridiculous anyone thinks it will, yet this is easily the most common suggestion you see academics or academic-adjacent people come up with.
Yes, it's a fear for a relative loss of status
There aren't enough actually conservative academics for them to have much of a share of job-losses. Instead the people being purged for ideological reasons will be people who identify as left of the center of American politics, but who have colleagues who identify as even further left and consider the purged rightists as a result.
I think you drastically underestimate the extent to which yesterdays gentlemen were creatures of status. They may not have worried that their lands would be taken away, but they would certainly have worried that they would fall out of favor with this or that lord or that they would stop being invited to parties or to go hunting. Lower classes have always been willing to be more blunt and crass in their language because they don't hyper focus on status the way that elites do. I think the only difference between today's and yesterday's elites is simply how much more public their writing can be.
Yeah, my essay suggests elites have never been particularly intellectually courageous
Within all wealth brackets are people chasing status, and people who aren't. There are billionaires that have breakfasts at McDonalds, live in moderate houses, drive old cars, wear Gap. Then there are people who will buy a £1000 on a Canada Goose coat on credit and the moment they have a spare £20K would buy a Rolex with it.
Agree that gentlemen were largely status-motivated; but somehow the early scientists created a strange insular status hierarchy where mucking around with lenses and chemicals was higher status than hunting, war, and being witty at dinner parties.
I don't know if it was high status across aristocracy as a whole
definitely not; only in the Royal-Society-adjacent subculture
very interesting. John Lilburne's life is quite fascinating in this respect - how he endured so much time in prison i have no idea, (not to mention punishments)at least 5 stints all for ideas, and he never seemed to learn his lesson.
So, in the USA, more than 3/4 of university professors are not even on the tenure track. They're adjuncts and other contingent faculty, with no job security and typically no benefits. This is from 2018, but COVID things worsened this already existing trend: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-quarters-all-faculty-positions-are-tenure-track-according-new-aaup
Even at research universities, only abut 1/3 of job listings are for tenure-track positions. Getting tenure is increasingly rare. At least in the USA the idea of professors being tenured and thus able to speak their minds is outdated.
Tenured professors don't speak their minds either though
Oh, definitely. I’m just adding that also tons of university faculty have no sort of job security, which worsens this problem.
Great point and a really interesting way to think about courage. I teach leadership classes to police managers and one of the things I talk about its the distinction between physical courage and social courage. Physical courage is actually pretty easy (not that everyone has it but of the two its easier). Social courage is much more difficult and a lot of the folks who display social courage are not even really that courageous...they are just disagreeable nature, so it comes easier to them. I suspect what I am calling social courage is closely related to your idea of low upside courage.
I will say that some institutions have set up mechanisms to overcome this. In particular both military and police tactical teams (SWAT Teams or high-speed military units) have developed debriefing systems and planning systems that make it much easier to display the low upside courage you describe. It involves a systematic process that requires some degree of self-criticism, group criticism and acknowledges that conflict in pursuit of the mission is desirable but being contentious just to be seen as right is for dumbasses (i.e., getting it right versus being right)
Thank you, this is interesting
I agree this is a massive problem, I see it in my own profession (horse training) as well. There are some big problems facing the horse industry as a whole, but very few people really want to be honest about the issues and possible solutions, for fear of becoming persona non grata and losing clients. In this end the inability to honestly discuss the issues means we have no decent methodology for arriving at the truth and I guess we just hope to stumble on it by accident.
Yes it's a very human thing. But with intellectuals we need them to not be like this
???
Fascinating. Would love to learn more about this in your industry. I’d never have guessed
I was reading John Keegan's history of the American Civil War (it's one of his less good ones, but it has its moments), and near the end he asks the question of why men would participate in charges in which 30% of them would be casualties. The answer seems to be "because they don't want to look like cowards in front of their friends". I think this, rather than winning anything, is the main reason ordinary people display bravery in battle. Likewise, if you are a young man in Ukraine right now, you have to be thinking that for the rest of your life people will ask what you did in the war. Do you want the answer to be "I hid in my mom's basement from the conscription board until I snuck into Poland at night"? Frankly, I'd rather be killed in battle than have to tell people that.
In other words, I think men fight in wars for the same reason academics avoid rocking the boat: they are scared of social opprobrium. Unless there is some pressure away from conformity, unless you are scared of being seen as subservient to the academic/university establishment instead of defiant towards it, the natural tendency will be to avoid showing intellectual courage.
Good points
This is one of the unintended consequences we are now discovering of a concentrated war to stamp out conformity and peer pressure in society in favor of individual empowerment. The net may still be quite positive, but if we’re not the individual freedom-loving absolutists that the empowerment philosophy imagines, the marginal calculus could well be different.
Lol. Yeah so afraid of what people think of me I could die LMFAOO
What's so funny?
I think that being interdisciplinary has helped me have “more courage”.
So I have degrees from 3 different departments, then left one discipline as I didn’t like its strictures. Now, being interdisciplinary exposes me to a broader range of perspectives, helps me be more critical, as I’m less prone to group think, as I’m not beholden to any gate keepers, so there is less fear of ostracism.
I liken myself to a desert nomad. The city folk can’t threaten to outcaste me, I’m already in the desert! 😛
Poignant stuff; I wish I knew a 'how'. I do think some academics can hide behind the cancel environment to obscure what is actually good, old-fashioned intellectual laziness/cowardice (am I being too harsh?). In my anecdotal experience, academics can be a little bit like loudmouths in pubs (the two not being mutually exclusive, of course). It's easy to tell a table of your mates how you'd 'do that guy in', less so when you're alone in the ring with them.
In some fields, I think this is exacerbated by something you describe in the article: the notion that being an academic is a career and not a vocation. I'm not naive, if we don't want to limit faculties to whatever's left of the leisure classes, people have to earn a decent wage with at least some expectation of advancement. Nevertheless, when people are understandably more concerned with 'getting on', what incentive is there for the courage you describe?
(Basically repeating what you said, but I feel it deeply.)
As a mentor of mine said to a fresh group of history postgrads: "Everything we are going to learn is useless. We are not here to cure cancer, but for a love of scholarship."
Expanding academia could have been a huge issue here tbf ...
I get your point and sympathize. In a time when the smartest people are joining safe industry jobs twiddling hyperparameters at cushy, crazy salaries - we need academics who zig when the leviathans zag. But the issue is that with rare exceptions, academia has become a papal style orthodoxy. Martin Luther (aka the nudge) can't and won't come from within
I think the solution is creating common knowledge and expectation that one has a duty to speak up about your subject and a duty to the truth. People are scared because they don't want to be singled out but if they expect they won't be alone it's easier. And it's less about giving it more upside than just making it what people assume is the way they are supposed to behave (see my comment about going to war taking less courage than not going along).
This is why I'm pushing my idea of a Hippocratic oath for academics. I think that coming up with good wording would be a good start to get it adopted.
https://peteri394q.substack.com/p/a-hippocratic-oath-for-academics
Yeah agreed
> I think the solution is creating common knowledge
Knowledge of epistemology (and philosophy in general) would shake up the world. Arguably the most powerful weapon, and it sits on the shelf unused.
Most philosophers I encounter fit the description in the article as well, it is pathetic.
I mostly meant common knowledge that speaking up to correct the record doesn't mean you support whoever's argument that helps.
If you talk to philosophers (or any other academic) in private about what they study they will frequently share views they don't raise on social media or other places where the public is likely to encounter them. And it's less disgusting than the understandable desire not to become the center of a controversy they don't want nor are interested in.
For instance, philosophical arguments are often used to justify pro-choice arguments and even though -- at least in my experience -- even most pro-choice philosophers don't think very much of arguments like Thompson's violin much less bodily autonomy as a trump cars the incentive is for those philosophers to say nothing. After all, if they speak up and point out "well, actually, logically speaking the argument made by pro-lifers is just as logically strong as the argument for barring abortion at 8 months if you accept their assumptions" people will assume they are plumping for abortion restrictions.
And the net effect is it all looks extremely shady but in reality it's just everyone doing what you do at Thanksgiving or at dinner with your friends -- chimming in to say things you know will be greated positively while avoiding sore subjects and points of conflict. The problem is that in an age of social media on net that creates wrong impressions.
Hence creating common knowledge that the social meaning of pointing out a mistake might be something other than plumping for the side that observation helps.
I more or less agree...however, imho this sort of narrative runs cover for a very big problem: philosophy is powerful, but we do not harvest its potential, in large part because philosophers are typically unable to actually *practice* their abstracts theories in concrete reality.
> And the net effect is it all looks extremely shady but in reality it's just everyone doing what you do at Thanksgiving or at dinner with your friends
Consider the metaphysical causal force the word "just" is exerting here, and in all other places it is "just" included in casual (and *causal*) conversation.
We are playing this simulation with training wheels on, no wonder we keep losing.
Maybe, but what is truth? Is mine the same as yours? I think openness to different ideas and ways of thinking will work better than telling people to be more truthful.
The problem isn't that they aren't truthful but that they are selectively so. And indeed, it's not even about lecturing people to speak up as much as giving people an explanation for why they spoke up that's not bad intentions -- I spoke up because I believed I had a duty not because I wanted to help that cause.
<blockquote>
I believe in a correspondence theory of truth: "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white.
</blockquote>
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
If that doesn't answer your question, I recommend this parable: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple-truth
Joscha Bach had a nice meme on this topic: https://x.com/Plinz/status/1287175516466737152
Going to war is a "crush the outgroup" type of courage: aggressive, but socially respectable (well, it usually is).
This special type of courage is probably a function of intelligence and non-conformism as well as aggressiveness (disagreeable personality). Figuring out how to increase non-conformism would seem to be the crux of the matter, though there might be issues with social stability if radical non-conformists become too dominant in society. Always tradeoffs.
Joscha folds like a house of cards like everyone else when he runs up against a serious intellectual challenge to his claims.
Intellectuals are cowards, afraid to get into a serious fight about truth. Like spoiled little babies.
Using warfare as a romantic measurement of courage is misguided. Prior to the uniqueness of America’s all volunteer army conscription was commonplace as a means to escape uncomfortable social situations or jail, and the landscape of warfare was very different. I don’t think existential crises like the great world wars were situations where young men took a lot of consideration of how their involvement would be perceived socially aside from maybe a general condemnation of cowardice for draft dogging. But using that as a comparison for today’s young men who choose call of duty over enlistment is a misnomer.
Also, the overall social milieu is one of overexposure and partisan blaming, most egregiously characterized by the YouTube vigilante who exposes private citizens making unverifiable claims and instigating mob behavior towards their subjects. So this is an absolutely reasonable motive to avoid adversarial action against opposing ideology when the benefits of being “right” come at the cost of public vilification, professional sanctions, and personal attacks. Smart people pick their battles. Kudos to the ideologues and martyrs willing to die on any hill for the sake of truth. But some fictions aren’t worth combating if the personal fallout far outweighs any benefits gleaned from exposing the truth. Especially in niche fields where very few people will be aware of or appreciate the substance. If I’m going to risk my career on a subject I feel strongly about, it better well be something impactful enough to warrant my undoing. Changing the habits and perceptions of an entire species is almost impossible for a single person to do, outside of an extreme event that impacts many. Otherwise it’s a long slog of constant reinforcement requiring a lot of work and involvement.
I think a big issue is money. Although tenure protects the salary, it does nothing to protect the salaries of students or research supplies. You might have the job, but without funding you can't actually do the job.
We live in an age of demoralization. It's not even the institutions half the time. Folks see low hanging fruit and feel compelled to invent vague shadowy authority figures guarding it. You can just do things. There really aren't all that many domains the reality-based community is excluded from.
Wdym?
That's a tough question. I'd love to get back to you on this eventually.
I think it's worth considering why superforecasting and prediction markets do not solve this problem of intellectual courage.
A prediction market, in principle, incentivizes being better calibrated than other participants. You can achieve this both by being accurate and also by making others inaccurate. Brier scores punish you for improving other people's calibration.
It's fun to imagine an alternative prediction market or forecasting tournament that found a way to incentivize improving market calibration.
Here's one small idea. Imagine that prediction market users had to choose whether to participate in questions as a "forecaster" or as a "calibrator." Forecasters get points by making forecasts more accurate than the rest of the participants, as usual. Calibrators can only participate by sharing arguments and information sources. Each calibrator is seen by only half the forecasters at random, allowing the platform to test the calibrator's causal impact on the accuracy of forecasts and assign points accordingly.
I'm not sure how this could be implemented in practice, but in principle calibrators could be rewarded for activities beyond information sharing. They could directly encourage forecasters to update their predictions in response to new information, for example.
Another, perhaps simpler, possibility would be allocating points to participants in prediction markets not only for their relative accuracy, but also for the accuracy of the market as a whole.
Of course, this doesn't really solve the problem outside of settings where epistemic accuracy is directly incentivized above all else...
A problem with prediction markets is that many questions are regarded as immoral. Robin Hanson's Policy Analysis Market was shut down after accusations that it promoted terrorism, and it remains illegal in the US to bet on electoral outcomes. At least some markets lean right because left-wingers refuse to participate. In theory, it should be exciting to bet against bigots on the benefits of asylum seekers in Europe and take their money. But it is not happening.
You are raising an important problem that academia (and, as you show in the beginning of the article, not only academia) suffers from. Courage-intellectual or else-is always for the few. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it from the majority. What we need, however, is not intellectual courage but intellectual honesty, which you mention in your article as well (after all, this is what we want intellectual courage for). This intellectual honesty can occur only under socioeconomic conditions where people can secure their material needs relatively easy and do not have to worry about the future of their career. To put it differently, intellectual honesty and capitalism, at least at its current form, are almost contradictory—this is what my research has shown thus far at least. There are other aspects that affect the lack of intellectual honesty too, but this is an important one.
> What we need, however, is not intellectual courage but intellectual honesty
This does not catch the delusion problem, which is *widespread*, and concentrated in disciplines that are worshipped, like science.
Hi anzabannanna, what delusion are you referring to?
In part, our cultural (including science, and academia in general) blind spot regarding important things like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
Thank you for this! I recently wrote something in a similar vein. What we need is courage and boldness. This is what should be the pinnacle of our civilization. You nailed it.
https://www.culturalfuturist.net/p/the-bold-and-the-brave
Agreed.
This piece is very interesting and I kinda agree with it, But I think it lacks two fundamental points;
- Honour exists only when the culture foster honor-seeking behavior. Modern western culture is inherently against this.
- The value of institutions is in their individuals. Academia lacks honour because the demography of Academia is anti-masculine coded. You cannot request honor and sincerity from an organisation full of HR ladies.
- And Ideology is the death of honesty. Academia is an ideological institution.