Meanwhile, EY only gets paid if he’s right about the acausal robot god, right? Right?

damn. i hate when im reading through old stuff on reddit and in the middle of a sparkling, scintillating discussion i find someone has written over all her old comments with nonsense, fragmenting the discussion permanently. what hilarious, moving, romantic, haunting things could she have said? just to wash it all away, in this digital era of permanency? wow. that takes courage. i bet she was really cute, too

Null results are hard to get published, especially in higher impact journals, and publications, especially higher impact publications directly build towards tenure and better grant funding.
Ironically, the types of reforms Eliezer has vaguely gestured to before (that have been better proposed by more informed people) would probably change this by making it better incentivized to publish null results.

This also once again demonstrates his Efficient Market Hypothesis type thinking where throwing money in the form of markets at a problem should automatically fix it.

This also demonstrates a 5th grade science fair understanding of science, where everything breaks down into neat hypotheses with clean yes or no answers and not messy spectrums of theories each with many overlapping claims and few with completely distinct predictions.

And of course there exist no perverse incentives outside of academia for not caring about the truth of the theories you’re espousing.

I thought these guys had moved away from such simplistic incentive structure theories of social behaviour with their “the 20s had better ‘social technology’ than we do today” bs. But I guess there’s never any actual progress in these kinds of discourse communities, just endless churn.

Elizer, you understand that you can advance in your academic career by publishing important and accurate results, that you can damage your career by doing the opposite of that, and that your career may impact your compensation? Furthermore, you understand that, by virtue of these scientists being in academia they have chosen to not prioritize money and have other reasons for doing things?

Fuck’s save you autodickdact

My brother in Christ, have you ever heard of grant applications?

How would you even determine if the theory in your research is true? And if it is later false would you need to turn back the money? Not sure this is all a great plan to fix the problems in academia.

This also will make university administrators very rich, and incentives short bullshit papers which are easily proven over fundamental harder work.

E: hmm, perhaps he recently realized that string theory is not as valid a theory as he though and this is how he is lashing back?

Spoken like someone who has never tried to publish in a reputable journal

“The problem with academic science is that the rewards aren’t naive, gimmicky and gameable!”

Maybe I just have a particularly bad case of post-PhD burn-out, but I am somewhat more sympathetic to this take than I usually am to Big Yud.

Glossing over the philosophically thorny issue about what it even means for a scientific theory to be “true” (and that probably shouldn’t be glossed over, tbf), anyone who has spent time in academic science has heard broadly similar critiques being made by working scientists.

Most of the metrics by which scientific careers are judged are largely independent of whether the work you’ve done is good, let along “true” in any objective sense. Anyone who has ever had a paper rejected b/c Reviewer 2 felt like engaging in bullshit political gatekeeping knows what I’m taking about. Granting committees can be the same way. There are dozens of thinkpieces out there written by scientists describing how the current system incentivizes shoddy, thrown-together papers at best and pushes people towards outright fraud at the worst.

Of course, the the fact that these critiques exist and can be read proves that Yud isn’t really saying anything particularly novel or insightful here, but when your baseline of Hot Takes is “acausal robot god justifies nuking China” or “Aella should let me [DATA EXPUNGED] in her [DATA REALLY EXPUNGED]”…you take what you can get.

Yes it would be much better if everyone got paid a bunch of money for all their theories that were true. They definitely wouldn’t make up results.

verifiable

Nobody cares except for the journals who’s name gets dragged down because they published false results, the scientist who published them and is now going to have a much harder time finding funding, the people who funded this useless science, the people employing the researcher who are now getting their name dragged through the mud for having lax standards, students involved with the research who now need to answer for why their name appeared on fake science…. You know, nobody involved cares at all, because there’s no “correctness bonus”

Yud would be a lot more compelling if he would just strip his arguments down to their truest fundamental essence: struggling to suck his own dick.

Good to know that the man who thought he was singularly equipped to save the entire universe is unfamiliar with the concept of salaries.

How is this dude so popular? This has to be the dumbest take ever conjured up. “These people don’t get paid extra to do their literal job correctly, so their results must be wrong (and mine are obviously right).”

There are organizations in academia that will very much pay you and fund your research if “the theory is actually true”

money is the only thing that matters, apparently. The esteem of peers, or a place in history doesn’t count because it can’t be measured in dollars. What a pathetic little man

He is partially correct though roughly not at all in terms of the implication I think he is making.

Much of academia would look much worse if not for a considerably high density of “true believers” who pursue some intellectual project out of intellectual curiosity, egalitarian motives etc.

Arguably it is getting worse as these critical true believers are in fact penalised, as their ideology makes them resistant to engaging in trend chasing, game playing, ass kissing, producing superficially acceptable or impressive but actually flawed work etc.

These true believers will actually put in a lot of hard work if they trust the institution they are working for, but that also is less the case as university management tend to have very different culture, ideology etc.

Poisson thought Fresnel’s wave theory could be dismissed with a thought experiment. Poisson showed Fresnel’s theory predicts a bright spot in the shadow of a circular disk - Poisson stopped there, thinking he had refuted Fresnel since everyone knows the shadow has no bright spot. Arago did the experiment and found the bright spot.

Of course he is unaware of this thing in academia called “tech transfer” where professors and their school split profits from commercializing inventions. Quite a few professors have become filthy rich from this, for example the guy who invented Gatorade, the chemotherapy drug Taxol, etc

Said by no one working an academia. If your stuff is true and works, it makes it easier to get more grants, in STEM stuff gets patented, and the publications are open to review by anyone else that reads them.

Meanwhile, this guy gets venture funding for sounding right. It is always projection.

As much as I like to dunk on him, he’s not wrong there. Academia’s incentives are rotten, I left Academia after a few postdocs because my marketing skills were more important for my career than actual results.

That’s not true, cutting edge researchers who have a track record of being right get promoted to Assistant professor (to get tenure) to full professor to a named chair. Each come with a pay bump. Also, they become attractive to other departments, so they start getting paid more not to leave.

Yud: To be clear, I’m not saying that nobody in the system cares

OP: Apparently, no one in academica cares

bruh

the word ‘verificatable’ irritates me

Stopped clock moment for Yud

I don’t know if it’s twitter, the inevitable rot that comes from repeating the same thing over and over for decades, or simply old age/bad health(like he says), but wow the quality of his reasoning has taken a very sharp nosedive hasn’t it. He used to be much better at the game of constructing a logical edifice given some initial premises, even if the premises were mostly incorrect, even if if the edifice was many times more logical-sounding than actually logical, even at the face of the fact that trying to predict the future behavior of complex systems by ‘arguing from first principles’ is a fool’s errand anyway. If you *wished* to play the game, it wouldn’t be so easy to point out exactly what the fault in the reasoning/analogy would be.

These days it’s like there’s a 25% chance that he will start typing a “hot take”, forget where he was going with it before he hits “send”, and immediately trying to backpedal. Offering a counterargument used to be harder than ‘well i would definitely hire ants to dig holes for me if only i could get them to listen’ or literally ‘well so are you’.

Keeping their job, that is their incentive to be correct. Maybe eliezer can get away with not telling the truth but in most jobs you arn’t correct, you get fired!

True is whatever the party says