> The most influential philosopher of recent times is Eliezer Yudkowsky ... The adoption of his thinking contributed to the formation of major AI labs such as OpenAI and later Anthropic.
Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them.
(And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)
disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area
The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome.
On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again.
And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model.
Also a professor (of two varieties at different times).
I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree with the sense of ignored crisis it points to, but also think it doesn't understand the problems with the solutions it recommends, or maybe misunderstands the sources of the problems, like you're saying.
Academics is different from finance maybe in that outside of outright fraud, things are murky. What one person considers "unscientific" another might consider perfectly reasonable or even rigorous, and vice versa. I've seen debates like this, where the two sides both consider the other unscientific and theoretically and methodologically unrigorous. I don't see the outright fraud as the core of the problems either, it's an extreme version of something that exists because of rotten incentive structures. Getting rid of it is akin to replacing the roof on a house that has rotten foundations: important, but not solving the problem.
The problems in academics can't be easily reduced to one thing. There's lots of extremely competent people working under a broken model of reality, one that assumes that such competence is rare rather than common, that progress is due to single individuals rather than collaborative groups, administrations looking for money from research rather than money for research, fame rather than truth, and so forth and so on. Then there's the other side of the coin, employers using degrees to avoid competent training and hiring, reducing people to specific degrees etc.
Increasingly I see the problems with academics as pervasive to society (at least US society), something deeper, just incentivized and maybe manifest more clearly because it's so broken when applied to academics. I don't think it's a coincidence that health care and academics have both seen huge inflation in the last several decades, for example, and are both huge sources of controversy in US society. I think the average people working in those fields are doing so in good faith, but I also think there's systemic pressures that create huge problems and bad actors in both, and there's enormous reluctance in both to change things because of power structures and poor understandings from the rest of society about what's going on.
I'm afraid it's not simply a matter of wasted money but one of profound institutional rot that drives away large numbers of the best and brightest. The article outlines this by focusing on the proto-scientist archetype and the spiritual, uncompromising pursuit of Truth. Today's academic culture is for the most part completely antithetical to a person possessing these attributes.
That some can endure the suffering and keep working in this sort of environment does not reflect well on today's institutions and doesn't inspire much optimism for the future of academia.
It's not the academic culture in my experience. It's the most competitive subset of the academia. Things tend to be worse if there is top-anything involved, if the field of study is supposed to be important, or if the field receives a lot of funding. These factors all attract the kind of people who respond strongly to incentives and often try to game the system.
I have two home communities in the academia. One is string algorithms, compressed data structures, and things like that. It's a small community where people enjoy what they are doing and have somehow found a way to make a living out of it. The groups tend to be small, the atmosphere is friendly and honest, and the results rarely appear in top conferences.
Then there is a subset of bioinformatics and genomics, which often uses results from the other community. This is supposed to be important, so there are a lot of big well-funded labs from top universities involved. Stuff sometimes gets published in prestige journals, administrators from funding agencies (particularly NIH) are trying to direct the research, and even the Big Tech is trying to grab their share of something. I haven't seen fraud, but everything is so serious and competitive and there is a constant pressure to get things done before someone else manages to publish something similar.
I don't know how things are further downstream, and I'm not interested in finding out.
academia was meant to protect researchers from profit incentives that bias their work in private companies, if you replace those with other corrupt incentives then what's the point? you could just do that shoddy, useless research in industry and not publish it.
I wouldn't be as pessimistic as this. Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud or direct pressure to commit fraud. Bad research, bullshit, politics, yes... but those are maybe not unique to academia.
Anyway, quite a wake-up call to be told we should model ourselves on finance. Ow.
> Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud
LaCour? Gino? The Ariely study mentioned in the article?
Every day it gets harder for me to believe that the medical and pharmaceutical industrial system's configuration of incentives can ever lead to improvements in health for people.
I don't doubt there are many, many researchers and physicians who genuinely want to help people. It's possible to me that virtually everyone does.
But if that's the case, the incentive structure has apparently gotten away from everyone and become some sort of monster working at cross-purposes toward them at all times, keeping them from succeeding.
I don't know the specific numbers, but what fraction of the U.S. workforce and economy is involved in medical/pharmaceutical or related insurance research, treatment, or administration? It has to be well into the double digits.
If people started actually being cured of things, actually being well, whole segments of this structure would collapse--and if that percentage figure is high enough, so would the economy.
I don't think we even need to posit that there are actually malevolent people involved who are trying to keep people sick. It could all just be a consequence of a whole system that depends on it to keep operating, and consequentially nudges just enough of every benevolent, neutral, or merely self-interested person's work in a direction that keeps it from making people well.
Healthy people tend to be more productive - so the net effect of having a lot of non-healthy people being treated might well be economically negative. Moving 5-10% of the GDP into something else is disruptive (overall total healthcare is more like 18% GDP in the US, I think), but nothing that didn't happen before.
I have been training myself to call it the medical industry, not the health or healthcare industry. It does very little to promote and preserve health.
E.g., There was some noise a few years ago about the obstacles Louisiana faced in changing the medicine for hep C from the expensive lifetime subscription model to a cure.
Instead of pontificating on the efficacy of the healthcare system, why not just look at the actual outcome?
Lifespans are going up, including the length of time spent being relatively healthy; infant mortality is down; cancers are getting healed; there’s even a miracle cure for obesity.
Lifespans were going up, for older generations who were raised under different conditions than we have today. Today's young people are much more sickly than their forebears.
Maybe. Or at least it's probably one of the factors that helps them sleep at night and get up in the morning.
I don't really see what that has to do with my point, though. I'm saying we don't have to assume anyone has ill will to explain why the system is failing. I'm not saying it's impossible that some people do.
Well that's the long term consequence of treating academia as a means of social mobility; a gravy train, rather than a dispassionate search for the truth and knowledge.
Palladium magazine is published by The American Governance Foundation. I couldn’t find out much about it by Googling, does anybody know what its deal is?
IIRC Palladium
is mainly run by the more libertarian-oriented rationalist/lesswrong types. Or at least, I've only seen it recommended by those types. I think it's funded by Peter Thiel.
Most of the negative examples are med/bio-related (including psychology here), whereas the single positive example is in CS/Engineering. Systematically med is dealing with a harder replication problem. Moreover, "light involvement from the academic system " is a significant stretch. Not all but most of the people doing the work have been trained within academia instead of within industry and the work has been from an academia-industry collaboration. Thinking about the proportion of people that go into academia vs industry makes the ratio more meaningful as well.
The replication crisis is clearly a big issue, but the conclusions I would draw from the examples presented are more difference between fields than a condemnation of academia. To just say "move it to private instituions" is shortsighted.
I think the biggest institutional mistake of the academic system is the over-production of academic bound PhDs.
People are strung along for years thinking they have a shot at some professorship, so they work for low pay over their prime societal contribution years before realizing there are no spots left.
Academics afraid of their future security will be more prone to fraud, and more of them need enough FU money to try things that go against the grain.
If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available it could help curtail the fraud ridden rat race.
A real model of rigorous analytical thinking here: there are cases of fraud in academia, therefore all of academia is entirely fraudulent and should be dispensed with. Or it should take lessons from... the financial sector?!
Yes, there should be effort to address academic fraud. But no, we should not buy into conservative propaganda and torch our institutions of higher education.
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My mother has Alzheimer’s and I would love to be able to blame her condition and lack of treatment on anyone at all. It would be immensely, primally satisfying - which to me is a warning flag for cognitive bias.
I think the logical pathway between “two 20 year old papers that ‘sparked’ the Amyloid hypothesis are responsible for the entire research agenda and billions spent on ineffective drugs” is strained. “Sparked” may be true, but the idea that a few twenty-year old fraudulent images tricked Big Pharma into spending two decades chasing this hypothesis and developing drugs, and all along the way the whole thing was based on fake data that nobody every bothered to test in a subsequent experiment? That seems deeply unlikely to me. If true I would like to see that case made with evidence.
TL;DR What I am not saying: fraud is acceptable. What I am saying is that there are many replication and error correction systems in science, and people with an axe to grind really don’t want to understand that.
Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them.
(And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)