Thread by @Meaningness

I found this essay inspiring and important.

The pace of progress in science and technology has slowed, for reasons we partly understand. We also know some factors that appear to accelerate them. Learning more, and applying it, is urgent.

Many disdainful comments re @patrickc/@tylercowen: “Arrogant tech bros ignorant of the existing fields of history & sociology of science & technology, gah”

I’d like to point out some broad patterns of academic dysfunction manifesting here (🧵)

It’s easy to assume that, if there’s an academic field named after some phenomenon, the people in it are doing whatever can be done to discover things about that phenomenon, and everything known about it is taught in that field.

This is rarely true.

Academic fields are social clubs operated for the benefit of insiders. Field founders want to claim as much territory as possible, so they name the field after some broad phenomenon. And then… 4/∞

Outwardly, an academic field claims as much territory as possible, but inside, it narrows its scope to a particular subset of phenomena, and methods of treating them, which allows it reduce the work to a safe routine of minimal-publishable-units production.

An academic field then *must* attack outsiders addressing the broad phenomenon it supposedly covers—because their investigations would reveal the field’s actual narrow scope, limited methods, and dubious foundational assumptions.

Linguistics in the second half of the 20th century is an extreme example. It claimed “the study of language,” but narrowed to arguments about notational variants for formal grammars that were supposed to account for the syntactic grammaticality judgements of expert linguists.

Linguistics in that era ruthlessly suppressed anyone who dared discuss any form of empirical data, which Chomsky defined out of existence as “performance”; or who wanted to address actual language use.

If you wanted to learn anything about language during that period, you had to do it in the psychology or sociology department. But they had their own narrow methodological shibboleths, and there was no field that broadly addressed the phenomenon.

“We already have a field explaining sci/tech progress” would be more plausible if advocates cited one of them, rather than eight.

It would also be more plausible if those fields advocated practical, concrete actions that would accelerate progress…

I am an interested layperson, not an academic, but I’ve read many hundreds of papers in the history & sociology of science, technology, & development economics. It’s fascinating stuff with real insights. It doesn’t seem to have the answers @patrickc & @tylercowen seek.

As @iwelsh points out in a reply 🧵, these fields frequently work to support political agendas, rather than to figure things out. “History of technology” is often just “Technology: horrifying threat or global menace?”

Realizing, in the mid-20th century, that the Myth of Progress was an eternalistic quasi-religion, and asking pointed questions about “cui bono” and “why should we believe this,” was hugely valuable and necessary.

It’s now a lazy trope, suitable for mindless mechanical MPUs.

When people with billions of dollars say “we want more research on problem X,” researchers with something to say about X might think “hooray, new funding source!” rather than “oh hell, they’re probably going to expose the vapidity of our discipline, better shout at them”

I’m rather skeptical of a new field of Progress Studies, because every “X Studies” field turns into another rote paper generator.

Rebooting research on how to do science and technology better, ignoring discipline boundaries—that seems urgent & with huge leverage for benefit.