The Tyranny of Trendy Ideas in Academia
As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham&#x27;s essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004.<p>The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I&#x27;m all in favor of smiting the very dangerous contrapositive to that assumption: that unpopular ideas therefore must also lack value. I support this author as far as he is attempting to raise awareness of this trap -- lest someone else have to go through the same fate as Ignaz Semmelweis, Guglielmo Marconi, or James Allison.<p>But I felt like this article did little to present valid mechanisms to mitigate the risks of fashion, and instead spent most of the text attacking fashionable ideas simply for being fashionable, operating under the assumption that fashion itself necessarily lacks substance and causes problems on its own. I think this sort of hipster approach is as big of a risk as blindly following fashion -- both premises assume that popularity is necessary and sufficient to determine the value, or lack of value, of an idea.<p>But maybe I&#x27;m just a blind fashion follower myself, since I felt so personally attacked when the author criticized MOOCs as just another fashionable fad -- despite the valid criticisms he linked to, I felt like I got a lot of value out of them, after all.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html</a>