Anatomy of a Hoax
The problem here is that there are, in fact, tons of academic research and publication endeavors that are largely bullshit. But there are overall even more tons that are legitimate.<p>The arts and humanities don&#x27;t own all the bullshit, nor do the sciences have a lock on the good stuff.<p>There are deep problem in the academic world. The incentives are broken, and the pay is quite low.<p>There have been movements towards &quot;science-ing&quot; (for lack of a better word) almost every area of thought, and the results are not good.<p>In music theory and composition, there were attempts to &quot;science&quot; music back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. For a solid few decades, you couldn&#x27;t get a job as a music theory or comp professor without subscribing to musical set theory, integrated serialism, or 12-tone row methods of composition.<p>There was a specific attempt to &quot;elevate&quot; the study of music to the realm of math and science, to use stochastic methods and musical &quot;proofs&quot; to show the perfection of a piece of music.<p>It was all ridiculous, the music created by these methods was unlistenable and unapproachable, which the proponents of this movement used as an excuse to say, &quot;well, if you understood it better, you&#x27;d like it more. But you&#x27;re an idiot, so you don&#x27;t get it.&quot;<p>Similar things are happening in a lot of areas. The rise of statistics as a tool and the easy accessibility of software that allows people with no understanding of how these methods are supposed to work let&#x27;s people who are basically out of ideas to come up with all kinds of pseudo-scientific-sounding thoughts to go p-value fishing and publish papers that are literally garbage.<p>They don&#x27;t just do it for fun though. They do it because publications are directly tied to salary, grants, and prestige.<p>If you&#x27;re working in the humanities, the fastest way to a raise is to spew some bullshit out on a paper with some numbery-type words, some stats, and a theory that&#x27;s the falsifiable to begin with, but can&#x27;t be argued with by your peers because it&#x27;s all completely unintelligible to begin with.<p>Your coworkers wont call you on it because they don&#x27;t want to lose out on the next big thing, and no one else will call you on it because actual scientists won&#x27;t admit that they don&#x27;t know enough about humanities buzzwords to tell bullshit from good ideas.<p>You end up with clowns like Deepak Chopra saying things that almost anyone can tell are utter bullshit,  but almost no one will complain about.<p>The vast majority of academics are like my parents: they teach German or history, they&#x27;ve been doing it well for around 50 years, and they don&#x27;t pretend to think the world needs new research about der, die, or das when it comes to gender agreement.<p>And there are the occasional few who look at gender agreement and see an opportunity to get a quick raise by writing about how gender agreement in the German language is sexist according to x percent of people they surveyed on yougov who don&#x27;t actually speak German.<p>There is a legitimate problem in certain parts of the humanities, and as someone who only ever studied violin, music theory, and philosophy--now working in the tech world--it&#x27;s disappointing to see the humanities and liberal arts get a bad rap.<p>The problem is systemic though. It comes not from a lack of diligence, but from the fact that this kind of irresponsible research is strongly incentivized by the university structure. From pay to collegial respect to tenure: calling bullshit out is not encouraged. It is frowned upon.<p>If there is a tragedy in American Universities, it is exactly this: a place that promotes tenure as a mechanism to ensure free thought and the mutual exchange of ideas without fear of reprisal has turned into a system where disagreeing with obvious bullshit is a big mistake.