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Rob Nelson's avatar

You and Munger are my favorite writers tackling this problem by describing it in plain language that makes visible that which is obscured by an elaborate structure of incentives that is hard to see, even for those climbing it to named professorships. Their complexity makes it difficult to see from the outside. And the incentives prevent those on the inside from understanding what's happening because, to use the Upton Sinclair line, their salaries depends upon not understanding it.

I disagree that "No one knows why we do this." There is a long, and probably, too boring story about guilds that go all the way back to the founding of Bologna and Oxford. The question is why have these feudal forms of knowledge production and transfer persisted so long in a modern world dedicated to rationality and objectivity.

My long answer involves what Thorstein Veblen called "trained incapacity," a recognition that the great benefits of academic freedom has a few drawbacks, and to take seriously what Dan Davies has to say in The Unaccountability Machine. And to keep reading you and Munger.

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Molly Trombley-McCann's avatar

From your perspective, how do peer review and hierarchical promotion practices play out in terms of false positives and false negatives? Based on my conversations with friends in academia, and my sense of "the discourse", there is frustration about false negatives - good work that is unexpected or disruptive to current models is too hard to get through, and valuable work showing lack of results also doesn't tend to get through. But I'm guessing it's more complicated than that. I'd love to hear how you would describe peer review from that lens.

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