Answering Questions about the Academy
Alex sent me some questions about dishonesty in the academy. I assume that they were inspired by the essay Why Most Academic Reasearch is Fake . In this post, I will answer his questions. What ‘big important problems’ are ignored by academic research? There are many examples of academic fields ignoring core issues so that they can focus on minutia. The notion of utility, which is widely used in philosophy and economics, is almost entirely taken for granted. Economists assume that utility can be measured with monetary metrics, such as GDP. Important questions, such as “What is utility?” and “Can we quantify utility?” are ignored, despite the notion of utility being essential to both moral philosophy and economics. Evolutionary theory is not well-defined in academic biology, despite being the core theory. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists spend their time contriving Rube Goldberg mechanisms to avoid the implications of evolutionary theory, rather than trying ...