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Academia’s Abstraction Failure - by Robin Hanson

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One of the greatest obstacles to humanity using abstract thought to help on its biggest issues is this: our main professional specialists in abstract though applied to big issues are academics, and they refuse to think abstractly about how they allocate resources. Academics are divided into an inherited structure of disciplines and subfields, a structure that changes only slowly. The focuses within each subfield fluctuate with changing fashions, the relative size of fields changes as outside funding changes, and sometimes funding allows the creation of new fields. The (high-dimensional) space of all possible abstract topics, however, is only sparsely populated by this structure. Most of that population is in dense “urban” clusters, with few residents of the vast “rural” tracks outside of those clusters. Most of sources of resources and prestige for academics are tied to those clusters, which discourages them from venturing outside of those clusters. Academics are so tied to their littl

One of the greatest obstacles to humanity using abstract thought to help on its biggest issues is this: our main professional specialists in abstract though applied to big issues are academics, and they refuse to think abstractly about how they allocate resources. Academics are divided into an inherited structure of disciplines and subfields, a structure that changes only slowly. The focuses within each subfield fluctuate with changing fashions, the relative size of fields changes as outside funding changes, and sometimes funding allows the creation of new fields. The (high-dimensional)…

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