Linguistics in the second half of the 20th century is an extreme example. It claimed “the study of language,” but narrowed to arguments about notational variants for formal grammars that were supposed to account for the syntactic grammaticality judgements of expert linguists.
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Linguistics in that era ruthlessly suppressed anyone who dared discuss any form of empirical data, which Chomsky defined out of existence as “performance”; or who wanted to address actual language use.
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If you wanted to learn anything about language during that period, you had to do it in the psychology or sociology department. But they had their own narrow methodological shibboleths, and there was no field that broadly addressed the phenomenon.
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“We already have a field explaining sci/tech progress” would be more plausible if advocates cited one of them, rather than eight.
It would also be more plausible if those fields advocated practical, concrete actions that would accelerate progress…
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I am an interested layperson, not an academic, but I’ve read many hundreds of papers in the history & sociology of science, technology, & development economics. It’s fascinating stuff with real insights. It doesn’t seem to have the answers & seek.
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As points out in a reply 🧵, these fields frequently work to support political agendas, rather than to figure things out. “History of technology” is often just “Technology: horrifying threat or global menace?”
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Realizing, in the mid-20th century, that the Myth of Progress was an eternalistic quasi-religion, and asking pointed questions about “cui bono” and “why should we believe this,” was hugely valuable and necessary.
It’s now a lazy trope, suitable for mindless mechanical MPUs.
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When people with billions of dollars say “we want more research on problem X,” researchers with something to say about X might think “hooray, new funding source!” rather than “oh hell, they’re probably going to expose the vapidity of our discipline, better shout at them”
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I’m rather skeptical of a new field of Progress Studies, because every “X Studies” field turns into another rote paper generator.
Rebooting research on how to do science and technology better, ignoring discipline boundaries—that seems urgent & with huge leverage for benefit.
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Replying to
For once I agree with a thread of yours almost 100%. Both the deconstruction of the knee-jerk reaction and the skepticism of the proposal.
The proposal is bad but not for the reasons the critics imagine in their turf-anxious motivated and perverse missing of the point.
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The leveraged land-grab mechanism via coverage of a small fraction of the territory claimed could be a good definition of “paradigm”. Internal Kuhnian paradigm shifts are civil wars. A field getting dismantled by gravity of more densely covered adjacent ones is like invasion.
The Collison/Cowen proposal does not seem serious. It starts with desirable outcomes rather than mysterious frontiers, which makes it an automatic write-off for me. You can build institutions that way but not fields. Notable that opening example is “MIT” rather than say “physics”
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