Distinguish two critiques in this general vicinity:
(1) Longtermism seems weird because its main proponents are philosophers who have professional incentives to make “interesting”/extreme claims regardless of their truth or plausibility.
(2) Academics are likely to “systematically overstate” the importance of their own research, so we shouldn’t take their claims about “true importance” at face value.
These are two very different critiques! Matthews clearly said (1), and that’s what I was responding to. His explanatory claim is demonstrably false. Your critique (2) seems right to me, though a trivial generalization of the broader claim:
(2*) Everyone is likely to systematically overstate the importance of their own work, so we shouldn’t take their claims about the true importance of their work at face value.
I agree that we need to critically evaluate claims that someone’s work is important. There’s nothing special about academic work in this respect, though.
I agree that we need to critically evaluate claims that someone’s work is important. There’s nothing special about academic work in this respect, though.
Strong disagree with this part. Academics, in the sense of ‘people who are paid to do specialised research’ are substantially more incentivised to overstate their value than a) people who aren’t paid, or b) people who are paid to do more superficial/multi-focus research (eg consultants), and who could therefore pivot easily if it turned out some project they were on was low value.
It sounds like you’re talking about researchers outside of academia. Academics aren’t paid directly for their research, and the objective “importance” of our research counts for literally nothing in tenure and promotion decisions, compared to more mundane metrics like how many papers we’ve published and in what venues, and whether it is deemed suitably impressive (by disciplinary standards, which again have zero connection to objective importance) by senior evaluators within the discipline.
A tenured academic, like a supreme court justice, has a job for life which leaves them far less vulnerable to incentives than almost anyone else.
Distinguish two critiques in this general vicinity:
(1) Longtermism seems weird because its main proponents are philosophers who have professional incentives to make “interesting”/extreme claims regardless of their truth or plausibility.
(2) Academics are likely to “systematically overstate” the importance of their own research, so we shouldn’t take their claims about “true importance” at face value.
These are two very different critiques! Matthews clearly said (1), and that’s what I was responding to. His explanatory claim is demonstrably false. Your critique (2) seems right to me, though a trivial generalization of the broader claim:
(2*) Everyone is likely to systematically overstate the importance of their own work, so we shouldn’t take their claims about the true importance of their work at face value.
I agree that we need to critically evaluate claims that someone’s work is important. There’s nothing special about academic work in this respect, though.
Strong disagree with this part. Academics, in the sense of ‘people who are paid to do specialised research’ are substantially more incentivised to overstate their value than a) people who aren’t paid, or b) people who are paid to do more superficial/multi-focus research (eg consultants), and who could therefore pivot easily if it turned out some project they were on was low value.
It sounds like you’re talking about researchers outside of academia. Academics aren’t paid directly for their research, and the objective “importance” of our research counts for literally nothing in tenure and promotion decisions, compared to more mundane metrics like how many papers we’ve published and in what venues, and whether it is deemed suitably impressive (by disciplinary standards, which again have zero connection to objective importance) by senior evaluators within the discipline.
A tenured academic, like a supreme court justice, has a job for life which leaves them far less vulnerable to incentives than almost anyone else.
Why was this downvoted?