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.
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?