I actually would find this at least somewhat concerning, because selection bias/selection effects are my biggest worry with smart people working in an area. If a study area is selected based upon any non-truthseeking motivations, or if people are pressured to go along with a view for non-truthseeking reasons, then it’s very easy to land into nonsense, where the consensus is based totally on selection effects, making them useless to us.
There’s a link to the comment by lukeprog below on the worst case scenario for smart people being dominated by selection effects:
One marker to watch out for is a kind of selection effect.
In some fields, only ‘true believers’ have any motivation to spend their entire careers studying the subject in the first place, and so the ‘mainstream’ in that field is absolutely nutty.
Case examples include philosophy of religion, New Testament studies, Historical Jesus studies, and Quranic studies. These fields differ from, say, cryptozoology in that the biggest names in the field, and the biggest papers, are published by very smart people in leading journals and look all very normal and impressive but those entire fields are so incredibly screwed by the selection effect that it’s only “radicals” who say things like, “Um, you realize that the ‘gospel of Mark’ is written in the genre of fiction, right?”
I actually would find this at least somewhat concerning, because selection bias/selection effects are my biggest worry with smart people working in an area. If a study area is selected based upon any non-truthseeking motivations, or if people are pressured to go along with a view for non-truthseeking reasons, then it’s very easy to land into nonsense, where the consensus is based totally on selection effects, making them useless to us.
There’s a link to the comment by lukeprog below on the worst case scenario for smart people being dominated by selection effects:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fyZBtNB3Ki3fM4a6Y/some-heuristics-for-evaluating-the-soundness-of-the-academic#scZakQrAYm2Mck9QQ