The longer you hold a view, and the more publicly you hold a view, the more calcified it typically becomes. Changing your mind becomes more aversive and potentially costly, you have more tools at your disposal to mount a lawyerly defense, and you find it harder to adopt frameworks/perspectives other than your favored one (the grooves become firmly imprinted into your brain). At least, this is the way it seems and personally feels to me.[1]
For this reason, the observation “someone I respect publicly argued for X many years ago and still believes X” typically only provides a bit more evidence than the observation “someone I respect argued for X many years ago.” For example, even though I greatly respect Daron Acemoglu, I think the observation “Daron Acemoglu still believes that political institutions are the central determinant of economic growth rates” only gives me a bit more evidence than the observation “15 years ago Daron Acemoglu publicly argued that institutions are the central determinant of economic growth rates.”
A corollary: If there’s an academic field that contains a long-standing debate, and you’d like to defer to experts in this field, you may want to give disproportionate weight to the opinions of junior academics. They’re less likely to have responded to recent evidence and arguments in an epistemically inflexible way.
Of course, there are exceptions. The final chapter of Scout Mindset includes a moving example of a professor publicly abandoning a view he had championed for fifteen years, after a visiting academic presented persuasive new evidence. The reason these kinds of stories are moving, though, is that they describe truly exceptional behavior.
At least in software, there’s a problem I see where young engineers are often overly bought-in to hype trains, but older engineers (on average) stick with technologies they know too much.
I would imagine something similar in academia, where hot new theories are over-valued by the young, but older academics have the problem you describe.
That consideration—and the more basic consideration that more junior people often just know less—definitely pushes in the opposite direction. If you wanted to try some version of seniority-weighted epistemic deference, my guess is that the most reliable cohort would have studied a given topic for at least a few years but less than a couple decades.
A thought on epistemic deference:
The longer you hold a view, and the more publicly you hold a view, the more calcified it typically becomes. Changing your mind becomes more aversive and potentially costly, you have more tools at your disposal to mount a lawyerly defense, and you find it harder to adopt frameworks/perspectives other than your favored one (the grooves become firmly imprinted into your brain). At least, this is the way it seems and personally feels to me.[1]
For this reason, the observation “someone I respect publicly argued for X many years ago and still believes X” typically only provides a bit more evidence than the observation “someone I respect argued for X many years ago.” For example, even though I greatly respect Daron Acemoglu, I think the observation “Daron Acemoglu still believes that political institutions are the central determinant of economic growth rates” only gives me a bit more evidence than the observation “15 years ago Daron Acemoglu publicly argued that institutions are the central determinant of economic growth rates.”
A corollary: If there’s an academic field that contains a long-standing debate, and you’d like to defer to experts in this field, you may want to give disproportionate weight to the opinions of junior academics. They’re less likely to have responded to recent evidence and arguments in an epistemically inflexible way.
Of course, there are exceptions. The final chapter of Scout Mindset includes a moving example of a professor publicly abandoning a view he had championed for fifteen years, after a visiting academic presented persuasive new evidence. The reason these kinds of stories are moving, though, is that they describe truly exceptional behavior.
At least in software, there’s a problem I see where young engineers are often overly bought-in to hype trains, but older engineers (on average) stick with technologies they know too much.
I would imagine something similar in academia, where hot new theories are over-valued by the young, but older academics have the problem you describe.
Good point!
That consideration—and the more basic consideration that more junior people often just know less—definitely pushes in the opposite direction. If you wanted to try some version of seniority-weighted epistemic deference, my guess is that the most reliable cohort would have studied a given topic for at least a few years but less than a couple decades.