Executive summary: The aesthetics and incentives in academia can distort what work is considered “good”, leading to an overemphasis on novelty, trendiness, and conspicuous effort at the expense of truth, importance, and clarity.
Key points:
The aesthetic of novelty/cleverness in psychology academia discourages publishing true, important insights about everyday life that are obvious in hindsight or have historical precedent.
The aesthetic of topicality/trendiness incentivizes researchers to work on currently popular topics and use trendy terminology, rather than the most important problems.
The aesthetic of effort leads to valuing conspicuous displays of technical difficulty over concise, helpful explanations.
These problematic aesthetics are not unique to academia, and are often invisible to those most affected by them.
Having bad aesthetics of success leads to having bad “research taste” that optimizes for the wrong things.
We should examine what aesthetics we use to judge success in our own pursuits, and what distortions they might cause.
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Executive summary: The aesthetics and incentives in academia can distort what work is considered “good”, leading to an overemphasis on novelty, trendiness, and conspicuous effort at the expense of truth, importance, and clarity.
Key points:
The aesthetic of novelty/cleverness in psychology academia discourages publishing true, important insights about everyday life that are obvious in hindsight or have historical precedent.
The aesthetic of topicality/trendiness incentivizes researchers to work on currently popular topics and use trendy terminology, rather than the most important problems.
The aesthetic of effort leads to valuing conspicuous displays of technical difficulty over concise, helpful explanations.
These problematic aesthetics are not unique to academia, and are often invisible to those most affected by them.
Having bad aesthetics of success leads to having bad “research taste” that optimizes for the wrong things.
We should examine what aesthetics we use to judge success in our own pursuits, and what distortions they might cause.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.