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You’ve almost nailed it! “It survived because it was something that only academics cared about” The critical change has been in the number of academics, not i
by 2devnull 3y ago
You’ve almost nailed it!
“It survived because it was something that only academics cared about”
The critical change has been in the number of academics, not in their level of care. It was always a small exclusive group. It can only work if it’s a small exclusive group. We can’t make everyone an academic and expect quality output anymore than we can make everyone a coder and expect great software. Academia (higher ed) simply cannot scale and still be what it’s been. Great wine must be produced in small batches, perhaps the elite should be too.
- jahewson 3y agoYou're implying that bad politics is the product of bad minds but that's not the case at all.
- rossdavidh 3y agoYes, this sounds accurate to me, because it follows the general pattern that "enforcement by reputation doesn't scale". It works in small groups, because the feedback loop is relatively quick and relatively difficult to evade. The larger the group, the slower the consequences and the easier it is to find people in the group who don't know your reputation yet. The "solution" which occurs almost immediately to any developer is to automate the reputation, but I think we've seen enough SEO and similar algorithm-hacking to understand how that fails. In fact, "rack up a lot of publications" is itself a method of hacking an attempt at automating reputation.