In recent years, I’ve noticed a lot of think pieces in which people talk about their academic fields hitting an impasse. A recent example is this Liam Kofi Bright post on analytic philosophy:
Analytic philosophy is a degenerating research programme. It’s been quite a long time since there was anything like a shared project … People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place … The architectonic programmes of latter-20th-century analytic philosophy seem to have failed without any clear ideas for replacing them coming forward … What I think is gone, and is not coming back, is any hope that from all this will emerge a well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest.
Another example is Sabine Hossenfelder’s 2018 book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which is about how high-energy particle physics has made itself irrelevant by pursuing theories that look nice instead of those that try to explain reality. The book followed on the heels of a number of pieces noting how the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model (though we still have to wait and see if the Muon g-2 anomaly turns out to be something new). And of course there are many books and articles about the apparent dead end in string theory.
Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen thinks economics hasn’t done a lot to enlighten the world recently. I personally disagree with him, given all the great and very accessible empirical work that has come out in recent years, but Cowen might be thinking mainly about economic theory — back in 2012, he told me that he thought there had been no interesting new theoretical work since the ’90s.
There are seemingly endless warnings of disciplinary dead ends. In 2013, Keith Devlin, director of the Stanford Mathematics Outreach Project, fretted that “mathematics as we know it may die within a generation.” Some worry that the field of psychology will be rendered irrelevant by neuroscience. In general, if you pick an academic field X and Google “the end of X,” you’ll find an essay from the last decade wondering if it’s over — or declaring outright that it is.
Is this normal? Maybe academics just always tend to think their fields are in crisis until the next big discovery comes along. After all, some people thought physics was over in the late 19th century, just before relativity and quantum mechanics came along. Maybe the recent hand-wringing is just more of the same?
Perhaps. But an opposing notion is the “end of science” hypothesis — the idea that most of the big ideas really have been found, and now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for the universe’s last few remaining secrets. This is the uncomfortable possibility raised by papers like the 2020 American Economic Review study “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” by Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom and co-authors.
In between these two theories, I offer a third hypothesis, striking a middle ground: The way that we do academic research — or at least, the way we’ve done it since World War II — is not suited to the way discovery actually works.
More : https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-disciplines-hit-dead-ends
By Noah Smith , August 3, 2021
