Links to Consider, 6/2

Inquisitive Bird on poverty and crime; Noah Smith on the corruption of science; Erik Hoel on a book-writer's odds; and Noah Smith on a history Ph.D's odds

Inquisitive Bird writes,

As I will argue, the causal effect of poverty on violence is weak, and potentially practically null. Instead, the association between poverty and violent crime is mostly the product of selection: traits like low cognitive ability, mental disorders and others, negatively impact economic success and are also risk factors for committing violent crime.

Noah Smith writes,

And yet the incentives of modern science seem almost designed to encourage widespread fraud. The key metrics for success in science are 1) publications in peer-reviewed journals, and 2) citations of those publications. And as Goodhart’s Law tells us, all metrics will eventually be gamed. There are many ways to game the publish-or-perish system — p-hacking, specification search, citation rings, etc. Fraud might not be the easiest or safest of these. But it’s almost certainly the most damaging.

Peer review is a poor defense against fraud; even careful, diligent reviewers who might spot bad statistics or weak inferences will struggle to identify outright fakery. That leaves culture — a general feeling of pride in the integrity of the scientific system — as the front-line defense against fraud. There was never any assurance that this culture would remain intact as larger and larger sums of money got thrown at science.

As I have said before and will say again, the whole system of incentives in academia ought to be redesigned. The problem is that the people who have gotten where they are today by gamin that system are not going to be the ones to change it.

Erik Hoel writes,

The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).

If you try to make a living as a fiction writer, a painter, a singer, or an actor, do not get your hopes up. It is like entering a lottery where the winners get to have a full-time career in the fine arts.

You need a backup plan.

Which should be something other than trying to become a history professor, especially if you are a white male. Noah Smith writes,

it’s clear that Walsh expected not only to get a tenure-track academic job, but a job in his particular research field — 20th-century U.S. history. There aren’t many such jobs in existence, but that was what Walsh had set his sights on. And it’s his failure to get that specific job, in that specific field, that made him get frustrated and lash out in the thread that made everyone angry.

…we sent so many Americans to college that we created a glut of educated workers. But when a country has fewer kids facing higher prices for a less valuable education, you’re probably going to see fewer people go to college. And that means less demand for professors in general.

But there’s a fourth reason that the demand for historians has fallen: College kids are increasingly avoiding the history major.

My father was one of the few college administrators who saw this coming 50 years ago. He feared that many people were not suited to productive employment. He termed such people “corkball players,” because he thought that government might have to pay them to play corkball, an idiosyncratic two-on-two form of baseball that was popular in St. Louis when he was growing up. He thought that humanities departments were gearing up to turn out PhD’s who would become corkball players.

He was wrong about economic misfits needing the government. Many corkball players end up being absorbed as administrators in universities or nonprofit foundations.

substacks referenced above:

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The case of the angry history postdoc

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Making a living by writing is as rare as being a billionaire

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Does poverty cause violent crime?