Back to Basics
Recently I read this post -- " Behavioural Science Needs to Return to the Basics " -- and I didn't like it. In this blog post I am going to complain about it. To be clear my complaints are not going to dispute that there are lots of tiresome prigs in academia, that given the general demeanour of academics tiresome moralists tend to be of the liberal left variety, and even less that in work (both ideological and not) there is a lot of slapdash reasoning. All of those claims are certainly true, and (aha) the lived experience of any academic will confirm them adequately enough. (If you don't believe me then see here .) These are pretty central claims to the linked piece, so that's a substantial amount of agreement! But alas in academia we don't just care that you say true things, we care that you say true things for the right reasons. The old joke that philosophers are the kind of people who say "I know it works in practice but does it work in theory?"