The Null Hypothesis Regarding the Humanities

Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of the Humanities Report that has been generating discussion. I really don't have the time or capacity to do much in depth thinking or reading about this so genuine apologies if I am missing something obvious or already covered in the report. I just want to have publicly stated something that I think of as the default or null hypothesis of sorts in this realm.

Most academic work is bad. (My own work included.) Most academics are left-wing. (Myself included.) Nothing about being left-wing especially prevents you from doing bad work or elevates your work's average level of quality. So most of the bad work in academia is done by left-wing people with a left-wing slant. We could change that such that people would be more facially politically neutral or have a more right wing slant or have a variety of political slants in their work. That might well include getting them to change which epistemological views they say are best, since presently they're endorsing those on grounds of their political vibe. But most work would still be bad, and that's the real problem here.

The reason most work is bad is that most of us are stupid and incompetent. If we weren't left wing we would still be stupid and incompetent. If we had different background epistemologies, or the 90s science wars Boghossian is so keen to refight had gone differently, we would still be stupid and incompetent. We're stupid and incompetent because that's just how most people are, and maybe the problems we handle in academia are of their nature at the "research frontier", places where it is hard to get things right. 

The above is what I consider to be the null hypothesis. I mean it to be something like: while it is the case that a lot of academics in the humanities and social sciences are bad, and in their bad work they will say lefty things and endorse various wacky left-coded epistemologies, it wouldn't make them not bad to make them not left-wing and get them to endorse different epistemologies. The cause of their incompetence is that in general we're not very good at solving the kind of problems that humanities and social scientists address themselves to, that's part of why such problems constitute the research frontier. 

For what it's worth, I think an examination of the natural sciences would tend to support this. The political valence of the work there is often less overt and the epistemology tends to be the kind of inchoate mix of Popperianism and empiricism that, whatever their flaws, at least doesn't raise culture war heckles among squishy liberals or most of the right. Yet there after all the average number of citations to papers is still pretty small; it seems the typical work isn't contributing much. More generally and persuasively (to me) this is evinced by the long-standing failure to find evidence for the Ortega hypothesis among sociologists of science. So I don't think the fact that most work is disappointingly crap is a humanities and social sciences specific feature. (Edit: Eric Schliesser points out to me that the recent replication crisis might also provide some further evidence of this point.) I think that it just turns out that most of us working at a research frontier don't actually achieve that much. Because we're stupid and incompetent.

That's not to say nothing should be done. The fact that people tend to be stupid and incompetent is no excuse for any one of us. We are all just, en masse, failing individually to be better. We should in fact each and all of us aim higher and be better. (Or if we can't then maybe just pull back from publishing so much, as I have considered for my own case. That option though is harder given the incentive structure of academia so would require institutional changes that would be hard to bring about.) I am not generally a fan of "overly-demanding" objections in ethics. The fact that a failure is common doesn't make it excusable.

If I think all this you might wonder why I am not more up in arms about the state of the academy. Well I have thought that all of this incompetence is ok because of the way I thought intellectual progress works. I thought that, by and large, science progresses best by letting in lots of work rather than trying to pre-filter for high quality by gate keeping. We can then afterwards by a process of communal discussion (including not just academics but the broader life world, which is less impressed by our rhetoric and so better at just ignoring our guff) sort out the good from the bad, just accepting that there's lots of bad work in the mix. If the return on the hits is big enough that justifies a lot of duds, after all. (My sense is this is how the market for book publication works? So I guess I had a book publication model of scientific progress.) This still means that you individually should try and do good work and cut back if you know of yourself that you can't; but at a communal level I was ok with lots of bad stuff and incompetence because I thought that the social system as a whole would pick out the gems. 

But maybe that was naive of me, and we do need to find some way of introducing paradigms that raise the floor on quality. I am just not sure how to do that. What's more, I have also been hypocritical about this, as when I have condemned bad conservative work I have there got on my high horse and preached individual level rigour and standards. 

Now that last also gives me a note to end on, which is that I think I should acknowledge my own bias here. I am clearly the bad thing the paper is complaining about. I am a lefty academic, I adhere to a kind of Carnappian existentialist subjectivism in metaphilosophy and I have defended standpoint epistemology and racial capitalism and sympathetically discussed intersectionality theory. I am at least sympathetic to subjectivism and relativism about truth, even if I find that hard to square with deflationism. I teach a course on evidence and policy where we spend a non-trivial amount of time going over the argument from inductive risk, since I really do think that means one has to make non-trivial ethically/politically laden decisions as part of standard empirical research methodology. Perhaps not that surprising to learn about policy facing science in particular, but I think the possibility of such connections is pervasive, albeit usually not so interesting. In short, I think I have all of the positions and intellectual tendencies and general lefty-humanist-vibe that the report picks out as ruining the humanities. I don't even disagree that I am bad and my work makes the world worse so, as mentioned, I have therefore been trying to do less of it, consistent with the requirements of maintaining my position. So it's very possible I am motivated in this by a kind of companions in guilt argument, wherein I would at least like to feel like I am not alone in ruining everything. Maybe so.

But when I look at the instances given of bad work in the humanities and social sciences it mostly just strikes me as... well, bad. Full of non-sequiturs, poorly written sentences that suggest poor thinking underneath, and (often morally incoherent) overblown rhetoric that I suspect will get us nowhere good at all. I am just not inclined to think that if we convinced the people doing this that actually Williamson's defence of externalism was really rather persuasive and have they heard the Good News of Rawls our Lord and Saviour... that the people doing this would start doing good work. I think they would just now be making non-sequiturs about how ethnographic observation proves the difference principle was right all along, or when you really examine this or that play from the 1700s it shows decisively that the world is gunky rather than atomic. Likewise the more right-coded version of this where we persuade everyone to read Great Books and write in the classical style. We'll just get more of that awful genre where it turns out misreading the Melian dialogue is key to understanding literally every event in international relations ever. Such rot would, I think, probably be more comfortably received by the authors of the report than the more radical lefty flavoured rot, and relatedly would perhaps raise less of a fuss in the eternal campus-watch newsbeat as it would be less exciting for right wing culture warriors circling the academy like vultures. That's not nothing, I like the quiet life too. But it's not really that reassuring either.