From where I'm standing (I hold a Ph.D in a scientific field, and my spouse is a tenure-track academic), an unsustainable portion of academic work consists in justifying one's research program, on grounds that have little to do with the subject of study.
It should hopefully be obvious that I'm not trying to stir a DEI flame war. Rather, I can't shake the feeling that DEI activism isn't accomplishing much beyond creating bureaucraty, and that this benefits neither research in general, nor marginalized groups trying to establish themselves in academia.
Anyway, this seems like a specific instance of a larger trend you're pointing to. Possibly not even the largest or most absurd one.
It's like the same people put application and social consciousness first in their RFPs and then turn around to accept invisible fig leaves during evaluation... Who's getting fooled, the government? Politicians? The public?
Is it, though? In the case of DEI, it appears to me (on the surface, anyway) that these initiatives are being implemented at the request of very vocal special-interest groups, and at the orders of the politicians who represent them. It seems like a fairly straightforward case of lobbying by institutions whose existence depends on the existence of a social problem. It's a rough analog to Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex idea.
The same is true with what you call "questionably applied number theory". The only difference is that special-interest group isn't defined along ethno-racial lines, but instead comprises various bean-counters and ad-men who sell various forms of investment.
In my view, there used to be a consensus that such lobbyists were not welcome in universities, or at least not in droves, because of their tendency to subvert intellectual pursuits in favor of short-term profits.
Thanks for the conversation. This has been interesting :)
It'd actually be great to have some politicians who ridicule frivolous academic research. It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic research anyway). Alas, their attentions are all elsewhere.
Did you mean "applied research"?
>It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic research anyway).
Careful where you cast stones, my friend. There is a lot of bullshit in software engineering, too.
Gestures towards pile of discarded JS frameworks...
In fact, I'm sure you've noticed the heaps of government-funded software trash.
Academia justifies itself by claiming it's necessary to do "basic", "foundational", "fundamental" or "blue sky" research in a non-commercial setting, because supposedly corporations can't afford to do long term research that doesn't have immediate application. So in this model academic scientists develop a foundation of firm and rigorous theory about how nature works, publish a literature on it for the good of all mankind, and then shorter term applied research is done by companies to derive practical insights from that literature.
That model doesn't seem right, because there are lots of corporate research programmes into fundamental theory that were/are lavishly funded despite a decade+ of no ROI, most obviously at the moment AI. But let's put that aside and pretend it's true.
Problem is that humanities and social studies don't produce a body of theory on which anything can be built. Humanities produces only critical theory, which despite the name is more like a belief system than a scientific theory. The social studies produce a lot of that too, but even outside critical theory their output is just a giant pile of random thought bubbles and mini-studies to try and prove them. There's nothing much linking these studies, no frameworks that make reliable new predictions. Instead we get an endless stream of Just So claims that fall apart when people try to replicate them, but even failure to replicate doesn't have any impact because there's nothing underneath them to be invalidated. At most it's shown that this one specific paper isn't reliable.
Contrast to something like physics where the work of academic theorists is all about coming up with unified theories of everything, which could then be used to develop practical applications. Einstein is super famous because he invalidated large swathes of theory and opened up space for new theory to be developed. Social studies don't have any equivalent to Einstein and can't by design.
The Federal Aviation Administration was named for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, including "distance from knee to knee while sitting", and "the politeal [sic] length of the buttocks."[19]
Office of Education for spending $219,592 in a "curriculum package" to teach college students how to watch television.
Amusingly it does seem to have hit the mark. A former NSF director even lied about the awards to try and discredit it!
Too bad this is all so long ago. I was asking more about the present day, as it seems like that was the implication of the comment being replied to. Where are all these populists with their modern version of the Golden Fleece awards?
There are fewer of these than you'd think. Modeling wobbling plates is easier mocked than done, for example.
Taxpayers shouldn't be funding studies into the weaving techniques used by pre-Columbian natives in the upper Mississippi basin.
Creating a bilingual dictionary for an indigenous language spoken by a few thousand people who aren't even in the country funding that research is the definition of "a waste of government research grant money."
I feel profound sadness and pity for anyone with such an impoverished worldview. I hope someday you can experience some literature, art, nature, or human connection that can pierce though it and help you reconnect with your innate capacities for empathy and wonder.
Not wanting to use taxpayer money to fund your friend’s whimsical intellectual odyssey is not the same as lacking empathy and wonder.
Keep your pity—you sound like you could use a fair dose of empathy yourself.