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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
The Science post screwed up the link to the announcement, here's one that works. Despite Science's spin, the overall reporting is accurate. Let me de-spin it a bit, with quotes from the original announcement:
An elected government chooses a popular priority--economic growth--and a ministry aligns with that priority.
So the applications to this fund should either make a reasonable case that they will benefit NZ economically, or that they have some potential to lead to that. That's in line with the priority the elected government has established for itself (economic growth).
I can see why humanities and social scientists would be upset: nobody likes to have their source of funding taken away. I have but two questions: (1) do they disagree with the current elected government prioritizing economic growth, or (2) do they argue that the humanities and social science projects funded by this fund lead to economic growth as well as the core science projects?
If the disagreement is with the first question, then the response is: elections have consequences. New Zealand economy is doing poorly, people are worried, they elect a government with a mandate to grow the economy. While other goals have value, they have lost priority.
Is there any argument on the second front? The Science article hints at the possibility:
... but there is absolutely no follow-up or development of this argument. In fact, it's clear that "fundamental science" of the kind that an Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is likely to do indeed will continue to be funded, and likely at a higher rate than before now that the funds are not going towards social science / humanities. Unless, despite the name, that institute is pursuing non-core, non-fundamental-science projects (e..g, "How would an advance in nanotech affect [$historically-disadvantaged-minority]?" or "Indigenous knowledge of microchips").
That brief hint of a beginning of an argument is followed by a conflation of economics and social cohesion, and then by how this will impact Maori-led research. So bupkis.
Your argument is at least more developed: you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population. I wonder, though: New Zealanders adopt science and tech products made elsewhere, and (let's take your claim at face value for the moment) suffer the social consequences anyway. Isn't that strictly worse than having NZ companies develop the product domestically, and at least capturing the economic benefits of the product?
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
No it won't. We reflect on that question right here on the Motte. And, of course, these conversations happen every day within families, friend groups, and churches. We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.
But even so, these credential elites are doing an awful job measuring and promoting human well-being. The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world and stokes social division. Even worse, it often places objective truth-seeking below appeals to authority. That's how you get stuff like "indigenous ways of knowing" being taught in NZ schools as an alternative to science.
The sooner we free ourselves from this corrupt priestly class, the better.
So, shifting the focus to philosophy specifically, since that's where I'm more knowledgeable.
A couple points do have to be conceded. Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions. It's not uncommon for bright undergraduates to anticipate the major positions and lines of arguments when they're first presented with a philosophical problem.
It also has to be pointed out that the modern research university, and with it the concept of the "academic philosopher", is itself a somewhat recent historical invention. Although institutions of higher learning in some form date back to antiquity, not every canonical philosopher has had institutional support - Spinoza was a lens crafter, Kierkegaard was independently wealthy, Nietzsche held a PhD in an unrelated field and did most of his writing after he left the university. So we know that good work can happen even in the absence of universities.
Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.
I love TheMotte dearly, and obviously you can tell from my prolific posting history that I derive a great deal of value from this forum, but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.
It depends on who you're talking about? I suppose the anti-natalists and transhumanists could be plausibly accused of being nihilist, so if that's part of the "dominant ideology" then sure. Wokeists and Marxists in the general case though are definitely not nihilists. You can disagree with them and call them evil, but they're not nihilists. They think that what they're doing is extremely meaningful
Only if the incentives of that work align with not only producing high-quality work on these questions, but also effectively disseminating the results. Current incentives in academia do not.
Yes, some academics still produce great work (aimed at others in their sub-field). The work of disseminating their result even among their sub-field peers is a challenge due of the deluge of poor-quality stuff that everyone (including them) puts out to inflate their publication record.
I have been in enough hiring and promotion committees to witness first-hand that most committee members (a) will count the number of publications, taking into account the frequency and recency of them, and the quality of the journals based on SJR metrics, and (b) will not even bother reading any of the works if the applicant is even in a slightly different sub-field, but instead rely on the blurbs in reference letters / external reviewers, which (b1) tend to be way too nice and uncritical, and (b2) tend to do about as good a job conveying the actual qualifications of the candidate in their field as we professors do when we write a letter of recommendation for a student's grad school application.
(And gods-forbid that the candidate tries something interdisciplinary and we couldn't find a reviewer with decent knowledge of both fields. Or collaborates with someone outside their field. In math at least, that tends to look like this: the mathematician use some low-level mathematics to make a reasonable model in the context provided by other collaborators; if the reviewer is a mathematician without much knowledge of the other field, the reviewer isolates the mathematical model, realizes that it's pretty low-level math, and reports that in the review. The hard part of the collaboration is the endless back-and-forth with the non-mathematicians to get them to elucidate what, specifically, they want to model, and to commit to particular measurements and parameters. None of that work comes through in the review of the final polished publication, and is certainly not apparent to any pure mathematician.)
As a result, those who rise in an academic field must go through several such filters: at least one successful tenure-track hire; successful tenure review; successful full-professor review, and any reviews in-between. The process selects for those who stay firmly in the confines of their sub-field, making numerous and safe publications. By the time one gets through these filters, one might as well stay in that lane where it's safe and comfortable, and where one has already achieved some level of prominence and prestige.
At that point one becomes the cog that perpetuates the system: one gets swamped by requests for reviews (manuscripts submitted to a journal that published your work; external review of a tenure / promotion candidate; letters of recommendation for junior colleague; letters of recommendation for students). That's a shit-ton of work, and one feels obliged to take on some of it (to keep ones connections), so one develops streamline methods for quickly writing those reviews. Which results in more bland, overly-positive-while-saying-little-of-substance reviews that others then rely on for admittance/publication/hiring/tenure/promotion. And because they know (and you know) the worth of those reviews, everyone falls back on something concrete like the JSR metrics, which feeds the Goodhart's law and further dilutes the few high-quality works that do indeed get produced and published.
So no, the current academic system's incentives do not align with producing a few but high-quality explorations into important questions.
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