Scott Alexander on the APA meetings

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He writes,

Were there really more than twice as many sessions on global warming as on obsessive compulsive disorder? Three times as many on immigration as on ADHD? As best I can count, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate this. There was still a lot of really meaty scientific discussion if you sought it out. But overall the balance was pretty striking.

I’m reminded of the idea of woke capital, the weird alliance between very rich businesses and progressive signaling. If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.

Higher education has an awful disease, and it has spread in several directions.

8 thoughts on “Scott Alexander on the APA meetings”

  1. I think some of this can be explained by academic structures that continuously force publishing. When you require thousands of people to have an original idea and publish something, this is the type of stuff you get.

  2. The impression I got from reading the piece (excellent by the way) was that the APA conference was not strictly academic. Rather as a quasi-governmental entity that officially defines diseases, defines acceptable practice, polices heresies, lobbies to restrict new entrants and competition while protecting incumbents, lobbying for increased third party payer requirements, and generally working to keep the field as lucrative as possible in the vacuum of evidence that it actually delivers beneficial services, represents the increased blurring of the lines between government and business. Of course the education industry, as well as several other industries work on a similar model, but making the distinction is worthwhile in order to draw attention to how anti-democratic this trend and the damage that the conformity demanded by these hyper politicized entities does to the economy and progress. The metaphor “the swamp” is a very useful tool for understanding what is going on when professional associations take on governmental roles. Nothing good will come of it and even though government reformers already have their hands full with purely governmental messes, they need to be wary of efforts to move accountability and authority outside constitutional boundaries.

    • As a related matter, it would be very interesting to learn Dr. Kling’s thoughts on the merit of Baumol’s cost disease to explain high inflation in the medical and education industries. Some would have us believe that the high rates of inflation are inevitable because without the higher salaries people would choose to work in other industries. If this were actually true, wouldn’t say a 50 percent pay cut for tenured professors at public universities be economically efficient by encouraging incumbents to move to higher value occupations? Since the vast majority of academic research is useless and unread, and adjuncts and grad assistants do the lion’s share of teaching already, there would appear to be very little downside.

    • https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-doctor-charged-25-counts-murder-accused-prescribing-excessive-doses-n970026

      Ohio doctor charged with 25 counts of murder, accused of prescribing excessive doses of painkillers…

      —

      Right here, fentanyls cause the pain. The neuro inhibitors in the pain pathways are atrophied because of repeated opiod use. Hence, every minor ache and pain we tolerate becomes excruciating pain to the opiod addict. The natural suppressant function, gone. We have a similar effect higher up in the emotional center and the set of psycho active drugs like Xanax. I have training here, and in college we could cut up rat brains and see the atrophy due to these two types of drugs.

      Shrinks are behind the curve, plus they are dealing, in many cases, with a background if illicit use, patients flooding their brains with these drugs. It is impossible for the shrink to do anything but harm until the patient is isolated from illicit dosing.

  4. This reminds me of this quote from Eric Kaufmann’s book Whiteshift:

    > As it [the left modernist sensibility] gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade but to institutionalize itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity. This is a subtle but critical shift.

    Scott Alexander is one of the best political pundits of today. He claims to self-identify as liberal, I would categorize him more as IDW like Eric Weinstein or even Arnold Kling.

  5. Higher education has an awful disease, and it has spread in several directions.

    Yes it is eye-rolling signaling but reviewing the entire post, I am left with:

    Our Pharmaceuticals model is a complete disease here. I would suggest that we should allow our insurance companies to source drugs from any developed nation as our consumers are completely covering the cost of the shrinking R&D.

    And in terms of drug abuse, I am wondering how more people are not becoming drug addicts? Everything about that convention is brought to you by a pharma company.

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