The profession – RE-DESIGN

The Discursive Dilemma and Research Project Evaluation

Published by demetriodor on November 21, 2017

tl; dr When we collectively evaluate research proposals, we can reach the opposite verdict depending on how we aggregate the individual evaluations, and that’s a problem, and nobody seems to care or provide guidance how to proceed. Imagine that three judges need to reach a verdict together using majority rule. To do that, the judges have to decide independently if each of two factual propositions related to the suspected crime is true. (And they all agree that if and only if both propositions are true, the defendant is guilty). The distribution of the judges’ beliefs is given in the table below. Judge 1 believes that both propositions are true, and as a result, considers the conclusion (defendant is guilty) true as well. Judges 2 and 3 consider that only one of the propositions is true and, as a result, reach a conclusion of ‘not guilty’. When the judges vote in accordance with their conclusions, a majority finds the defendant ‘not guilty’. Proposition 1 Proposition 2 Conclusion Judge 1 true true true (guilty) Judge 2 false true false (not guilty) Judge 3 true false false (not guilty) Majority decision TRUE TRUE FALSE (not guilty) However, there is a majority that finds each of the two propositions true (see the last line in the table)! Therefore, if the judges vote on each proposition separately rather than directly on the conclusion, they will have to find the defendant ‘guilty’. That is, the judges will reach the opposite conclusion, even though nothing changes about their beliefs, they still agree that both…

Why political scientists should continue to (fail to) predict elections?

Published by demetriodor on May 11, 2015

The results from the British elections last week already claimed the heads of three party leaders. But together with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, there was another group that lost big time in the elections: pollsters and electoral prognosticators. Not only were polls and predictions way off the mark in terms of the actual vote shares and seats received by the different parties. Crucially, their major expectation of a hung parliament did not materialize as the Conservatives cruised into a small but comfortable majority of the seats. Even more remarkably, all polls and predictions were wrong, and they were all wrong pretty much in the same way. Not pretty. This calls for reflection upon the exploding number of electoral forecasting models which sprung up during the build-up to the 2015 national elections in the UK. Many of these models were offered by political scientists and promoted by academic institutions (for example, here, here, and here). At some point, it became passé to be a major political science institution in the country and not have an electoral forecast. The field became so crowded that the elections were branded as ‘a nerd feast’ and the competition of predictions as ‘the battle of the nerds’. The feast is over and everyone lost. It is the time of the scavengers. The massive failure of British polls and predictions has already led to a frenzy of often vicious attacks on the pollsters and prognosticators coming from politicians, journalists and pundits, in the UK and beyond. A formal inquiry has…

Constructivism in the world of Dragons

Published by demetriodor on March 26, 2013

Here is an analysis of Game of Thrones from a realist international relations perspective. Inevitably, here is the response from a constructivist angle. These are supposed to be fun so I approached them with a light heart and popcorn. But halfway through the second article I actually felt sick to my stomach. I am not exaggerating, and it wasn’t the popcorn – seeing the same ‘arguments’ between realists and constructivists rehearsed in this new setting, the same lame responses to the same lame points, the same ‘debate’ where nobody ever changes their mind, the same dreaded confluence of normative, theoretical, and empirical notions that plagues this never-ending exchange in the real (sorry, socially constructed) world, all that really gave me a physical pain. I felt entrapped – even in this fantasy world there was no escape from the Realist and the Constructivist. The Seven Kingdoms were infected by the triviality of our IR theories. The magic of their world was desecrated. Forever…. Nothing wrong with the particular analyses. But precisely because they manage to be good examples of the genres they imitate the bad taste in my mouth felt so real. So is it about interests or norms? Oh no. Is it real politik or the slow construction of a common moral order? Do leader disregard the common folk to their own peril? Oh, please stop. How do norms construct identities? Noooo moooore. Send the Dragons!!! By the way, just one example of how George R.R. Martin can explain a difficult political idea better…

The failure of political science

Published by demetriodor on March 25, 2013

Last week the American Senate supported with a clear bi-partisan majority a decision to stop funding for political science research from the National Science Foundation. Of all disciplines, only political science has been singled out for the cuts and the money will go for cancer research instead. The decision is obviously wrong for so many reasons but my point is different. How could political scientists who are supposed to understand better than anyone else how politics works allow this to happen? What does it tell us about the state of the discipline that the academic experts in political analysis cannot prevent overt political action that hurts them directly and rather severely? To me, this failure of American political scientists to protect their own turf in the political game is scandalous. It is as bad as Nobel-winning economists Robert Merton and Myron Scholes leading the hedge fund ‘Long Tern Capital Management‘ to bust and losing 4.6 billion dollars with the help of their Nobel-wining economic theories. As Myron & Scholes’ hedge fund story revels the true real-world value of (much) financial economics theories, so does the humiliation of political science by the Congress reveal the true real-world value of (much) political theories. Think about it – the world-leading academic specialists on collective action, interest representation and mobilization could not get themselves mobilized, organized and represented in Washington to protect their funding. The professors of the political process and legislative institutions could not find a way to work these same institutions to their own…

The education revolution at our doorstep

Published by demetriodor on November 14, 2012

University education is at the brink of radical transformation. The revolution is already happening and the Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera and the Marginal Revolution University are just the harbingers of a change that will soon sweep over universities throughout the world. Alex Tabarrok has a must-read piece on the coming revolution in education here. The entire piece is highly recommended, so I am not gonna even try to summarize it here, but this part stands out: Teaching today is like a stage play. A play can be seen by at most a few hundred people at a single sitting and it takes as much labor to produce the 100th viewing as it does to produce the first. As a result, plays are expensive. Online education makes teaching more like a movie. Movies can be seen by millions and the cost per viewer declines with more viewers. Now consider quality. The average movie actor is a better actor than the average stage actor. As a result, Tabarrok predicts that the market for teachers will became a winner-take-all market with very big payments at the top: the best teachers would be followed by millions and paid accordingly. My prediction is that the revolution in education will also lead to greater specialization – maybe you can’t be the best Development Economics teacher, but you can be the best teacher on XIXth Century Agricultural Development in South-East Denmark: economies of scale brought by online education can make such uber-specialization of teaching portfolios profitable (or, indeed necessary). Surprisingly or…

Science is like sex…

Published by demetriodor on November 12, 2012

‘Science is like sex – it might have practical consequences but that’s not why you do it!’ This seems to be a modified version of a quote by the physicist Richard Feynman that I heard last week at a meeting organized by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (the major research funding agency in the Netherlands). It kind of sums up the attitudes of natural scientists to the increasing pressures all researchers face to justify their grant applications in terms of the possible practical use (utilization, or valorization) of their research results. Which is totally fine by me. I perfectly understand that it is impossible to anticipate all the possible future practical consequences of fundmental research. On the other hand, I see no harm in forcing researchers to, at the very least, think about the possible real-world applications of their work. The current equilibrium in which reflection on possible practical applications is required, but ‘utilization’ is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting a grant, seems like a good compromise. Of course, I come from a field (public administration) where demonstrating the scientific contribution is usually more difficult than showing the practical applicability of the results: so my view might be biased. I am not even sure what fundamental research in the social sciences looks like. Even rather esoteric work on non-cooperative game theory has been directly spurred by practical concerns related to the Cold War (and sponsored by the RAND corporation) and has rather directly led to the design of real-world social instituions (like the…

Category: The profession