Academic Cliques

Well, I'm a linguist, and yes, we do have that. Actually, it works a lot like the philosophy of religion thing. Researchers within the subdiscipline that deals with X believe X is really important. But outside that subdiscipline/clique are a lot of people who have concluded that X is not important and/or doesn't really exist. Naturally, the people who believe in X publish a lot more about X than the people who think X is a stinking pile of dwagon crap. This can lead to outsiders getting the impression that the field has a consensus position about X=awesome.

The best example I know is the debate about linguistic universals. Chomskyan universalists think that all human languages are fundamentally alike, that there is a genetically determined "universal grammar" which shapes their structure. The Chomskyans are a very strong and impressive clique and a lot of non-linguists get the impression that what they say is what every serious linguist believes. But this is not so. A lot of us think the "universal grammar" stuff is vacuous non-sense which we can't be bothered with.

Starting a big fight with the Chomskyans has not been a good career move for the past half-century but this may be changing. In 2009, a couple of linguists started a shitstorm with the article The Myth of Language Universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. The abstract starts like this:

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective.

Suddenly a lot of people are willing to die on this hill, so you can find a very ample supply of recent articles on both sides of this.

Oh there are many examples of this throughout science.

In my own area (machine learning), a decade ago there used to be a huge clique of researchers who's "consensus" was that ANNs were dead, SVM+kernel methods were superior, and that few other ML techniques mattered. Actually, the problem was simply that they were training ANNs improperly. Later researchers showed how to properly train ANNs, and the work of the Toronto machine intelligence group especially established that ANNs were quite superior to SVMs for many tasks.

In econometrics, subsequence time series (STS) clustering was widely thought to be a good approach for analyzing market movements. After decades of work and hundreds of papers on this technique, Keogh et al showed in 2005 that the results of STS clustering are actually indistinguishable from noise!

Another one, in physics, was pointed out by Lee Smolin in his book, The Trouble with Physics. In string theory it was commonly, but wrongly, consensus opinion that Mandelstam had proven string theory finite. Actually, he had only eliminated some particular forms of infinities. The work on establishing string theory as finite is still ongoing.

Unfortunately in my field (programming languages? I guess?) we just outright get ignored by the mainstream of our own field, even while they crow about how important we supposedly are.

Just last Thursday night I attended a talk in which an Esteemed Elderly Researcher complained, when asked for complaints, that computer scientists had not made enough progress in the verified construction of programs and in better programming languages since he was young, and remarked that everyone should have been listening to Alan Kay.

When I attempted to ask, "What about Simon Peyton Jones, Martin Odersky, and the formal PL community?", he basically acknowledged their existence, ignored our entire research field, and went back to saying not enough progress had been made in programming languages.

Still not sure if I asked wrong (raising one's hand and being called on is socially permissible, yes?), or if the mainstream CS research community (certainly including 100% of my own current department, much to my anguish and dismay on signing up as a grad-student under the naive impression we had a good three or so PL people here) is just davka bent on ignoring the formal study of programming languages and its massive advancements in recent years.

Expert consensus thus represents a concerted effort to ignore expert consensus.

Here is a quick tip for seeing if the apparent academic consensus that says C on topic X is really just a clique: Find a review article on X that assumes C, with a lot of space dedicated to describing at length (and with many citations) all the work that has been done supporting C and building on it. If the C consensus is a clique and the review is minimally honest, it will probably have a small section describing a different perspective, with only one or two citations, which when tracked will prove to be review articles on X as long and impressive as the one you are reading but describing a non-C position.

I've joked that when a philosopher says there's a philosophical consensus, what he really means is "I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me.

I came across a term to describe this phenomenon in linguistics regarding grammaticality judgements: Hey Sallys. The idea being, you form some theory about what's grammatical based on what sounds good to you, you think that you ought to check to make sure you're not just being idiosyncratic, and so you wander out into the grad room/house/water cooler/etc and say "Hey X, how does this sound to you?"

Having said that, there's a paper somewhere showing that individual linguists' grammaticality judgements are just as good as taking a large survey in the vast majority of cases.

Insofar as I am an optimist about the scientific method, I put my trust in the existence of objective incontrovertible tests for different theories in the field. All humans tend to play politics with beliefs, so there will be consensuses and contrarians and cliques in every field. But in fields that agree on tests, those consensuses will correspond to the actual outcome of the tests; while in fields with no tests, politics will overwhelm any signal produced by armchair reasoning.

Mathematicians have excellent tests for the correctness of a proof, so they rarely disagree for long. Physicists have good empirical predictions, so they only disagree about some things.

Linguists might agree on a test, but most of the time that test is not doable in practice, so they can't really know if there are biological universals of language; and so they keep on disagreeing about theories more (I predict) than they disagree about any actually observable fact.

And philosophers, by definition, mostly work on things that have no empirical tests, at least not actually executable ones. So they are used to disagreeing, and also to sometimes agreeing (coming to consensus), without actual objective proof of the thing they agree on. And that's why I expect that "how many philosophers believe X" is a poor tests for "is X true", more so than for mathematicians or physicists or even linguists.

This thing can happen even in mathematics or theoretical CS, where there can be a gradual growth of a group of people researching something which gets ignored by and/or has no relevance to the mainstream community.

A good example is institutional model theory, whose practicioners think it is the ultimate theory of abstract logic, even though its accomplishments remain to be seen.

There are academic cliques in physics, too, in some sub-disciplines, though not as pronounced. They cite mostly each other, have their own conferences and such.

As someone who is not an expert on anything, I'd be curious to hear some experts weigh in on how opinions within any given field compare (and contrast) with politics, the infamous mind-killer.

Are there similar mechanisms and biases at play? Do people act tribally and use arguments as soldiers in philosphy & linguistics, for instance?