Spreadin' Love

Megan McArdle explains why it's highly unlikely that "global warming scientists have been engaging in some kind of massive conspiracy to conceal the truth." She can't imagine why scientists who spent ten years getting a PhD would ever to decide to make things up, and that not one, but all of them, would participate in this deception.

Let me add a quick note. While it's true that peer reviewers don't usually get their hands on raw data,  the system has other checks in place. One scientist and his colleagues aren't the only ones doing research in a particular area. There are competing teams at universities around the world. The system is set up to reward people who come up with new findings. That's how people get tenure. No one gets tenure reproducing existing studies. They either have to create new studies that affirm the first study's conclusions or, better yet, mark new territory.

Alex Tabarrok writes a fascinating post about the future of online education. He envisions universities vying for hot-shot teachers, rather than researchers. (Jacob Levy would say "dream on.") These hot-shot teachers produce online lectures which are mass produced and distributed, and an army of TAs does all the grading. It was a thought provoking post with quality comments.

Comments

[y81]

I dunno, I mean, there are televangelists with huge audiences, and there are megachurches where much of the congregation watches the pastor on a video screen, but the average university lecturer isn't offering eternal life. So I just don't see the demand being that high for university lectures. In fact, at most educational institutions I know, they don't bar the doors or anything, anyone could attend the lectures if they wanted to. But no one does.

[Laura/Geekymom]

I consider myself a pretty hot-shot teacher, but what I do can't be packaged since I don't lecture. My classes tend to be discussion oriented with plenty of group work, supplemented by lots of online work. I could envision moving that online only in some way via video chat. The group work would have to take place outside of class time for sure. And, I don't see anyone paying me buckets to do any of that. The trend is that once things go online, they get cheaper, even if the costs are the same for production (and sometimes they're more, sometimes they're less). Until the glut of Ph.D.'s goes away, the cost for teachers, online or in person, will be fairly cheap.

[David Kane]

"While it's true that peer reviewers don't usually get their hands on raw data"

By "don't usually" do you mean 99.999999% of the time? I can't recall hearing of a single incident in political science in which a peer reviewer got hold of the data and checked to see if the regression results were correct or whatever.

I am not complaining about the process, to be clear. I just don't think your "don't usually" is giving an accurate picture to your non-academic readers.

[MH]

David K,

Wrong thread. I've certainly never re-run an analysis when I review anything and never heard of anybody doing it. I don't know what different field do, so I didn't use "never".

[MH]

Oops. That was to Laura's post, not my comment.

[Marya]

They're going to have to seriously work on the production values before they can mass-distribute academic lectures, but even so, they'll never become educational in the way that a good classroom lecture is educational, because they won't be able to adjust to audience as they go. (jliedl already talked about this on her blog.)

Also, then the academic profession will start being hired based on the chili pepper scheme on ratemyprofessors. I mean, more than it is.

[Tamar]

I think McArdle misses two of the biggest points that bug me about the climate change debate (and for the record, I sort of don't care if it's true or not, as long as it gets people to take the environment a little more seriously). First of all, look at the dates at the bottom of the chart. 1880? Are you kidding me? As a non-scientist, I wish someone would explain to me how 150 years of climate records indicate anything about a 5-billion-year-old hunk of rock. If there's anything I learned in the few science classes I was allowed to take in college, it's that 150 out of 5 billion is probably meaningless. Secondly, there is one big fat incentive to, if not make up, follow the party line: it's politically correct. Not on talk radio, of course, but definitely in the ivory tower.

[dave.s.]

Yee Haw. Medieval Warm Period! http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/19/lawrence-solomon-wikipedia-s-climate-doctor.aspx?CommentPosted=true
Megan Mc. is usually right, but this sounds pretty coordinated...