The Academy Systematically Denies Truth

Why Academia is an Engine for Anti-truth Seeking

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I did some research in preparation for our Kulture Dads episode on beer, and I discovered that alcohol became a worldwide staple not because people liked its intoxicating effects, but because its antiseptic effects made it a clean and safe source of fluids. This was news to me, but is apparently well known in anthropology, as I found in multiple sources with citations.

Somehow, I also found my way on to a reddit thread debooonking this idea as “fake”, with one commenter saying that you will read this everywhere but never in a source with citations. The commenter cited no sources. Because of course not—it’s reddit, the most impressive gathering of midwittery on the entire internet. I maintain that the Dunning-Kruger effect is real but applies to midwits—the closer you are to the mean of standard deviation 1, the more of an expert you are on every field of human knowledge that has ever existed.

What the eternal redditor loves is not truth, but novelty. And in this he is not alone—in fact, he is the archetype of the Current Year academic. If you go on reddit, you don’t have to look far before you will come upon a snarky “bad X” forum on the model of r/badphilosophy whose regulars are underemployed humanities grad students who maintain their self-respect by laughing at people who have studied better things than critical gender studies.

This is not to say that no genuine scholarship comes out of the academy, but the modern academy possesses a twofold dynamic that drives it, on the whole, in the opposite direction of truth.

The first dynamic is novelty seeking, the TEDx worldview, where “everything you ever thought you knew about X is wrong!” This is, to some extent, a permanent feature of scholarship in all times and places. Successful academics are high in intellectual trait openness, although slightly low in senso-aesthetic openness.¹ So they thrive on new intellectual experiences and feel uncomfortable when things aren’t changing. In some circumstances this is fine, even desirable, such as when a discipline is young. But the older a discipline is, the more likely it is that the lust for novelty will get you away from, rather than toward the truth. The older a discipline is, the more likely it has hit upon the truth at some point, and the less likely that radical new frameworks are truth-seeking—as a discipline enters its mature phase, it’s more a matter of refining and buffing out the rough edges than completely recasting it. Genomics is getting pretty good now, but the various subdisciplines within ethics or history have long ago jumped the shark.

Academics hate conservatism for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with conservatism’s validity and everything to do with its relationship to novelty. Conservatism systematically puts academics out of work. There’s only so much demand for intellectuals who are prepared to say “yep, Darwin got it right” or some such thing, whereas in principle there exist infinite untapped markets for idiotic contrarian hot takes.

This problem is compounded by “publish or perish”. It’s not enough to simply be the most able defender of group selection or direct realism; you must produce a certain amount of literature in order to gain a tenured position in the first place. And because of the powerful and irrational (powerful because irrational) disposition toward novelty, your published work had better have something new in it. You’ll note that the absolute worst insult for an academic is that his work is “not interesting”, as though interest matters at all to truth. “Wrong” is fine; that at least gives the eternal redditor something to do. The aggregate effect is that academia becomes mere busywork, a sort of pettifogging bureaucracy at best, and more likely, a post hoc rationalization of prevailing power structures.

The second dynamic is in some sense the opposite of the first. But rather than tempering the first, it reinforces it.