Curtis Yarvin, the cathedral, and particle physics's enemy #1

or how ideas spread in academia

We like to think that the best ideas rise to the top in academia. However, is this always the case? Academics are human, and the typical normal human stuff like politics can get in the way of the best ideas.

How do ideas spread?

Over the last few years, I’ve stumbled upon different ideas about how ideas themselves spread. They’ve always intrigued me, and I’ll list them out here:

• Bertrand Russell, a philosopher of the 20th century, thought that the context of a historical period influenced the philosophy of the time. Periods of struggle tended to go hand-in-hand with philosophies of perseverance (like stoicism). Periods of good fortune tended to result in the popularity of optimistic philosophies, including the enlightenment movement.

• Memetics is another idea, first posed by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. He proposed that ideas tend to undergo evolution (mutation, competition, selection) like genetic data does. The unit of information, he called the meme, was the cultural information equivalent of the gene.

• Robin Hanson, a modern writer, argues that human cultures that promote prosperity (and fertility) tend to hold the ideas that win the popularity contest. He warns that there has been a worldwide shift in culture that is non-adaptive, which has resulted in lower fertility rates. In short, people are having less kids, later in their life. I guess, it also follows that the small pockets of culture that have high-fertility rates (like religious fundamentalists) will dominate in the future.

• A YouTuber by the name of JohnTheDuncan, introduced me to the idea of social reproduction within capitalist systems. Social systems are reproduced within society by the subjectification of the individual—which means instilling certain values in people like self-responsibility, entrepreneurialness, and capitalism. One of the ways people are subjectified is by giving them debt, which kind of forces people to continue to work within the capitalist framework.

• Finally, the cathedral, the main idea I’ll be talking about in this article, was proposed by Curtis Yarvin, who is a rising political thinker. The cathedral discusses how ideas spread within academia and the press. Curtis Yarvin himself is a controversial figure. He calls himself a monarchist, but he also has self-described troll-like tendencies. So does he call himself a monarchist to be provocative, or is he serious about it? I don’t plan to learn more about (or write about) his political views. Most of my discussion will be coming from this essay explaining the concept of the cathedral.

As we can see, there are many different ideas about how ideas, cultural information, and philosophies spread and rise in dominance. There is no single overarching theory. We can think of something like cultural evolution—that Robin Hanson works on—to be working on very long time scales…after all, ideas have to be conducive with certain aspects of biological/physical reality to remain relevant. However, cultural information isn’t just transmitted from parent to child, but can also spread horizontally from peer to peer, so Hanson’s conception of cultural evolution doesn’t explain how ideas spread within a single lifetime.

Curtis Yarvin’s, the cathedral, is an interesting explanation of how ideas spread within academia. We think that the best ideas are the ones that become most popular among our experts, but the cathedral explains how things can go haywire.

The Cathedral

Curtis Yarvin introduces the cathedral by posing a simple question. Why is it that all of our most prestige university and press media agree with each other? (Harvard, Yale, New York Times, Washington Post). They seem to walk in lock-step with each other on certain matters of social, political, and economic theory. There is no reason for them to agree with each other—there isn’t any new evidence. Most of the evidence for these fields have already been there, historically.

Curtis argues that there are systemic reasons for this strange agreement. The reasoning goes as follows: Over the last century, we’ve handed over power and authority to academia and to the press. (Hence, the name “the cathedral” to echo the same power once given to “the church”.) We let these institutions decide what is right, what is wrong…what is important, what is unimportant.

The argument continues that the ideas that rise to the top (within the cathedral) are those that reinforce the cathedral’s own power and influence. It’s a provocative idea. To what degree Curtis is right, it’s hard to say, but it has some rings of truth to it.

(also a shout out to Peter Banks whose article explaining who Curtis is made me aware of the cathedral concept.)

The ideas that rise to the top in academia are those that secure funding

For me, it’s easier to think of it in terms of funding, not power. The ideas that rise to the top, the areas that get researched—are those that secure funding. It is easy to see why this is the case.

Researchers are subject to the same social and economic forces that all of us are. If a certain area appears more “trendy”, they may pivot, at least a little bit towards it. More trendy research areas will also attract young career researchers that will end up becoming dependent on that field’s funding.

Let’s take a simple example—machine learning and AI have been hot topics for a while. It’s pretty easy to apply a machine learning model on some pre-existing data and publish a paper on it. So, people do it, not necessarily because it’s useful but because it’s easy and shows some sort of productivity for that lab. Researchers may also try to include machine learning keywords in their grant proposals in the hope that it attracts attention or demonstrates that their proposed research is novel. This is to say, researchers notice what is popular, and they respond to it.

Or let’s take another example from something that I’ve been recently interested in: effective altruism. One of the spectacular things about the effective altruism movement is the tremendous amount of funding that it is able to attract—an amount that is, I think, unusual for philosophy. Philosophy isn’t a resource intensive field, they typically don’t need much funding. Effective altruism, however, is successful in attracting funding from private sources by framing their research as “identifying the most good that we can do in the world using rational and evidence-based means”. This gets people excited. Compare this to philosophers who are more modest with their research proposals—or those that say that it isn’t clear which ethical framework is correct. Between effective altruism and the more modest approach, it is easy to see which is the winning idea.

Taking a step back, and looking at funding, specifically, we can see why funding was set up this way and why problems arose.

The top researchers (or at least established researchers) within a field are the ones who evaluate research proposals and decide where funding goes. They form committees, they meet, and they read over grant proposals to select the most promising ones. Although this group is composed of experts, and most are good intentioned, they are still human and just like any other group of humans, they are vulnerable to groupthink, complacency, and other forms of more overt corruption.

Now, the problem is that we don’t know which fields have more or less corruption, but I think it’s fair to say that all fields, at least, feel a bit of its sting.

Many a researcher has entered academia with bright eyes, expecting things like academic freedom, intellectual stimulation, and rigor—only to be disillusioned. It’s frustrating to researchers when they feel like they have to work within a system that’s flawed, where they feel like they can’t get funding for research that they think is meaningful.

A curious case of the cathedral’s machinations in fundamental physics

Sabine Hossenfelder has been bringing attention to this (and other) problems for at least eight years now. She works in fundamental physics and has been outspokenly critical of the need for another large particle collider for some time.

The Large Hadron Collider cost $9 billion to build (according to wikipedia). That’s a lot of money, and it employs a lot of physicists. Now, there’s talk about building another, larger collider that will cost even more money and will continue to support those same physicists and some new ones.

Sabine argues that we don’t need a larger collider—it likely won’t give us new physics. Our current models of physics already explain the evidence from the Large Hadron Collider, and the Standard Model doesn’t predict that we’ll see anything new form the proposed larger collider. Therefore, the idea that we might see something with the larger collider is highly speculative. Meanwhile, other areas of research have been neglected. She seems to have been rather consistent with her reasoning since her book Lost in Math in 2018, and the reasoning makes sense to me.

It is interesting to see the cathedral politics play out in an academic field that we typically think of as a hard science. There are reasons other physicists may decide not to speak out—either they assume the larger majority are right, or they wisely decide not to enter an unnecessary conflict—all but Sabine (and a few others).

Solutions?

One of the ways science self-corrects is when we notice the problems within it, and then try to find solutions to fix them. We’ve known for a while that publishing pressures and the replication crisis are real problems, and the scientific community is aware and is trying to solve those. For example, they’ve added more training in statistics, proposed new methods in which statistical procedures are published before a study is done, and, most importantly, they teach students about these problems.

These problems with funding, I think, are also real. The first step is to raise awareness. As this starts popping up on researchers’ radar—perhaps a bigger conversation about it is on the horizon. For example, there could be more training about the effects of groupthink or creative solutions to fund less popular ideas.

Curtis Yarvin makes a good point with the cathedral. When researchers make noise about the importance of this or that thing, Curtis gives us a framework to understand, “Well, yes you’d say that’s important. Your funding depends on people thinking that’s important.” Which is kind of not good, it’s not why we turn to experts for their opinion.

I’m pro-science, and one of the ways we make science better is by finding problems within it and fixing them. Science is a self-correcting machine. Let’s correct it, and not brush it under the rug.

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Some other fine quotes from Sabine:

“Researchers in academia don’t get paid for being useful, they get paid so long as other people in academia find their research worthwhile. It’s a self-optimizing system, yes, but what it optimizes is how to please other academics with the least amount of effort.”

“In the foundations of physics the problem presents differently. It’s not that they ignore evidence, it’s that they figured it’s easier to publish theories for which there is no evidence. In the life sciences we see research bubbles built on shaky evidence that no one wants to question. In the social sciences, psychology and public health we have p-hackers and post-selectors. In some parts of biomedicine and material science, we have an industry cranking out scam papers that no one reads, and so on. It looks different in each field. But these are all symptoms of the same underlying problem.”