[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[Anders Sandberg]

Robin D Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> , 23/1/2014 4:20 AM:

There is an academic specialty of futurism. That is, there are professors, journals, and even some departments which specialize in that topic. Do people here often read or cite such folks? It seems not, but then the question is why not. What is the problem with academic futurists such that people on a future oriented list like this aren't much interested in them?

Well, being more or less an academic futurist, I might of course be biased.
I think future oriented people can be oriented towards it in different ways. 
At the simplest there is the entertainment/escapism aspect: the future is gonna be cool/horrifying, and talking about that is fun. From this perspective the academics are too boring. 
Then there is the future-oriented community: it is nice to be around others interested in similar things, so we flock together. But this social function works best when everybody can participate - and there is a threshold of entry to any more academic topic. Hence the emphasis of recent popularizations of the future. 
Then there is the informative aspect: we take the future seriously, we might want information that help us make better decisions. This is where good academic insights might be helpful. Except of course that most academic stuff is not directly useful: besides Sturegon's law and the problem of judging quality if you are an outsider, thresholds of entry problems (whether academic jargon, math or gated journals), a lot of the research is focused (for various internal reasons) on less actionable or low-priority issues. These factors are multiplicative: individually not too strong, but together they make a pretty big filtering effect. This is where the "wrong" of the academics is located, but it is also about the interface to academia.
And of course, the style of discourse in any community is shaped by people partially mimicking what they see. So if nobody mentions that great paper from Futures or Journal of Technological Forecasting, others will be less likely to do it. You deliberately created a thread more interesting to you partially because you in a sense feel some "ownership" of this list historically due to your long history with it, but most list members at any time are less likely to try to push the discussion boundaries for all the usual sociological reasons. Still, as I calculated for list lulls ( http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2013/07/summer_silence.html ) being "that guy" can be pretty rewarding for improving the list quality.  

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

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