[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[Giulio Prisco]

re "the future is gonna be cool/horrifying, and talking about that is
fun. From this perspective the academics are too boring."

Thing is, academics _are_ too boring ;-) ;-)

On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:11 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>