You can only discover things once

You can only discover countries like America or theories like General relativity or Quantum theory once. What happens if all of the low hanging fruits in a field have already been picked and you still have to publish new discoveries, because you want to keep your well paid job at the university? The situation is similar to car manufacturers which need suddenly to obey strict rules for lower and lower emissions for cars although they only can build cars based on fossil fuels. Faced with this impossible task they often start to cheat, like Volkswagen in the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. Cheating as an adaptation to insurmountable obstacles.

Academic researchers, scientists and professors who work in scientific fields where it is almost impossible to find out new things tend to become cheaters and tricksters. Not all of them, but some.  They have to become good in pretending they have found out something, although they have not. For example by clever marketing or by hiding their lack of insights behind nonsense, buzzwords and bullshit [1].

By forcing their members to publish something new even if they have not found out something the academic system actually turned from a system that tries to make sense of the world into a system which produces nonsense – which is ironically the opposite.

The situation reminds me of an old folk tale named Krabat [2]. In the version told by the German writer Otfried Preußler there is an old mill. Preußler is mainly known for his wonderful children books, but this story is rather dark. The master of the mill is an evil sorcerer who has made a deal with the devil. He must sacrifice each year one of his apprentices, or he will perish himself. His apprentices work mainly to keep him from doing that, and every year one of them is sacrificed to keep the master alive. One of these apprentices is the main character Krabat, a young boy who joins the mill, uses what he has learned to resist the master and ultimately defeats him with the help of his love for a village girl, thereby finding freedom and breaking the spell.

It is a little bit similar to an academic professor who is sacrificing each year one of his students, isn’t it? The students help him doing his daily, dirty work of pretending to have gained new insights, but in the end they will perish like the students before them. Just like the master of the mill in the folk tale Krabat the professor destroys the lives of his students to keep his own.

It could be avoided if publishing is no longer absolutely mandatory, and teaching remains the main job of university professors. Nikhil Krishnan says this was the case in the philosophy department at Oxford University in better days. In chapter 10 he writes:

“Oxford philosophers saw themselves primarily as teachers, not as writers. With secure jobs from which only the most grotesque wickedness could get them sacked, they didn’t need to write (or “publish”) unless they felt they had something to say. In some other places the staff are in danger of spoiling ther chances of promotion, or even further employment, unless the keep up a constant output of published writing. Well, Oxford was not like that. (This is no longer true)”

If researchers only need to publish things if they really found out something then the quality of publications and research in general would be much better, and we would have certainly less bullshit.

[1] On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005
[2] Krabat, Otfried Preußler, 1971
[3] A terribly serious adventure, Nikhil Krishnan, 2023

( Unsplash photo of a windmill by Roman Bilokrynytskyi )