How To See If A Field Is Serious

Math>Humanities

This article’s main insight is not original to me but came from a friend of mine.

YouTube personality and streamer Destiny—real name Steven Bonell—recently debated two experts on Palestine, Norman Finkelstein and Mouin Rabbani. He had, on his side, famed Israeli historian Benny Morris, someone who is more critical of Israel than most Israelis, and less critical than most Americans. The weirdest thing was that Destiny did fine.

Now, he wasn’t the most informed or most knowledgeable person on the panel. But he also wasn’t, as some have claimed, clearly out of his depth. On various factual points, he aggressively went head-to-head with Finkelstein, someone who has written many books on the subject, and read through perhaps every human rights report ever written criticizing Israel. Destiny, in contrast, has been studying the conflict for just around 5 months and has not read a single book on the topic.

This is sort of wild. A guy who has spent his entire life studying a conflict is basically evenly matched against…a YouTube streamer.

I don’t watch Tucker Carlson anymore, but I did when I was in middle school. At that time, he’d mostly argue with professors—here’s a representative episode. The basic gist would be someone would say something that sounds crazy and then he’d bring them on to fight about it (e.g. someone would say trees are racist and Tucker would have them on to fight about it). Even though Tucker was not an expert on the subject (or on anything, really), and the professors would generally have published on the areas he was grilling them on—mostly areas like gender studies and queer studies—they would consistently fall apart completely.

This is a very good test of the seriousness of a field. If a field is unserious, if it’s just finding increasingly complex ways to package simple ideas, then an outsider who is good at debating (and, in Destiny’s case, pretty smart) will be able to outargue the subject matter experts. In the case of Finkelstein’s field and other humanities, while it takes a few months to get up to speed on the relevant facts, beyond that, the field isn’t very impressive.

Contrast that with, say, pure math. Imagine you had 6 months to prepare for a debate with Terrence Tao about his newest research. Or perhaps with some macroeconomist about economics, or with a physicist about physics. You could not do it. It really is an area that requires doing more than memorizing a few facts, or dressing up simple facts in increasingly complex language.

Analytic philosophy also does okay here. Even after 6 months of research, a typical non-philosopher would get schooled by Kripke or Huemer or Williamson. Destiny, with 6 months to prepare, could not successfully debate Williamson about necessitism, for example.

Grievance studies do the worst by these criteria. Successful scholars with lots of publications can’t hold their own against Tucker Carlson (contrast that with serious fields—Tucker certainly couldn’t school Williamson about the Barcan formula or Terrence Tao about math). In fact, Pluckrose, Lindsey, and Boghossian showed that by slopping together buzzwords, one could get published in high-ranking grievance studies journals. This is because those fields mostly consist of finding fancy ways of repeating utterly banal left-wing talking points.

So this really breaks down into two tests:

1. The Tucker test: If the person in this field argued with Tucker Carlson about their area of expertise, would they get wrecked? If so, the field is probably unserious.

2. The Destiny test: Could a smart person competently debate an expert in this field after just a few months of prep?

I would guess that most of the humanities—English, gender studies, the arts, and so on—would fail this test. Economics would do fine, as would most of the hard sciences. I’d guess political science would do poorly, as would much of history, as would most of the other soft sciences, as would continental philosophy. If you watch Mearsheimer, a quite prominent political scientist, argue with Piers Morgan, while Morgan is pretty thoroughly outmatched, he does orders of magnitude better than he would against a mathematician if they were arguing about math. And Mearsheimer is a lot better at arguing than the average political scientist.

I’d guess this is not just a test of the trustworthiness of a field but how difficult it is to get into. It’s obviously much more difficult, in general, to get a Ph.D in pure math than in English. If a field is hard to understand, at least to the level required to debate about it, then it’s almost surely a very difficult field to excel in. Let’s test this: before checking, I predict that the average IQ of math professors, physicists, and philosophers will be very high compared to other fields. Okay, let’s see if I’m right!

I couldn’t find great data on this, but here’s one thing that I found which is (I think?) GRE scores of grad students (for similar results, see here and here and here):

• 130.0 Physics

• 129.0 Mathematics

• 128.5 Computer Science

• 128.0 Economics

• 127.5 Chemical engineering

• 127.0 Material science

• 126.0 Electrical engineering

• 125.5 Mechanical engineering

• 125.0 Philosophy

• 124.0 Chemistry

• 123.0 Earth sciences

• 122.0 Industrial engineering

• 122.0 Civil engineering

• 121.5 Biology

• 120.1 English/literature

• 120.0 Religion/theology

• 119.8 Political science

• 119.7 History

• 118.0 Art history

• 117.7 Anthropology/archeology

• 116.5 Architecture

• 116.0 Business

• 115.0 Sociology

• 114.0 Psychology

• 114.0 Medicine

• 112.0 Communication

• 109.0 Education

• 106.0 Public administration

I’m surprised about how low Medicine is, but other than that, this is roughly what my theory would predict. Philosophy and various hard sciences are the fields that generally attract the smartest people. Consequently, they’re the most serious and some of the only fields that pass the Destiny and Tucker tests with flying colors.

These tests are far from infallible. For example, there isn’t a good way to have a debate about the area of expertise of someone who has studied a foreign language, or a historian who works mostly by digging through the archives to find new sources, rather than coming to controversial conclusions about the old sources.

But they provide a very good heuristic. If a field wouldn’t pass the Destiny test or the Tucker test, there’s a high chance it’s vulnerable to either some sort of hoax or replication crisis. Since Tetlock, we’ve known that the experts are often wrong, and many don’t outperform dart-throwing monkeys. But there are still lots of serious fields—you should trust the physicists and mathematicians, for instance. The Destiny and Tucker tests give a way to distinguish them.