Ch. 4: A Metasophist University

The University may seem to be a curious place to start when designing a new form of community. I do so for three reasons.

First, given that we have a clear albeit provisional definition of good, the next logical step is to re-examine ethics and policies with a view to seeing what best furthers the Metasophist Imperative. This is a gargantuan task, too big for any individual to do alone. Indeed, it would require the commitment and knowledge of many.

In the modern age there has never been such an organised effort to decide what is good, because there has never been widespread agreement on what good actually means. So what form should such an effort take? For this, I would like to propose a new discipline called metasophy, whose role would be to integrate the knowledge of all other disciplines. The development of this discipline we could entrust to a new institution, a sort of Metasophist university.

But this would not be the sole function of this new university. Its second objective would be to help everyone find their true calling in life, a task which requires an accessible and effective education system. It is only by experimenting and dabbling that you can discover your true aptitude in a given area. This must be facilitated at as early as the teenage years, as later the pressure to define a career rises, a pressure inimical to playful creativity. This process we will outline for this purpose also lays the basis for systems developed in subsequent chapters.

Third, there is a concern that academia has become overly specialised, which hinders creativity. Moreover, as one’s career progress in academia is linked to the the number of publications and citations received, there is a skew towards incremental progress at the cost of ground-breaking but long-term and risky research.[53] As we will discuss, this could also be due to established researchers getting control over top journals, academic positions, and research grants. This same group would resist new directions in the field, as their own relevance could be undermined. New selection processes should thus be experimented with, and one such process will be proposed in the chapter on the selection of elites. Appying this process in academia will be the third objective of this university.

For now, let us examine the first of these objectives: the form and purpose of metasophy.

4.1 The Role of Metasophy

Imagine we want to judge whether a particular pesticide is good or not. Such a judgement would at least require us to know the effect of:

1. The pesticide on human fertility, cancer rates and other illnesses

2. Cancer incidence on healthcare costs

3. Pesticides on agricultural productivity

4. Higher agricultural productivity on the economy

Clearly, metasophy would then be a field whose role is to integrate and evaluate the research findings from a wide range of different disciplines. This is not done by any discipline currently, even though it is necessary to make good societal decisions.

Such an approach is badly needed, as today many academic papers slide quickly into obscurity — this is a significant waste of knowledge and effort. Moreover, countless analyses have been run using public data such as that available from the International Monetary Fund or various central banks. Yet once run and published, it takes a great deal of effort for others to replicate or update the results. We need a better approach.

First, such studies need to be linked automatically. If you wanted to see whether pesticides were in fact good, there would be a significant amount of manual work involved in connecting these studies together. The only way to address this would be if there were a common system on which all studies and the data they use should be uploaded. This system must be curated in such a way that it becomes easy to find different studies, to compare them, to update them, and to allow for different studies to be connected in such a way that we can come to provisional judgements on whether something is good or not.

With the development of tools such as the Open Science Framework, such a world is already coming much closer. Furthermore, as the research community can already predict which studies are most likely to be successfully replicated, we could also imagining introducing prediction markets in order to see which studies are most likely to be successfully replicated in other contexts.[54]

Integrating the studies in one system could also rectify a major bias in the system whereby academics publish unreliable studies in order to raise their overall publication count. For example, one project attempted to replicate twenty-one experiments published in Science or Nature, and discovered that just thirteen were replicable.[55] By making replication easier, our new system would make errors harder to conceal.

If studies uploaded to the system are more likely to be used and cited, then more academics will upload to it over time. Eventually gaps would be noticed, and academics (and even non-academics) could then be able to fill those in. Naturally there will be gaps that cannot be filled by quantitative studies. Theory could offer a substitute, but the wisdom of crowds could also be helpful. The manner of doing this will be described in a later chapter.

The greatest advantage of this approach to morality is that it will make our entire moral system more nimble when reacting to changing circumstances. Consider the way popular opinions become entrenched, such as the belief that free trade is good. Public discourse, once it reaches a conclusion, simplifies itself by holding fast to that same conclusion. With metasophy, the relationships underlying such beliefs would be under constant revision and elaboration, especially when they are politically contested. If the weakness of civilisation partly rests in moral hysteresis — a slowness in abandoning outdated moral beliefs — then this system will form part of the cure.

The overall objective will be to compile a Metasopher’s taxonomy: for anything that may interest someone from a moral perspective, they would be able to look it up in the taxonomy see whether it is classed as good or bad, how this may vary across contexts, and what factors contribute to that decision. Moreover, if the Community achieves sufficient scale to have numerous chapters, then each chapter should develop its own taxonomy. We would therefore allow for multiple sub-worldviews to develop, avoiding the problems identified by Pareto and Toynbee discussed in previous chapters.

Thus we have set out the main task of our Metasophist University. But education in the West is far from perfect, and our new university will have other roles. First, however, we must catalogue the flaws to be remedied.

4.2 Flaws in Modern Education

The flaws of the current system are many.

First, access to quality education is limited and often expensive in many countries. In the UK average student debt for recent graduates is around US$44,000, while even in tuition free Sweden it is in the range of US$20,000.[56] This latter number ignores the cost to the taxpayer from the wastage incurred by the same introductory courses being taught in multiple universities. Moreover, many courses are not taught by experts in the domain. The result can often be an underwhelming educational experience.

Second, there is significant variation in the form of assessment. People doing the same course in different universities will not only have a different educational experience, they will also sit a different exam graded with varying degrees of generosity. Given the unreliability of the grade as an indicator of quality, people come to rely on university reputation as a way to distinguish quality. But places at reputable institutions are scarce, meaning that there is bound to be a certain inequality in outcomes.

Third, a uniform pace is forced on people with very different capacities: for some the class will be too fast, and for others too slow. To avoid excessive failure rates, faculty will tend to adapt the pace and difficulty to suit the abilities of the average and weaker students. Those who should go faster or into more depth are not sufficiently pushed to do so. This problem presumably persists until postgraduate level.

Fourth, many are not sure what they wish to do before they enter university. The fact that many people spend a year of their lives and a significant amount of money to studying a subject they later abandon is a waste if the same could be done earlier.

However, the greatest flaw with education is that it homogenises the students. By reducing diversity, it stifles creativity. It achieves this as follows.

First, in order to progress in your career, you need to obtain references. In order to avoid displeasing one’s professors with the subsequent risk of a poor reference or job market recommendation, the risk-averse will avoid expressing opinions likely to be frowned upon. They may even unknowingly choose or tailor their work with a view to impressing their superiors. This a particular example of a general phenomenon, whereby people at the bottom of a hierarchy will tend to emulate those at the top — to flatter them, in the hope of later being favoured by them. But creativity requires going against the status quo, and that won’t be favoured by a top-down hierarchy. The long-run result will be increasing domination of the field by those of a given worldview, which could be ideological, theoretical, or methodological.

For example, according to one study, law professors are far less conservative than practising lawyers; 15% of law professors are conservative whereas 35% of lawyers are.[57] But it would be a mistake to think that this just affects conservative voices. Economics suffers from two problems: a lack of pluralism regarding methodology (which left-wing voices tended to complain about), and the internalisation of a certain technocratic disposition (because of the intimate professional links with central banks, governments, etc.) which discourages anything that could be seen as radical.

The cost of such dynamics is illustrated by one study which found that innovative biomedical research is more likely to be published after the death of a leading figure in the field.[58] The authors find some evidence that this patterns is likely to be true in fields with tight-knit networks or narrow methodologies.

It is important to note that the issue here is not hierarchy generally, but specifically where the process of selection is controlled by those at the top. You could have a hierarchy where selection is more algorithmic, based for example on peer assessment. I discuss one possible scheme along these lines in the chapter on the selection and training of elites.

On this note, the modern university can unintentionally create an elite with a uniform set of values and desires. This point was raised by Dan Wang based on the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.[59] According to this theory, people imitate each other not just in mannerisms but also desires. The more similar people are, the more intense such imitation will be. If students start to imitate each other’s desires, they will end up trying to get into the same types of careers.

Thus we see intense competition for jobs in a small number of sectors such as consulting and finance, with other sectors being starved of talent. This creates a monolithic elite, as people in the same occupations will have the same economic interests. Having the same interests then spills over into having the same values or approximate political beliefs. The basis is then set for the elites vs. the people conflict which does so much to undermine a society.

One solution to this problem would be to provide people with the tools to fashion an individualised education, avoiding the standard and rigid curricula that can be found in many (but not all) university systems. How to do this we will now discuss.

4.3 Reimagining the University

First, it is important to note that there are two types of educational needs. For people who are eager to learn, content simply needs to be provided. For those who do not enjoy the learning process, rewards and disincentives are probably needed.

But willingness to learn depends on the subject under consideration; most likely everyone has a certain subject in which they would be especially interested, even those with little interest in academics. But limited subject choice before the age of eighteen means that one never has the chance to be exposed to whatever this area is.

One objective of this university must be to identify this special penchant. A questionnaire could be used to recommend ten or more modules to the student. This should take place at the earliest age possible in order to maximise engagement in school — the age of twelve for example. From this time on, two to three hours of school time per week could be set aside to these subjects.

But how does one provide such a range of subjects in secondary school? This shall be the responsibility of the University – providing a range of modules which can be used in secondary and third level education, or approving already existing modules (such as those provided by Coursera and other MOOC providers). Exams in controlled environments could then be offered on these subjects, allowing us to accredit the increasing array of modules that are offered online.

Furthermore, this would allow us to identify the most talented students in a given area at a very young age — an essential input for a system to be designed in a later chapter. But because this system outlined here is targeted at secondary school students, currently existing MOOCs may not be suitable in terms of quality or the prior knowledge expected of the students. We would therefore need our own process to produce such modules and ensure that they are of the highest quality.

Creating High Quality Online Modules

First of all, a range of modules such as “Introduction to Economics” could be identified, along with the syllabus for each course. For each module five lecturers or experts would be selected to prepare a course. This number could be lower for less popular courses. They will initially receive a fixed fee for their effort, and will collectively decide on the syllabus and the exams.

Once prepared, students would be allocated randomly to the five different modules. All students would sit a common examination at the end of the year. The average results and student reviews for each course would then become public information. On the basis of this information, students the following year will select which online module they would like to follow.

After the first year, the professors would receive a payment depending on the number of students who have decided to follow their course to incentivise high quality teaching. As students would surely select courses based on the result, lecturers would experiment with features such as in-video quizzes or flashcards to make sure that students understand the key concepts.

Using such modules, it would be possible for students to quickly determine what would be their favoured course of study at university. But we should even go further. Imagine a student has done five university-level economics courses – he should then be able to skip them at university.

As more and more modules are offered within the system, it may be possible for our university to offer entire degrees online. Such degrees could be cheap but of high quality, accessible but highly recognised.

As the student body grows, we could also allow different chapters within the Community to propose different curricula. We would therefore ensure diversity regarding the ideological and methodological content of courses.

This new system creates a wide range of possibilities. For example, one possible critique of the above would be that some courses require certain prerequisites, such as calculus and algebra. However, such mathematics courses could also be modularised and offered online.

Benefits of this system

First of all, this system allows students to go through education faster. For some, this will mean more time for creative pursuits before finally committing to a career. Others will enter the job market, and start paying taxes, sooner. It is thus not difficult to imagine that there could be some monetary incentive for the early completion of a degree.

Second, it would break down the Girardian dynamic where students are studying the same subjects at the same time, and are generally undifferentiated. People will become much more diverse in the type of subjects they have studied. It would also be easy to expand this system to accommodate those in adult education. Finally, it would help attain equality of opportunity within the West, as it would partially equalise the quality of education each child has access to.

But the greatest advantage of this system is that it would allow us to identify everyone’s greatest talent at a very young age. This would allow us to bring them together and give them the chance to work on common projects. Exactly how to achieve this is outlined in the next chapter.

Next Chapter: Unifying a Metasophist Society

Endnotes

[53] Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen. Stagnation and Scientific Incentives. Working Paper 26752. National Bureau of Economic Research, Feb. 2020. DOI: 10.3386/w26752. URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w26752

[54] Colin F. Camerer et al. “Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015”. In: Nature Human Behaviour 2.9 (2018), pp. 637–644. ISSN: 2397-3374. URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z

[55] Hannah Devlin. “Attempt to replicate major social scientific findings of past decade fails”. In: The Guardian (Aug. 2018). URL: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/27/attempt-to-replicate-major-social- scientific-findings-of-past-decade-fails

[56] Joseph Chamie. “Student Debt Rising Worldwide”. In: Yale Global (May 2017). URL: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/student-debt-rising-worldwide

[57] Adam Bonica et al. “The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity”. In: Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics 806 (2017). URL: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/827/

[58] Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin. “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” In: American Economic Review 109.8 (Aug. 2019), pp. 2889–2920. URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161574

[59] Dan Wang. Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror. https://danwang.co/college-girardian-terror/. Accessed: 2018-07-02. 2017