thinking about what WE’re thinking about

As I was sitting  being annoyed at myself for derailing my plans for today by forgetting my wallet I was flicking through my rss feeds. I came across this post on Less Wrong entitled “Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields“. This piqued my interest because, in my very best grumpy old fart way, I’ve been wondering about the validity of current POE methodology, but I know very little/nothing about it beyond what I’ve heard in pub conversations.

There was a particularly good quote near the start that made me think of research in architecture in general:

As the first heuristic, we should ask if there is a lot of low-hanging fruit available in the given area, in the sense of research goals that are both interesting and doable. If yes, this means that there are clear paths to quality work open for reasonably smart people with an adequate level of knowledge and resources, which makes it unnecessary to invent clever-looking nonsense instead. In this situation, smart and capable people can just state a sound and honest plan of work on their grant applications and proceed with it.

In contrast, if a research area has reached a dead end and further progress is impossible except perhaps if some extraordinary path-breaking genius shows the way, or in an area that has never even had a viable and sound approach to begin with, it’s unrealistic to expect that members of the academic establishment will openly admit this situation and decide it’s time for a career change. What will likely happen instead is that they’ll continue producing output that will have all the superficial trappings of science and sound scholarship, but will in fact be increasingly pointless and detached from reality.

Whilst I think that there are a lot of people doing really valuable work at the moment, I don’t think that there are many people who would struggle to categorise  at least some of the work that they’ve come across recently into the latter paragraph’s bucket.

I’m not sure where this goes, there are lots of opposing arguments about the long term, unforeseeable benefits of any particular line of research, of the loss of cultural  diversity if we are too focused on the impact that work has. Even after all of this, I can’t help feeling that we are not yet done with exploring the obvious stuff in architecture, but it might just need us to do some hard work and think about things differently. I don’t think that any of the problems that we come across in architecture are provably intractable.