Philip E. Tetlock: belief

Transcript context

…Sure, but we want more of you both, right? What should we do? One thing that would be useful . . . There is this tendency for training in universities to become hyperprofessionalized and compartmentalized. So it is harder for people who have weird interests that straddle, say, psychology and organizational science and political science and law and history. The people who have weird sets of interests — it’s hard for them to get traction in the current career environment. Certainly, in my home discipline of psychology, it had this kind of rampant publication inflation in which PhD students would be very lucky to get a job. You’d have to have a ridiculous number of publications and some of them in Ajournals. It’s the sort of thing we didn’t really expect 30 years ago. We thought, “Oh, that’s a tenure case. Oh, that’s a junior hire.” Those kinds of pressures I think produce a narrowing of focus. Now you say, “Well, yes . . .” I said earlier a lot of the great advances in science come from hedgehogs. We’re producing hedgehogs on an industrial scale here. And I think there’s some advantage that may make a little bit more room for weirdo eclectics. And the way that departments are carved up — would you change that at all?…

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