{"id":6392,"date":"2013-12-01T16:50:39","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T00:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/?p=6392"},"modified":"2013-12-01T16:50:39","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T00:50:39","slug":"a-bs-detection-heuristic-you-can-tell-if-a-discipline-is-bs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/a-bs-detection-heuristic-you-can-tell-if-a-discipline-is-bs\/","title":{"rendered":"A BS detection Heuristic. You can tell if a discipline is BS&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>A BS detection Heuristic.<\/p>\n<p>You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree in mathematics is much less dependent on the shool (conditional on being above a certain level, so the heuristic would apply to the differene betwewn top 10 and top 2000 schools).<\/p>\n<p>The same applies to research papers. In math and physics, a result posted on arXiv (with a minimum hurdle) is fine. In low quality fields like academic finance (where almost all academics are charlatans and all papers some form of complicated storytelling), the &#8220;prestige&#8221; of the journal is the sole criterion.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know about literature, sociology, political science, etc. Does the heuristic work there?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151881639063375&amp;id=13012333374\">A BS detection Heuristic. You can tell if a&#8230; &#8211; Nassim Nicholas Taleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A BS detection Heuristic. You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top 10 or 20 would be a waste of time. On the other hand a degree [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[123],"class_list":["post-6392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facebook","tag-heuristics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6392"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6394,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6392\/revisions\/6394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blackswanreport.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}