6 Worlds Collide

ACADEMIAOpportunities for reconciling the 5 worlds community with mainstream academia

Asst.-Prof. Dr. Matthias Samwald

Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Decision SupportMedical University of Vienna

What is special about the 5 worlds

- Surprising overlap of communities with seemingly disparate goals- Artificial intelligence & society- Effective altruism- Quantified self- Applied rationality- TranshumanismThere might be lots of meaningful overlaps / synergies

- Online communities have been vital- Lots of kind-of-scientific work and debate outside of academia

http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/

Academia -- how big is it?

- How many people graduate from universities per year? (a)- Austria: 49.635

- How many PhD students are there? (b)- Austria: 26.052- Germany: 208.500- EU-28: 717.320

- How many researchers are employed in the higher education sector? (b)- Austria: 13.100- Germany: 100.500- EU-28: 667.800

- Billions of Euros of research funding per yeara) Year 2012; Source: Bildung in Zahlen https://www.bmbf.gv.at/ministerium/vp/2015/20150422a.pdf?4ut4xd

b) Year 2013; numbers are full-time equivalents; Source: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/R_%26_D_personnel

So you are about to suggest it is a good idea to aim for a long-term career in academia?- Never without viable alternative

options that also fit your personality!

https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2010/4294970126.pdf

Okay, so… why do you want to talk about academia?

- Potential for tapping into vast pool of existing resources and harnessing them for very high-impact progress

- Significant additional prestige and credibility of ideas among important decision makers

- High standards of writing more clearly, and in a way that is better connected to the relevant empirical literature

- Subjecting work to critical review from academics helps prevent building intellectual echo-chambers

So what do you suggest we should do?

Step 1) Establish the 5 Worlds memespace as a new interdisciplinary field of academic research!

- Global cause prioritisation, strong emphasis on intellectual ‚mobility‘ between cause areas

- Pragmatic technoprogressivismTechnological transformation and interlinking of individuals, society and networked intelligent machinesImportant: Steered by expected benefit, not by blind technofetishism

- Being serious about challenging established paradigmsGoals and subjects of researchHow scientific community is organized

Challenges: - Identifying and either filtering out or reformulating the small fraction of ideas that

might hold back adoption?- Finding a name for this field of research?

So what do you suggest we should do?

Step 2) Start organized collaborations and publish in modern, peer reviewed journals

- Huge untapped potential for trying out new models for international, fluid collaboration over the web

- Novel peer-reviewed journals could help make process less sluggish (e.g., PeerJ)

Step 3) Get research funding (profit!)Step 4) Influence funding priorities (even more profit!!)

- Governmental research funding seems by far the most viable funding source outside a small number of global hubs

So what do you suggest we should do?

If people are interested, we can have a break-out session tomorrow

Possible topics: - How to make bost of bachelor/master/PhD thesis, - How to established a new interdisciplinary research field (and how

to name it)- How new models of collaborative paper writing could work- Working on concrete research ideas- General career advice for academia

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