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Kitten's avatar

Interesting to note that one of the most dynamic and lucrative industries, tech, has managed to smuggle IQ testing in via the whiteboard coding interview quite successfully for decades.

But even more interesting to note that even given the existence of widespread non-credentialed entry options, it's still far, far more common for professional software engineers to have a four-year degree than not.

My best guess is that the demise of disparate impact doctrine will open up more such opportunities but won't put a major dent in college enrollment. College is at least as much about class signaling as work-credential signaling, and I doubt we'll see much decline in demand for that status marker in our lives.

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Adam Rochussen's avatar

Spot on. It is also a positive feedback loop. Academics who gained repute via credentialism do not have the cognitive capacity or individuality to assess the merits of others’ work, so they defer to the credentials of the authors of the work instead of the work itself.

I saw this firsthand during my PhD. Many PIs refused to form an opinion of a paper until others, whose credentials they respect, gave their opinions. In any journal club, their first question was always “which lab/institute is this from?”. Before submitting their student’s/postdoc’s work to a journal, they would send it round to at least five “credentialed” scientists, so that they could be sure that (a) the findings wouldn’t rock the boat, and (b) the science was sound—since they couldn’t/wouldn’t assess this independently. Of course, (a) was always more important than (b).

Regarding peer-review specifically—it’s a complete sham. Most journals allow you to block reviewers who don’t like you (i.e., who are wise to any dodgy science that you might have published) and to recommend reviewers who you are best pals with. Very few journals apply double-blind peer review as standard. At least in my field, success is more determined by who you know than what you’ve done/your actual work. It’s super easy to just recommend a reviewer whose grant application was given to yourself to review. You simply have to minimally communicate this mutual-dependability to each other and both sides instinctively proceed with pathetically shallow review. It’s possible for clades of scientists to propel themselves through decades of publications and grants via this circle-jerk tactic. Further, many older academics will deliberately avoid recommending younger academics as reviewers, since they are less tainted by decades of credentialism, and are more likely to actually assess the work.

Credentialism, and its ugly sister gerontocracy, are killing science.

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