These words of wisdom are Robin Hanson‘s. Hanson, an academic entrepreneur, promoter of prediction markets, and thoughtful blogger (his excellent blog is called Overcoming Bias), also has this to say: “I … know lots of academics, and they all have one or more research topics. And if you ask them they can usually phrase these topics in terms of questions they want to answer. And this is a big part of what makes academics more intellectually productive. But alas, few academics are able to articulate in much detail why it is important to the world that their questions get answered. * * * They seem to think it is someone else’s job to decide what questions are important. Unfortunately, most academic journal articles are answering pretty uninteresting questions.”
prior probability asks, why are there so many academic journals devoted to so many “uninteresting questions” (to borrow Hanson’s phrase). Also, what metric should we use to decide whether a question is “interesting” or not?
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prior probability 