Opportunities for reconciling the 5 worlds community with mainstream academia To be presented at the 5 Worlds Collide (un)conference in Vienna, Dec 2015. http://www.eventbrite.de/e/five-worlds-collide-tickets-18785324411

1. 6 Worlds Collide
ACADEMIA
Opportunities for reconciling the
5 worlds community with
mainstream academia
Asst.-Prof. Dr. Matthias Samwald
Institute for Artificial Intelligence
and Decision Support
Medical University of Vienna

2. What is special about the 5 worlds
Surprising overlap of communities with seemingly disparate goals
 Artificial intelligence & society
 Effective altruism
 Quantified self
 Applied rationality
 Transhumanism
There 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/

3. 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 year
a) 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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 technoprogressivism
Technological transformation and interlinking of individuals, society and networked intelligent
machines
Important: Steered by expected benefit, not by blind technofetishism
 Being serious about challenging established paradigms
Goals and subjects of research
How 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?

7. 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

8. 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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