Does Time Fix All?

As an graduate, finding useful references was painful. What the librarians had come up with were terrible time-consuming systems. It took an outsider (Berners-Lee) to invent the Web. Even so, the librarians were slow to adopt the Web and you could often see them warn students against using the Web as part of their research. Some of us ignored them and posted our papers online, or searched for papers online. Many, many years later, we are still a crazy minority but a new generation of librarians has finally adopted the Web.

What do you conclude from this story?

Whenever you point to a difficult systemic problem (e.g., it is time consuming to find references), someone will reply that “time fixes everything”. A more sophisticated way to express this belief is to say that systems are self-correcting.

Yet few systems are self-correcting. We simply bear the cost of the mistakes and inefficiencies. If some academic discipline fails to make us better off, we barely notice and we keep paying for it. What we see as corrections are often disruptions brought by people who worked from outside the supposedly self-correcting system.

Far from self-correcting, the system resists changes. For example, lectures are a terrible way to teach, yet they have been around for centuries and we are likely to lecture for at least decades, if not centuries.