To get a little meta, there's even somewhat of an open source race to communicate this exact message. I first saw it on eugyppius' substack, I tried my hand at it, I see you talk Gel-Mann amnesia which Mathew Crawford seems especially fond of including in any of his analysis of this issue, and now you deliver this gem.
I agree wholeheartedly that many captured institutions can be circumvented. I'm hoping to convince you that the American government needs to be recaptured as opposed to circumvented. I'm agnostic about this for other countries, but in America, I think we have a solid majority of the populace that subscribe to American values not shared by the managerial class controlling the government both in terms of elected officials and throughout the bureaucracy. I think if we can put our heads together there is potential for a populist political strategy to leverage this edge in popular support to achieve a similar end state for U.S.G. institutions as is already being achieved via circumvention with respect to institutions that don't have a monopoly on force. If successful, this effort also has the potential to shield these nascent attempts to circumvent sclerotic institutions against their inevitable attempts to defend themselves against this threat by leveraging state power (such as promoting another disinformation governance board).
and I suppose there's only one way to find out if it will work... Speaking of asteroids/ill omens for academia the Kostoff paper was just retracted a couple weeks ago. I'm trying to spread the word because it was the single most competent risk benefit analysis of C19 vaccination and "external reviewers" determined that it made the "erroneous conclusion" that the majority of counted C19 deaths were due to co-morbidity. No addressing the robust analysis that led to that conclusion, just an assertion that it's wrong because everyone knows its wrong. It takes the edge off a bit knowing they're only accelerating this process. Thanks again for the great write up!
Shoddy work that gets pushed into Nature because it furthers the agenda, and good work that either can't get published or gets retracted because it's politically inconvenient. It's all so tiresome watching these clowns squander centuries of accumulated prestige and trust for fleeting advantage.
I saw a great documentary once, “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” about the strategy of using a swarm of cheap little robots to gather and send data rather than one complex expensive exploring machine.
I recall that corollary to Murphy’s Law, Silverman’s First Law of Journalism: “The closer you are to the facts of a situation, the less accurate the media coverage will be.”
In no topic are your comments more relevant than with respect to metrology. Once you start digging in on the way science measures, be prepared to check your depends. Items such as the astronomical theory of the bombardments. Or the age of Ceres or Iapetus, or the strange origin nexus of long period comets and a particular point in the “asteroid belt”. It is easy once you look to get very uncomfortable with what tales are spun by whom and defended at all costs by storytellers with slide rules.
May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Liked by John Carter
Great article, and full of hope in regards to open network. Thank you.
Your point about research built upon flawed (yet accepted as true) prior research/ideas is very important - creating a 'drift' in a field that may not be immediately obvious. I've seen this - key references to flawed papers that were also constructed by flawed papers/ideas (and/or highly subjective conclusions) - and so the ideas drift in a particular direction.
I guess I'm talking more about theoretical research that builds on former theoretical research. I don't know about hard science doing actual lab experiments - my guess is that's less prone to such drift - unless you are a Big Pharma funded lab ;-)
The hard sciences may be less prone to that, but I wouldn't count on it. A poor paradigm can hang on for quite some time, with entire castles of air being built on a flawed premise. Of course, to a certain degree, that's always inevitable - all theories are necessarily wrong.
It's fashionable lately to criticize institutional policing because a few cops misbehaved, or all guns because a nut used one for murder. Most cops are competent and professional, and most guns are used legally. And most scientists try to do their science right. Most of the improper actions in any endeavor are more likely due to failures of leadership. If rank and file scientists perform badly, their leaders either committed the fraud or forced others to, or tolerated those who did.
But a lot of failures of science are because they can. Corruption proliferates where it's permitted. The ultimate guardians of integrity are the public, who should protest the fraud. Much of the public has been trained to accept, even applaud, fraud that supports their politics. And the failed education system assures that fewer people are even capable of recognizing bad science or good.
Betrayers of Truth was a good discussion of this several decades ago. Probably deserves an update.
All good points. I certainly don't take the position that the majority of working scientists are incompetent or deliberately deceptive; far from it, the ones I know personally are generally good at what they do and fairly honest. The problem is structural. Scientists are basically trapped in dysfunctional institutions. Like you say: a problem of leadership ... and ultimately, that's the single greatest issue our civilization struggles with.
If most cops are competent and professional, why hasn’t Hunter Biden ( and the many many thousands of assorted grifters and pedophiles in our “CONgress” “Judiciary”and “Executive” branch been arrested yet?
Because most cops don't make those decisions. They can arrest when they see a crime, or when they have a warrant. The warrants for assorted grifters and pedos (and Hunter) would come from farther up the chain.
Prosecutors have similar problems, deciding who to charge. LA is an interesting expose, with a commie Soros backed DA who refuses to prosecute and an office full of mutinous prosecutors suing for him to do his job. Recall effort underway.
People join law enforcement to stop criminals, not to become criminals. We need to learn to identify and remove the criminals more efficiently. More frequent elections is probably the best answer. We have the technology.
I've asked the same question of law enforcement officers over a beer at the bar. Seeing how the powerful and the wealthy are allowed to get away with essentially anything, I often think that the world would be a better place if cops just started going full Judge Dredd. Seeing the Sackler's get away with a fine that leaves them still rich and comfortable for what amounts to pre-meditated genocidal chemical warfare sits very poorly with me, and that's merely one example amongst hundreds of the powerful evading anything that even remotely resembles justice.
May 27, 2022·edited May 28, 2022Liked by John Carter
The real science was banned. So were drugs that treat & cure. Rush & science don’t belong in the same sentence. Incompetence, corruption, censorship. Change the definition of vaccine instesc of experimental gene “therapy.” Vaccinating into a pandemic violated Rule 1. No doubts at all the fake pcr, the highly incentivized & orchestrated propaganda were segues to planned implementation of a social credit system.
'' It's also why 'impostor syndrome' has gone epidemic in the professoriate: people promoted beyond their ability feel like they're impostors because, well, they're impostors''...Once I thought otherwise but after seeing the c19 circus I agree too. I think that all the hoops and the bureaucracy of the academy arises in part as a way to reassure itself of its capabilities.
But the main issue remains in those arrogants at the top running the show.
The various hoops originated as tests designed to weed out the unworthy, as much as anything else. That can be very effective at establishing a competence hierarchy. The problem isn't so much the hoops, as that they have made them easier to get through over time. Although as a grad student I did feel more than a little annoyance at how unnecessary some of them felt.
Russia has just announced that it is planning on pulling out of the Bologna Process (the mechanism to synchronise educational standards and credentials across national jurisdictions). The Kremlin wants to aim higher and enhance academic rigour. It is a vote of no confidence in the metrics by which the Atlanticist meritocracy defines itself. In effect, Russia is making the development of human capital a national priority.
This is truly a 'Sputnik' moment, albeit one that will probably go unnoticed in much of the West. It will be interesting to see what eventually happens: will the US ditch affirmative action to meet the challenge or will it double down and seek 'excellence' via Woke?
Yes, and China is moving in a similar direction by slowly pulling their universities out of the international ranking systems with their obsession with citation quantity and gate-keeping journals, focusing instead on excellence within its own borders.
It is harder imagine a more profound insult. The Chinese, having sent so many students to the best universities across the West, are exceptionally well-placed to make judgements about the comparative quality of education. It is a pity we will never hear the detail of the deliberations in Beijing. They would not be flattering, but they would be accurate and utterly unsentimental.
“Unnoticed in the West” at least up until the time that they have to start using their rockets with the impossible-to-predict flight paths on the “Atlanticists.”
It helps when quantitative researchers make their base level data available. Duplicability is a key measure for quality assurance. Ditto for honesty. You can't fake analysis when the data sets are there for your critics/rivals to take you down.
John, your suggestions on prose style are spot on. During the scientific revolution in the 17th c. there was a very strong emphasis on clarity and directness, especially amongst the crowd involved in the Royal Society. Clarity was identified with honesty and reliability. This was contrasted with the old style of the Scholastics, who preferred gaseous and flowery language. Thomas Hobbes (England's premier physicist before Newton came along) was particularly strong on this point.
Your comment about humour hit the mark. Francis Bacon keenly appreciated the value of humour in rigorous philosophy. The Enlightenment's premier encyclopediast Pierre Bayle (according to Voltaire he was the first man to write a book that could teach anyone to think for themselves) recommended that scholars "sport with the Muses" (lighten up and adopt a playful attitude while they pursue knowledge). From the little that I know about neuroscience, this makes perfect sense
Interesting. I'd noticed that older papers - pre-1950 or so - tended to be written in a looser, more informal and journalistic style, rather than the drab bureaucratese that contemporary works are composed in. I hadn't realized that this started as a deliberate policy, with the goal of clarifying thought. The old natural philosophers were a wise bunch to be sure.
Do you mean Hooke, rather than Hobbes? So far as I know Hobbes dabbled in the field but wasn't primarily known for his contributions in physics.
The bureaucratic style reveals the condition of those who use it: depersonalised and evasive and intended to minimise accountability/responsibility for the author.
The older pre-1950 style probably owed a lot to rigorous primary and secondary education, especially the emphasis on formal grammar. Also a couple of years of Latin was required for matriculation in much of the world. Good students of Latin develop an appreciation for precision and the etymology of their vocabulary. And never forget they were getting plenty of sleep, breathing cleaner air and were not ingesting cannabis or watching television.
Hooke/Hobbes...I probably got carried away. I am a very big fan of Hobbes. He wrote several treatises on maths/physics and was heavily involved in polemics with Robert Boyle and the Royal Society. Hobbes was vitriolic in his dislike of obfuscation and the whole culture of Scholastic natural philosophy (especially the use of language). In his lifetime Hobbes was treated as a scientific peer by all of the best in England and across Europe. Our present-day assumptions are inevitably filtered through disciplinary structures enacted by university managers - a group whose legacy has been consistently catastrophic.
This also gets to the rise of the hyperspecialist and the death of the polymath, something I've been meaning to address for a while. Time was, the polymath was the standard in natural philosophy.
There is no reason why polymaths cannot make a comeback. The volume of knowledge is greater, but the problem is that today few scientists have ever had any exposure to humanistic studies done properly (with a focus on the rigorous application of analytic methods to language and literature) and almost no humanities or social scientists today seem to have had any serious exposure to pure math or STEM. The dumbing down of the humanities and social sciences probably began with early specialisation by students without serious exposure to maths in their formative years.
The problem will get solved given time. The modern, mass entry, systems are breaking down. The value of learning for mastery in any field is obvious and, as more people, apply themselves to fixing things for themselves or their children, the constituency with an interest in rigour and a demand for a fully-rounded education will develop. The urgent need to develop human capital to the highest standard will provide a degree of much-needed pressure.
Publication pressure is a big factor, too. Taking the time to familiarize oneself with a subject deeply enough to make a meaningful contribution is time spent not churning out papers, which means reduced prospects for achieving tenure, getting grants, etc.
Too true. IMHO, the tertiary sector is mostly a dead-end. The whole system simply is not set up to achieve anything more than the bare minimum necessary for maintaining the credential-award industry with research-for-hire tacked on. The system has been drawing on the reservoir of existing human capital for so long that there is no longer much appreciation of what would be required to enable human flourishing. Within academia, the polymath question almost always gets answered (or dismissed) by way of reference to interdisciplinary liaison - this appeals to the 'group-work' ethos. It's a cop-out, of course.
Progress will have to come from outside the system. And progress will be slow. The coming wave of economic austerity will push much of the West down towards Third World conditions. On the bright side, the current exodus from academia frees up people to freelance as tutors or related intellectual-crofting as it were. Provided that such individuals have the means (and some do) they will be able to act as the seeds for developing something better.
May 28, 2022·edited May 28, 2022Liked by John Carter
The Temple/Network proposition does remind me of Eric Raymond''s similar (though not identical) theory about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar." I think the connective tissue has to do with the appeal to authority when it comes to matters of fact. Authority among humans is more often born of storytelling and traditional hierarchy than of raw fact-finding (unless those facts are highly relevant to instruments of war). The temple/cathedral/god-king/unerring authority is the psychological totem for all of us, whenever reasoned investigation seems too inconvenient or difficult. Which is often.
Good catch. I was totally riffing on that essay. Epistemic authoritarianism, and the intellectual atrophy that tends to follow, is definitely the failure mode that formal hierarchies tend to fall into.
Thanks. For what it's worth, I agree with both you and Raymonf on that epistemic level; this does seem to be the main fault line that runs through human hearts (if you'll allow me some poetry).
For sure. As a non-officially certified paranoid, I think “they” do it on purpose.
Milton Glaser, the famous graphic designer, once said his best students didn’t use computers. He said the reason why was because the computer tended to make too many decisions for you, thus steering your work toward roteness and predictability, making it harder to do something fresh and new.
May 28, 2022·edited May 28, 2022Liked by John Carter
Bravo!!!
There is a hilarious “TED TALK” By Rupert Sheldrake, (biologist who created the idea of Morphic Resonance) in which he tells about making a hobby out of collecting laboratory reports from different times and places about the speed of light. He says things like “in 1927, in Portugal, the speed of light increased to such and such, and then , 17 years later, at the National Lab in Berlin , it slowed down again to such and such, then, 30 years later, in Buenos Aires, it was seen to have speeded up to such and such.” He questions why the speed of light is considered to be a constant. What is the authority that gets to say, “no , your measurements must be incorrect, the speed of light IS a constant, in all times and places.” He does this with very droll British humor. But guess what? TED BANNED HIS VIDEO!!!!! Too hot to handle! Muh “SCIENCE” is not to be examined too closely!
May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Liked by John Carter
The ''publish or perish'' culture brings a few distortions I think. People tend to conduct research that doesn't really answer the question, but bring more papers. We don't ''get to the point''. Paradoxically, also a lot o basic, ''field work'', or cumbersome research is delayed because doesn't fit the scheme o doesn't attract students (because is deemed boring or is harder to published). (In the same vein some research cannot conclude appropriately because it doesn't fit the schedule of a post grade). Another naughty thing is that some people do some research and do not publish it. They prefer instead to keep it behind doors, ''under their sleeve'', to guide other publications. Add also the fact that negative results are barely published, so you always risk to repeat the same mistakes another person committed.
May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Liked by John Carter
I think the elephant in the room (as Eisenhower clearly grasped, and as decades of postmodern left wingers misconstrued or blatantly misrepresented) is the military-industrial complex. You touch on it when you mention the shift in priorities and practices post WWII. The goals, the funding mechanisms, the structure of credentials, publishing and debate... everything, essentially, changed beneath the shadow of the Cold War and the arms race.
What we're experiencing now is the hangover from that dizzy hslf-century. We built a hundred towers of Babel on the bedrock of MIC and MAD, only for the animating principles to fizzle in the early 90s, while the illness that infected the "enemy" had infested every scientific institution that was built and fed to defeat it. Less a Pyhrric victory than an ouroboros... which is more or less what Ike and others had predicted.
I am not a scientist. I do read mainstream science publications online and off. The culture changed as Boomers got greedy in both a cash nexus sense and ego sense. This is not limited to science. We live as e.e. cummings said in a culture of much and quick. https://news.stanford.edu/2015/11/16/fraud-science-papers-111615/
All earth cultures i know about describe a matriarcy that ruled, and then a “revolution” of sorts happened and patriarchy ruled since. I dont know much more than that.
Ah. Yeah, I've heard that narrative. Hard to evaluate how true it is - I'm sure the paleolithic featured matriarchies, but given the vast depth of that era I suspect there was a fair bit of diversity in cultural forms.
Suggest reading Oxford scholar Unwin’s “Sex and Culture.” He lays out the effect of feminized culture in great detail. Of the 800 he studied, *none* of the feminized cultures survived. It is a suppressed book. I had to go to India to find my copy.
To get a little meta, there's even somewhat of an open source race to communicate this exact message. I first saw it on eugyppius' substack, I tried my hand at it, I see you talk Gel-Mann amnesia which Mathew Crawford seems especially fond of including in any of his analysis of this issue, and now you deliver this gem.
I agree wholeheartedly that many captured institutions can be circumvented. I'm hoping to convince you that the American government needs to be recaptured as opposed to circumvented. I'm agnostic about this for other countries, but in America, I think we have a solid majority of the populace that subscribe to American values not shared by the managerial class controlling the government both in terms of elected officials and throughout the bureaucracy. I think if we can put our heads together there is potential for a populist political strategy to leverage this edge in popular support to achieve a similar end state for U.S.G. institutions as is already being achieved via circumvention with respect to institutions that don't have a monopoly on force. If successful, this effort also has the potential to shield these nascent attempts to circumvent sclerotic institutions against their inevitable attempts to defend themselves against this threat by leveraging state power (such as promoting another disinformation governance board).
I'm in favor of any strategy that works. As the left would say: a diversity of tactics.
and I suppose there's only one way to find out if it will work... Speaking of asteroids/ill omens for academia the Kostoff paper was just retracted a couple weeks ago. I'm trying to spread the word because it was the single most competent risk benefit analysis of C19 vaccination and "external reviewers" determined that it made the "erroneous conclusion" that the majority of counted C19 deaths were due to co-morbidity. No addressing the robust analysis that led to that conclusion, just an assertion that it's wrong because everyone knows its wrong. It takes the edge off a bit knowing they're only accelerating this process. Thanks again for the great write up!
Shoddy work that gets pushed into Nature because it furthers the agenda, and good work that either can't get published or gets retracted because it's politically inconvenient. It's all so tiresome watching these clowns squander centuries of accumulated prestige and trust for fleeting advantage.
I saw a great documentary once, “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” about the strategy of using a swarm of cheap little robots to gather and send data rather than one complex expensive exploring machine.
I looked it up, it looks very interesting, thanks for the recommendation!
I recall that corollary to Murphy’s Law, Silverman’s First Law of Journalism: “The closer you are to the facts of a situation, the less accurate the media coverage will be.”
Yep. And the more intimately acquainted with a given field of knowledge, the greater the awareness of just how uncertain that knowledge is.
One of my great quantum mechanic friends once said, not only is it not a complete theory, it’s actually really just a sketch
Heh, good one.
In no topic are your comments more relevant than with respect to metrology. Once you start digging in on the way science measures, be prepared to check your depends. Items such as the astronomical theory of the bombardments. Or the age of Ceres or Iapetus, or the strange origin nexus of long period comets and a particular point in the “asteroid belt”. It is easy once you look to get very uncomfortable with what tales are spun by whom and defended at all costs by storytellers with slide rules.
Great article, and full of hope in regards to open network. Thank you.
Your point about research built upon flawed (yet accepted as true) prior research/ideas is very important - creating a 'drift' in a field that may not be immediately obvious. I've seen this - key references to flawed papers that were also constructed by flawed papers/ideas (and/or highly subjective conclusions) - and so the ideas drift in a particular direction.
I guess I'm talking more about theoretical research that builds on former theoretical research. I don't know about hard science doing actual lab experiments - my guess is that's less prone to such drift - unless you are a Big Pharma funded lab ;-)
Precisely that form of theoretical drift, yes.
The hard sciences may be less prone to that, but I wouldn't count on it. A poor paradigm can hang on for quite some time, with entire castles of air being built on a flawed premise. Of course, to a certain degree, that's always inevitable - all theories are necessarily wrong.
Rob (from universe c137, another one you off-planet guys) sent this in another comment https://odysee.com/@northerntracey:a/Particles-plug-holes-in-theories-that-can-go-on-deducing-ad-infintum--Heinz-von-Foerster_mp4_Low_:0?r=9oBWtY68fYUdnMY2gt9dCdazJ4Py3mVo - interesting.
I'm seeing it in biology, some vague concept repeated for years because reasons... Then some people star to dig up and correct course...
It's everywhere if you know what to look for.
It's fashionable lately to criticize institutional policing because a few cops misbehaved, or all guns because a nut used one for murder. Most cops are competent and professional, and most guns are used legally. And most scientists try to do their science right. Most of the improper actions in any endeavor are more likely due to failures of leadership. If rank and file scientists perform badly, their leaders either committed the fraud or forced others to, or tolerated those who did.
But a lot of failures of science are because they can. Corruption proliferates where it's permitted. The ultimate guardians of integrity are the public, who should protest the fraud. Much of the public has been trained to accept, even applaud, fraud that supports their politics. And the failed education system assures that fewer people are even capable of recognizing bad science or good.
Betrayers of Truth was a good discussion of this several decades ago. Probably deserves an update.
All good points. I certainly don't take the position that the majority of working scientists are incompetent or deliberately deceptive; far from it, the ones I know personally are generally good at what they do and fairly honest. The problem is structural. Scientists are basically trapped in dysfunctional institutions. Like you say: a problem of leadership ... and ultimately, that's the single greatest issue our civilization struggles with.
If most cops are competent and professional, why hasn’t Hunter Biden ( and the many many thousands of assorted grifters and pedophiles in our “CONgress” “Judiciary”and “Executive” branch been arrested yet?
Because most cops don't make those decisions. They can arrest when they see a crime, or when they have a warrant. The warrants for assorted grifters and pedos (and Hunter) would come from farther up the chain.
Prosecutors have similar problems, deciding who to charge. LA is an interesting expose, with a commie Soros backed DA who refuses to prosecute and an office full of mutinous prosecutors suing for him to do his job. Recall effort underway.
People join law enforcement to stop criminals, not to become criminals. We need to learn to identify and remove the criminals more efficiently. More frequent elections is probably the best answer. We have the technology.
I've asked the same question of law enforcement officers over a beer at the bar. Seeing how the powerful and the wealthy are allowed to get away with essentially anything, I often think that the world would be a better place if cops just started going full Judge Dredd. Seeing the Sackler's get away with a fine that leaves them still rich and comfortable for what amounts to pre-meditated genocidal chemical warfare sits very poorly with me, and that's merely one example amongst hundreds of the powerful evading anything that even remotely resembles justice.
Justice is never a right, never easily achieved. It must always be defended.
So, are you surrendering, or going to war, all by yourself?
The real science was banned. So were drugs that treat & cure. Rush & science don’t belong in the same sentence. Incompetence, corruption, censorship. Change the definition of vaccine instesc of experimental gene “therapy.” Vaccinating into a pandemic violated Rule 1. No doubts at all the fake pcr, the highly incentivized & orchestrated propaganda were segues to planned implementation of a social credit system.
'' It's also why 'impostor syndrome' has gone epidemic in the professoriate: people promoted beyond their ability feel like they're impostors because, well, they're impostors''...Once I thought otherwise but after seeing the c19 circus I agree too. I think that all the hoops and the bureaucracy of the academy arises in part as a way to reassure itself of its capabilities.
But the main issue remains in those arrogants at the top running the show.
The various hoops originated as tests designed to weed out the unworthy, as much as anything else. That can be very effective at establishing a competence hierarchy. The problem isn't so much the hoops, as that they have made them easier to get through over time. Although as a grad student I did feel more than a little annoyance at how unnecessary some of them felt.
Russia has just announced that it is planning on pulling out of the Bologna Process (the mechanism to synchronise educational standards and credentials across national jurisdictions). The Kremlin wants to aim higher and enhance academic rigour. It is a vote of no confidence in the metrics by which the Atlanticist meritocracy defines itself. In effect, Russia is making the development of human capital a national priority.
This is truly a 'Sputnik' moment, albeit one that will probably go unnoticed in much of the West. It will be interesting to see what eventually happens: will the US ditch affirmative action to meet the challenge or will it double down and seek 'excellence' via Woke?
Yes, and China is moving in a similar direction by slowly pulling their universities out of the international ranking systems with their obsession with citation quantity and gate-keeping journals, focusing instead on excellence within its own borders.
It is harder imagine a more profound insult. The Chinese, having sent so many students to the best universities across the West, are exceptionally well-placed to make judgements about the comparative quality of education. It is a pity we will never hear the detail of the deliberations in Beijing. They would not be flattering, but they would be accurate and utterly unsentimental.
“Unnoticed in the West” at least up until the time that they have to start using their rockets with the impossible-to-predict flight paths on the “Atlanticists.”
Outstanding article and practical.
It helps when quantitative researchers make their base level data available. Duplicability is a key measure for quality assurance. Ditto for honesty. You can't fake analysis when the data sets are there for your critics/rivals to take you down.
John, your suggestions on prose style are spot on. During the scientific revolution in the 17th c. there was a very strong emphasis on clarity and directness, especially amongst the crowd involved in the Royal Society. Clarity was identified with honesty and reliability. This was contrasted with the old style of the Scholastics, who preferred gaseous and flowery language. Thomas Hobbes (England's premier physicist before Newton came along) was particularly strong on this point.
Your comment about humour hit the mark. Francis Bacon keenly appreciated the value of humour in rigorous philosophy. The Enlightenment's premier encyclopediast Pierre Bayle (according to Voltaire he was the first man to write a book that could teach anyone to think for themselves) recommended that scholars "sport with the Muses" (lighten up and adopt a playful attitude while they pursue knowledge). From the little that I know about neuroscience, this makes perfect sense
Interesting. I'd noticed that older papers - pre-1950 or so - tended to be written in a looser, more informal and journalistic style, rather than the drab bureaucratese that contemporary works are composed in. I hadn't realized that this started as a deliberate policy, with the goal of clarifying thought. The old natural philosophers were a wise bunch to be sure.
Do you mean Hooke, rather than Hobbes? So far as I know Hobbes dabbled in the field but wasn't primarily known for his contributions in physics.
The bureaucratic style reveals the condition of those who use it: depersonalised and evasive and intended to minimise accountability/responsibility for the author.
The older pre-1950 style probably owed a lot to rigorous primary and secondary education, especially the emphasis on formal grammar. Also a couple of years of Latin was required for matriculation in much of the world. Good students of Latin develop an appreciation for precision and the etymology of their vocabulary. And never forget they were getting plenty of sleep, breathing cleaner air and were not ingesting cannabis or watching television.
Hooke/Hobbes...I probably got carried away. I am a very big fan of Hobbes. He wrote several treatises on maths/physics and was heavily involved in polemics with Robert Boyle and the Royal Society. Hobbes was vitriolic in his dislike of obfuscation and the whole culture of Scholastic natural philosophy (especially the use of language). In his lifetime Hobbes was treated as a scientific peer by all of the best in England and across Europe. Our present-day assumptions are inevitably filtered through disciplinary structures enacted by university managers - a group whose legacy has been consistently catastrophic.
This also gets to the rise of the hyperspecialist and the death of the polymath, something I've been meaning to address for a while. Time was, the polymath was the standard in natural philosophy.
There is no reason why polymaths cannot make a comeback. The volume of knowledge is greater, but the problem is that today few scientists have ever had any exposure to humanistic studies done properly (with a focus on the rigorous application of analytic methods to language and literature) and almost no humanities or social scientists today seem to have had any serious exposure to pure math or STEM. The dumbing down of the humanities and social sciences probably began with early specialisation by students without serious exposure to maths in their formative years.
The problem will get solved given time. The modern, mass entry, systems are breaking down. The value of learning for mastery in any field is obvious and, as more people, apply themselves to fixing things for themselves or their children, the constituency with an interest in rigour and a demand for a fully-rounded education will develop. The urgent need to develop human capital to the highest standard will provide a degree of much-needed pressure.
Publication pressure is a big factor, too. Taking the time to familiarize oneself with a subject deeply enough to make a meaningful contribution is time spent not churning out papers, which means reduced prospects for achieving tenure, getting grants, etc.
Too true. IMHO, the tertiary sector is mostly a dead-end. The whole system simply is not set up to achieve anything more than the bare minimum necessary for maintaining the credential-award industry with research-for-hire tacked on. The system has been drawing on the reservoir of existing human capital for so long that there is no longer much appreciation of what would be required to enable human flourishing. Within academia, the polymath question almost always gets answered (or dismissed) by way of reference to interdisciplinary liaison - this appeals to the 'group-work' ethos. It's a cop-out, of course.
Progress will have to come from outside the system. And progress will be slow. The coming wave of economic austerity will push much of the West down towards Third World conditions. On the bright side, the current exodus from academia frees up people to freelance as tutors or related intellectual-crofting as it were. Provided that such individuals have the means (and some do) they will be able to act as the seeds for developing something better.
The Temple/Network proposition does remind me of Eric Raymond''s similar (though not identical) theory about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar." I think the connective tissue has to do with the appeal to authority when it comes to matters of fact. Authority among humans is more often born of storytelling and traditional hierarchy than of raw fact-finding (unless those facts are highly relevant to instruments of war). The temple/cathedral/god-king/unerring authority is the psychological totem for all of us, whenever reasoned investigation seems too inconvenient or difficult. Which is often.
Good catch. I was totally riffing on that essay. Epistemic authoritarianism, and the intellectual atrophy that tends to follow, is definitely the failure mode that formal hierarchies tend to fall into.
Thanks. For what it's worth, I agree with both you and Raymonf on that epistemic level; this does seem to be the main fault line that runs through human hearts (if you'll allow me some poetry).
“have to (be) addressed” this was so good I started reading it out loud to a friend and noticed you dropped a word in the first paragraph.
Damnit there's always something.
Word processors have been hell on editorial standards.
For sure. As a non-officially certified paranoid, I think “they” do it on purpose.
Milton Glaser, the famous graphic designer, once said his best students didn’t use computers. He said the reason why was because the computer tended to make too many decisions for you, thus steering your work toward roteness and predictability, making it harder to do something fresh and new.
That's why I turn off Google's auto-suggestions. Thin end of the wedge leading to purely algorithmic thinking.
Bravo!!!
There is a hilarious “TED TALK” By Rupert Sheldrake, (biologist who created the idea of Morphic Resonance) in which he tells about making a hobby out of collecting laboratory reports from different times and places about the speed of light. He says things like “in 1927, in Portugal, the speed of light increased to such and such, and then , 17 years later, at the National Lab in Berlin , it slowed down again to such and such, then, 30 years later, in Buenos Aires, it was seen to have speeded up to such and such.” He questions why the speed of light is considered to be a constant. What is the authority that gets to say, “no , your measurements must be incorrect, the speed of light IS a constant, in all times and places.” He does this with very droll British humor. But guess what? TED BANNED HIS VIDEO!!!!! Too hot to handle! Muh “SCIENCE” is not to be examined too closely!
The concept of replacing the system instead of trying to change it is the best idea of all.
The ''publish or perish'' culture brings a few distortions I think. People tend to conduct research that doesn't really answer the question, but bring more papers. We don't ''get to the point''. Paradoxically, also a lot o basic, ''field work'', or cumbersome research is delayed because doesn't fit the scheme o doesn't attract students (because is deemed boring or is harder to published). (In the same vein some research cannot conclude appropriately because it doesn't fit the schedule of a post grade). Another naughty thing is that some people do some research and do not publish it. They prefer instead to keep it behind doors, ''under their sleeve'', to guide other publications. Add also the fact that negative results are barely published, so you always risk to repeat the same mistakes another person committed.
I think the elephant in the room (as Eisenhower clearly grasped, and as decades of postmodern left wingers misconstrued or blatantly misrepresented) is the military-industrial complex. You touch on it when you mention the shift in priorities and practices post WWII. The goals, the funding mechanisms, the structure of credentials, publishing and debate... everything, essentially, changed beneath the shadow of the Cold War and the arms race.
What we're experiencing now is the hangover from that dizzy hslf-century. We built a hundred towers of Babel on the bedrock of MIC and MAD, only for the animating principles to fizzle in the early 90s, while the illness that infected the "enemy" had infested every scientific institution that was built and fed to defeat it. Less a Pyhrric victory than an ouroboros... which is more or less what Ike and others had predicted.
I am not a scientist. I do read mainstream science publications online and off. The culture changed as Boomers got greedy in both a cash nexus sense and ego sense. This is not limited to science. We live as e.e. cummings said in a culture of much and quick. https://news.stanford.edu/2015/11/16/fraud-science-papers-111615/
I also have to wonder if we are learning the circumstances of the overthrow of the paleoancient matriarchy
Care to elaborate?
All earth cultures i know about describe a matriarcy that ruled, and then a “revolution” of sorts happened and patriarchy ruled since. I dont know much more than that.
Ah. Yeah, I've heard that narrative. Hard to evaluate how true it is - I'm sure the paleolithic featured matriarchies, but given the vast depth of that era I suspect there was a fair bit of diversity in cultural forms.
Suggest reading Oxford scholar Unwin’s “Sex and Culture.” He lays out the effect of feminized culture in great detail. Of the 800 he studied, *none* of the feminized cultures survived. It is a suppressed book. I had to go to India to find my copy.
Sorry, but what exactly are "earth cultures"? Are they distinct from, say, Martian, Barsoomian cultures?
Precisely. Read “The Cosmic War” by JP Farrell