The non-disjoint distinction between scholar and academic is useful for me. I'm
neither. And watching my scholarly and academic friends do their jobs can be
fascinating. The academics spend a huge amount of time raising funds, writing
proposals, playing psychologist with colleagues, etc. ... everything one does
in other bureaucracies like corporations and what I imagine the national labs
are like. The scholars spend the majority of their time pushing pencils, but in
the service of deeper patterns they (think they) see. One scholar who happened
to be a colleague at a dot-com I worked at studied ancient texts and artifacts.
At work, he was a typical IT guy. But at home, he was driven by cataloguing
things. A guy I met the other day is a cryptozoologist who is driven by
taxonomies of mythological beasts like bigfoot. I guess I'm more bedazzled by
scholars than academics, regardless of where they find their home.
On 1/14/22 10:40, David Eric Smith wrote:
What Marcus says below feels right to me, and feels like the point:
On Jan 14, 2022, at 1:13 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
Maybe it is just me, but the world of investor-fueled Theranos type companies don't seem
like a sustainable way to do research. The investors are often ignoramuses for one
thing. Maybe when they have a lot of money, and maybe if you are on the winning side of
such an investment it is great for long enough to become independently wealthy. But it
seems psychologically damaging too, even to the winners. Yeah, I like to rail on
academics and SFI-type academics especially, but there is something about the greedy
search algorithms inherent in the startup world that just doesn't get to the bottom of
things, or even try to start from the bottom. It is opportunistic. And indeed
"big science" is great for some types of questions with their particle
accelerators, neutron imaging, and so on, but someone needs to fret over the basic
questions on a longer horizon. I don't think they should probably be The Elites as they
sometimes fancy themselves, but they are needed.
I was told a story recently about Gerard t’Hooft, by someone from that circle
who has known him and that whole cohort on the scales of their lifetimes.
When t’Hooft recently won the Nobel, he was commenting on a very specific thing
that seemed surprising to him, and disappointing. The description, not
verbatim but as it was put to me, was:
“So I’m not surprised if my neighbors or people at the store thought this was a
big deal. They didn’t know anything about what I do, and had no reason to
care. But now I’m famous for something and so it is briefly a big deal to
them. But what bothers me is why my department colleagues would be any
different. They have known for decades what I do, and have had the ability to
understand it, and to whatever level they want, do understand it. So why to
them is anything different today than yesterday?”
The people who know him say this is who t’Hooft really is. I have only met him
once, but I can buy it, from the things he works on and the abandon about
whether they are elegant and timely or perverse and obstinate.. He really
doesn’t care. He finds it strange and disappointing that other people would,
who he thought were in the same work as him for something like the same reasons.
Eric
What Marcus says below feels right to me, and feels like the point:
On Jan 14, 2022, at 1:13 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com
<mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
Maybe it is just me, but the world of investor-fueled Theranos type companies don't seem like a sustainable way to do research. The investors are often ignoramuses for one thing. Maybe when they have a lot of money, and maybe if you are on the winning side of such an investment it is great for long enough to become independently wealthy. But it seems psychologically damaging too, even to the winners. Yeah, I like to rail on academics and SFI-type academics especially, but there is something about the greedy search algorithms inherent in the startup world that just doesn't get to the bottom of things, or even*try* to start from the bottom. It is opportunistic. And indeed "big science" is great for some types of questions with their particle accelerators, neutron imaging, and so on, but someone needs to fret over the basic questions on a longer horizon. I don't think they should probably be The Elites as they sometimes fancy themselves, but they are needed.
I was told a story recently about Gerard t’Hooft, by someone from that circle
who has known him and that whole cohort on the scales of their lifetimes.
When t’Hooft recently won the Nobel, he was commenting on a very specific thing
that seemed surprising to him, and disappointing. The description, not
verbatim but as it was put to me, was:
“So I’m not surprised if my neighbors or people at the store thought this was a
big deal. They didn’t know anything about what I do, and had no reason to
care. But now I’m famous for something and so it is briefly a big deal to
them. But what bothers me is why my department colleagues would be any
different. They have known for decades what I do, and have had the ability to
understand it, and to whatever level they want, do understand it. So why to
them is anything different today than yesterday?”
The people who know him say this is who t’Hooft really is. I have only met him
once, but I can buy it, from the things he works on and the abandon about
whether they are elegant and timely or perverse and obstinate.. He really
doesn’t care. He finds it strange and disappointing that other people would,
who he thought were in the same work as him for something like the same reasons.
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
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