Groupthink and the Intellectual Elite

The Ornery American ^ | October 8, 2006 | Orson Scott Card

[gcruse]

This article is way to verbose. It needs boiling down to something like, "if it has social in its name, it ain't science."

[Logophile]

How did this happen to physicists? . . . You couldn't get tenure if you weren't a String Theorist. You couldn't get grant money. You couldn't get published. You couldn't get a doctorate -- except at the fringes of the field.

Follow the money. "Publish or perish" has been replaced by "Get funded or get out."

[ClaireSolt]

A lot of these departments should be shut down. While watching Bill O'Reilly discuss Gay and Lesbian history month at some school, I remembered what it was like to teach a course on black literature when all we had was a hastily assembled anthology and reaching for a topic within my hitory specialty for Black History month. It is falacious to just order these courses and celbrations when no scholarship justifies them. What they have produced is graduats with a ot of attitude and no context.

[Bahbah]

I have 9 years of post-grad work and all that you say is true.

[Grut]

In the past several centuries, every quarter century or so has seen a breakthrough in fundamental physics except the last quarter.

Well, we don't know that it hasn't happened this quarter-century; we just know it hasn't happened famously.

[Stultis]

I am being sarcastic, of course -- but I am not being inaccurate.

I hate it when that happens...

[glorgau]

This entire article is "hate speech" and must be banned.

[Louis Foxwell]

Correct. I honestly do not see a difference between the contorted linguistics of pseudo intellectuals trying to make themselves seem significant and the author who beats a one note song to death with about 10,000 words.

[zeugma]

See my freeper homepage for what I think justified his entire career. :-) He's a great writer, like Mark Steyn IMO, but different. Steyn is much better at taking a huge issue and reducing it to one short, pithy, and most importantly... true phrase. Card is much better at extended analysis that can drive a point home.

[edsheppa]

we just know it hasn't happened *famously*.

Fair enough, but I'd say we *do* know it didn't happen famously in the first twenty years of the past twenty five.

I've read a few more pages since my post. Smolin found MOND intriguing. I wonder what he thinks now given the unfavorable observations in the few months since his book as published.

[Grut]

If the goal of knowledge is to describe the world as a single system then physics is a mess, 'saved' by a balkanization into specialties that lets its major inconsistencies fall between the cracks.

My feeling is that any real progress in describing 'process' in a unified way will need a new paradigm and that that paradigm will probably come from elsewhere. I'd say from metaphysics, but the metaphysicists long ago gave up on the 'crunchy' world and took up semantics to have something to talk about. ;^)

[edsheppa]

I'd say your view is an interesting one, not without merit.