(no subject)
Scholarly work is strange. It involves a massive economy of words, in multiple senses, a ridiculous amount of time spent with noses in books, plus condensing what's in those books, from an already condensed form, into a high density meteor of hopefully truth salted with ones own observations. This, along with endless frustrations and agonizing over the pureness of that meteor make up 99% of what I do. All of this for something that could potentially be useful to a slightly wider circle of interested parties.
Don't get me wrong, I love that I care about an aspect of science that's either too dull, too obscure, or too technical for people to care about it. If things were the other way around, if what I was doing had an effect on the economic interests of a nation for example, then chances are that the quality of the sources I'd need to use would be highly compromised, and people with far less knowledge and experience than me would be claiming wildly untenable assertions about the subject of my studies and parading them around in front of the drooling, approving, and too-lazy-to independently verify- masses, as long as my subject was sufficiently abstract and partially removed from the chain of life and death plus money (global warming, or pharmaceutical research for example). This is a problem with a market of ideas: Stupid ideas can make it pretty far as long as they don't net an immediate deficit for society. This is why it took so long for gay people to be considered people, why Galileo could be imprisoned, why Paul Bremer wasn't immediately fired from his job running Iraq after he fired the Iraqi army, and why the Intelligent Design movement happily plods on. The fittest ideas for a society with complex and often self-contradictory needs are not the most accurate ideas, or even the most useful.
Which makes scholarly people something like truth philanthropists.. designing the product based on a standard that is not proportional to the possible payment. Assuming of course that the more accurate the idea is, the more it is worth in some future of society. I think that's true for science, and for justice. MLK Jr. said that the arc of history tends towards justice, I think it's safe to conclude on evidence that the same is true for scientific truth. We began the last century with a tentative theory of electromagnetism forged by people some of whom were attempting to use it communicate with the dead, we ended it with a particle theory so precise that it's proportion of error is equal to the width of a fingernail divided by the width of the continental United States, which is calculated on an incredibly sophisticated computing machine which has revolutionized pretty much everything that we do.
The ego quotient of scholarly work is pretty high, but not nearly as extreme as the work, and not nearly enough to make up for the pay.
So having said that I spend most of my day obsessively worrying whether or not what I'm saying is accurate and a good will representation of my research, I gotta say that it pisses me off when Hilary Clinton says something completely disingenuous to a stadium full of people and gets roaring applause. Politicians are truth merchants I guess. If she doesn't concede tomorrow, the number of days before the press stops calling her "determined" and starts calling her "delusional" will probably be a pretty accurate measure of the distance between "fittest" and "most accurate" in our particular market of ideas.
Don't get me wrong, I love that I care about an aspect of science that's either too dull, too obscure, or too technical for people to care about it. If things were the other way around, if what I was doing had an effect on the economic interests of a nation for example, then chances are that the quality of the sources I'd need to use would be highly compromised, and people with far less knowledge and experience than me would be claiming wildly untenable assertions about the subject of my studies and parading them around in front of the drooling, approving, and too-lazy-to independently verify- masses, as long as my subject was sufficiently abstract and partially removed from the chain of life and death plus money (global warming, or pharmaceutical research for example). This is a problem with a market of ideas: Stupid ideas can make it pretty far as long as they don't net an immediate deficit for society. This is why it took so long for gay people to be considered people, why Galileo could be imprisoned, why Paul Bremer wasn't immediately fired from his job running Iraq after he fired the Iraqi army, and why the Intelligent Design movement happily plods on. The fittest ideas for a society with complex and often self-contradictory needs are not the most accurate ideas, or even the most useful.
Which makes scholarly people something like truth philanthropists.. designing the product based on a standard that is not proportional to the possible payment. Assuming of course that the more accurate the idea is, the more it is worth in some future of society. I think that's true for science, and for justice. MLK Jr. said that the arc of history tends towards justice, I think it's safe to conclude on evidence that the same is true for scientific truth. We began the last century with a tentative theory of electromagnetism forged by people some of whom were attempting to use it communicate with the dead, we ended it with a particle theory so precise that it's proportion of error is equal to the width of a fingernail divided by the width of the continental United States, which is calculated on an incredibly sophisticated computing machine which has revolutionized pretty much everything that we do.
The ego quotient of scholarly work is pretty high, but not nearly as extreme as the work, and not nearly enough to make up for the pay.
So having said that I spend most of my day obsessively worrying whether or not what I'm saying is accurate and a good will representation of my research, I gotta say that it pisses me off when Hilary Clinton says something completely disingenuous to a stadium full of people and gets roaring applause. Politicians are truth merchants I guess. If she doesn't concede tomorrow, the number of days before the press stops calling her "determined" and starts calling her "delusional" will probably be a pretty accurate measure of the distance between "fittest" and "most accurate" in our particular market of ideas.