War on The Cult of Genius, The Cult of Theory, and The Cult of Not Biology

[aliothsan]

I started working on this post a loooooong time ago -- back in February of this year, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I wrote up about 4/5 of it, was called away, and forgot to ever return to it. So yes, the blog posts I'm linking to are several months out of date, and I'm sure this debate probably progressed quite nicely without me. But I'm

Comments

[arujei]

At some point I was going to talk about that fourth salvo of yours, just from the humanities person's perspective.

But this is nice. Good job.

[aliothsan]

Please do make the fourth salvo. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

[aliothsan]

And, thanks.

[lightflake]

Your rant echoes sentiments shared by me and mirazai; in fact, it's a really old complaint.

The scale of hard to soft sciences (literature->mathematics) is too frequently taken to mean worthless to valuable, or easy to hard. Stupid. Arrogant.

I enjoy my fields (polisci & psych) because they are so relatively new; there's so much that has yet to be studied that's sitting there in plain sight, just waiting. I like the idea of pioneering something. But I'm not one to say that discoveries that build on others are lesser, by any means--in fact, they're generally just as significant, even if they go unnoticed outside the community at times.

I find it easy enough to appreciate elegance in the harder sciences, but my ability to truly comprehend or create that kind of thing isn't near the level it is with art or my chosen fields. Hence why I'm in the areas I am...