Publish or perish within the scientific community is a potlatch of ideas! They’re freely given away in exchange for status, which translates into more desirable jobs (just as the ritual potlatch was used to apportion land and fishing rights). A side effect is the redistribution and dissemination, not of wealth, but of ideas! The whole process of publish or perish is just a means of nonviolent competition for social status.
I need to study more anthropology.
Oh how foolish I was! While reviewing a statement of purpose for a friend applying to CMU for grad. school, I realized my own mistake. Let’s see whether I’m going to play Roark to another’s Keating (if this is to be my role in society, I’ll never forgive it).
I spoke of my goals, how my accomplishments have led me towards those goals, and, unabashed, the research training I wished to receive in pursuit of those goals. My numeric credentials were superlative and spoke for themselves, so I did not mention them. This was all acceptable.
My error was one of omission; one that became blindingly obvious after I figured out how to get academic papers accepted, as it’s of the same nature. The data, the idea, the meat is not important unless properly wrapped. I didn’t brag about my interdisciplinarity; I practiced it and relied upon it being self-evident in my actions and goals.
Just as I had previously relied on acceptance of academic papers through straight and concise representation of the ideas and results of the research before I figured out how those were accepted.
There’s a game to it. Drop names. Drop keywords. Read up on and associate yourself with current academic trends.
It’s a stupid game, but I have to play it at least one more time in the future, so I may as well learn the rules of it if I’m to succeed next time.
I have a feeling knowing someone already in a graduate program is the most significant predictor of success; moreso than any personal factor. Certainly I’ve just provided some help. And in providing that help, I’ve helped myself realize something important as well.
The disproportionate interest in legalization of medical marijuana on Digg is not due to any medical benefits. The development of a drug that decouples the medical effects from the high has shattered the pretense of righteousness that the adherents on Digg were previously clinging to. Take a look at the comments:
Digg – Cannabis like drug dims pain without the high.
Vs. a typical sort of article you’d see on Digg from last year:
Digg – Medical Marijuana User Commits Suicide After Long Being Denied Its Use.
I’m not here to engage in this debate (although it’s pretty predictable to see where someone who has lived a straight-edge lifestyle would fall), but I find hiding behind some flimsy pretense very hypocritical regardless of your position.
I can already see what the comments are going to look like, so I’m disabling them on this post.
How much of Seasonal Affective Disorder is truly a physiological reaction to a shorter day? I just realized around the DST change that most people probably get almost no sunlight at all in the winter thanks to the way a typical workday is set up (once the sun sets before 5 PM, that’s it; game over!)
This would be yet another instance of the dehumanization of perfectly normal people by placing them in a completely unreasonable environment, then labeling them defective because they are unable to cope with that environment.
Solution: shorten the workday by an hour or two (taking away people’s morning sunlight in exchange for giving it to them in the afternoon is not a solution). Most people are at their creative and intellectual nadir around 4 PM anyway, so you may actually be doing the organization a favor by adopting a 6 hour workday. Not to mention that it would be a huge boost for morale.
Ok, but you’re the type that plays Oregon Trail on the “Grueling” speed setting. So what if John breaks his leg, Timothy gets cholera, or the oxen die? You want those extra 2 hours.
Fine. So either shift the workday later (you’ll still overlap with that 4 PM slump, it will still be dark and depressing when employees leave work, and now you’ll have to deal with the fact that you are coming between employees and their dinner, but they will have a chance to catch some morning sunlight), or schedule a time in the evening for employees to telecommute, if possible. Attention levels rise in the evening, before finally dipping about an hour before a person’s typical sleep time. It’s a circadian thing.
Assuming SAD is purely a physical problem that cannot be attenuated through social change is likely detrimental to the productivity of the workforce as a whole.
There are relatively few innovators and many people who like to copy and make incremental advances, but I didn’t quite realize how out-of-hand it was getting in social bookmarking until I looked into actually adding those buttons (via the Add to Any widget) to one of my sites. It looks nice and innocuous at first, but click on the down arrow in the popup menu and see just how many sites are listed, all serving the same function.
An economic boom is a time when the value consumed exceeds the value generated within an economy. In other words, there is money floating around that does not actually have a grounding in any valuable economic activity but can be used to consume value all the same (remember, money is not actually value; it’s an imprecise representation of it). The bust that invariably follows such an era is the elimination of the “negative value” that has accumulated from such a boom and a return to economic equilibrium, where money actually begins to represent value again. If I can be so bold as to rip off one of the laws of thermodynamics for my own purposes:
The overall change in the energy of a system is the change in heating – the change in work. In economics, the formulation is even simpler: profit = revenue – cost.
They are actually saying the same thing using different terms. In fact, if you used energy as a currency, these would be exactly the same law.
This time around, many people were given loans that they could not repay. These loans appear to have been used primarily to finance house purchases, which caused demand to rise and the price of a house to artificially increase. It was, of course, the sort of fake money I had just mentioned, untied to any real value because nothing significantly changed in overall productivity to match the increased consumption.
The economy, unlike the universe, is an open system. Value can be both added and removed. No significant value was added to the system, so “value revenue” was 0. The money used to purchase houses destroyed value, so “value cost” was positive. Thus, value was lost.
Because money is an imprecise measure of value, it took a while for people to notice, and thus everything appeared to be going really well.
Until it finally caught up, of course. The fall in house prices that followed was an act of balance. The pathological money was eliminated from the economy as house prices fell, thus it became tied to the actual value of the houses again. (The other solution that would have resulted in equilibrium would have been massive amounts of inflation, so this is actually preferable).
The reason why this is a disaster rippling throughout the economy is mere reliance on this fake money by both the lenders (who collected interest on it) and the borrowers (who “leveraged” it). The interest they collected was fake value too, of course. And then they invested that into other assets. And that was also fake.
When the bubble burst, this complex web of interdependencies, all built with valueless money, fell apart. That’s my take on it, anyway.
So for those who consider my frustration with inauthenticity unwarranted, consider what effect it has had on your economy. They spring from the same cause.
The trend these days is to set up free trade and deregulated capitalism as the cause of our present economic woes. Regulation is important in some contexts, such as in the environmental impact of industrial byproducts, but let me make something clear:
The financial firms are not capitalist.
The premise that makes capitalism work is that something of value is produced and the people who created it are rewarded with capital (i.e., the ability to leverage the value others provide) based on the assessment of that value against that of competing products or services. The best one, in theory, wins.
The financial industry is producing nothing of value. Its primary goal is to acquire more capital by what essentially amounts to arbitrage: purchase an asset when the price is low, sell it when the price increases. The word create does not factor into this at any point; the creation is being done by the companies that they are buying and selling.
Because they have divorced money from its meaning, it is no surprise that it looks all the same to them whether they use their own or someone else’s – so they’ve been using someone else’s and lending to others in turn.
The problem is that when you use someone else’s money, they can come calling at any time… and when you lend someone else yours, you always have to take into account that they may not be able to pay you back. What happened in the financial sector was that everyone had their hands in each other’s pockets and no one had produced any sort of actual value.
So stop calling it capitalism run amok. It isn’t capitalism to begin with.
It is human nature to emulate successful individuals and organizations. This includes traits not inherent to success. The propagation of nonessential traits is the only opportunity that an individual has to shape culture on a larger scale.
This has become one of the most important questions of my life, and will only continue to grow in importance should I continue down the path I’m on:
“If strength of an idea is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for adoption of that idea, what are the remaining conditions? Why is culture the way it is? Why were some ideas selected, others discarded?”
I cannot accept that it is random. I would be ashamed to live in such a society if it were. So what could this mystical formula, this holy grail of marketing, be? Why do so many good ideas go unimplemented? How can I increase the probability that my own are adopted?
I think I’ve marked the point at which society started to settle into its present form. It occurred around the 1950s, coinciding with the popularization of broadcast television. I doubt this is a coincidence; something fundamental was altered with the advent of real-time visual broadcast media.
It may have also been due to the effects of WWII modernization and the intensification of the cold war after WWII ended, but I would think the trend would have stopped by now if this were the case.