This man has earned my deep respect, for he was probably the only honest scientist remaining to the modern era. He alone disbelieved the self-delusions that most scientists still retain to this day… by subjecting the scientific method itself to scrutiny and recognizing the disparity between the process scientists claimed to follow – and the one they actually used.
His magnum opus is “Against Method”. It should probably be required reading for anyone seeking a scientific career.
Well, I suppose I have no choice but to continue playing the game, as before. Since I’m not considering a career in academia and I already have a bunch of recruiters lined up for an industrial research position, I should not be subject to “publish or perish”. That gives me a comfortable vantage point from which to perform novel science.
I hope.
How did I become an anti-intellectual intellectual? 🙂
After conversations with friends who share stories of collaborators not doing work, submitting fraudulent results, discarding reason, etc., I’m rapidly losing my confidence in modern academia altogether. I just want to finish my degree and do some real science already. It’s about ideas, not publications. It’s about advancing knowledge, not merely making the method sound like the solution to a grand problem. It’s about communicating results clearly and concisely, not obscuring them in pages of pseudo-intellectual jargon. It’s about openness, not skepticism. It’s about freedom, not censorship. It’s about learning, not servitude.
Until today’s academics realize this, almost all of science is a wasted endeavor. The few that keep it going in spite of the corruption are to be commended.
It’s come to the point that even after I’ve done the experiments and have the results, I loathe writing the papers. It’s not because I mind writing papers per se, but because I hate doing the whole background search, trying to figure out what exactly the problem is that we’re solving, stating all of the work that other people have done in the area before, and dressing it all up in four pages of nonsense when our results really could be presented in a paragraph or so. Is this really how research is done? Does the research paper, like the atom, consist mostly of empty space?
(Tangent) Speaking of which, why don’t I ever get to do something really cool like the Rutherford experiment I’m referring to? I have some ideas (I’ve posted them all here at one point or another), but I don’t have the resources to test them. Do you notice how many of his students won Nobel Prizes? And among those who didn’t, names like “Charles Galton Darwin” (who is really just a legacy) and “Hans Geiger” pop up? How the ones who won the prizes tended to study under him at Cambridge while the others studied at Manchester (and also made contributions probably worthy of winning prizes but weren’t as accepted as the ones who went to Cambridge)? And how *his* advisor also won a Nobel Prize? And his *grand advisor* too? And a very large majority of all of their other students? Surely you’re not going to tell me that *every one* of those Nobel laureates got there on talent alone, especially considering that the work done by many of the non-recipients was as significant as those who did receive them?
The more I observe academia, the more it seems like a cabal. Paradoxically, these people all came up with daring theories and did great experiments, but the rub is the *ability* to perform these experiments. I don’t speak of talent – I speak of *permission* and *support*, which I have lacked my entire life and show no signs of ever receiving (this is why I wanted to become a theorist before that path was closed to me as well!) I need to go into business or something on the side, because I will never have any opportunities if I rely on others to recognize my ability on their own. If I’m going to make something of my life, I need to wrest it from society rather than waiting for them to hand it over in deference.
(/Tangent)
Anyway, you may have noticed that I didn’t do a background search yet and have no idea what the problem is that we’re supposed to be solving, but I already have my experimental results. This is because the person choosing the problems and the person writing the paper are two different people who tend not to keep good communication.
On the upside, I wrote 6 pages of my dissertation so far this week and about 10 pages of my Treatise (which I’ll probably finish next week), so it’s not as if I mind writing when there’s a good reason to do so.
This just popped into my mind while driving today:
“Servitude is prostitution of the intellect”.
Progress ceases only when man is content.
To think that I thought the issues in “Atlas Shrugged” contrived. No, people really do behave like this:
http://www.news.com/5208-13579_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=34083&messageID=363045&start=0
Read the article it’s attached to as well.
Continued where “Dissertation, Week 11” left off.
Ah, the inevitabilities of group work. I’ll never be sure what to answer if asked whether I work well with teams… “depends on the team”? “Yes, I’m that one guy on every team who actually does the work”? “No, because teams are constantly and invariably overwhelmed by the special brand of apathy that comes with knowing someone else will be there to pick up the slack”? Any way I say it, it sounds bad, but it’s been my experience on every team I’ve ever worked with. Perhaps this is the purpose of management, but authority over the team’s organization and operations should not translate into higher rank. If a uniquely talented employee enters an organization, that person is irreplaceable in a manner that few managers are, yet the employee is considered the subordinate.
As Beethoven was supposed to have (roughly) said, “anyone can be an aristocrat, but there is only one Beethoven!” Such superlative skill should confer its own rank. Occasionally it does, but usually through promotion to manager. Do I even need to explain why promoting superlatively talented producers to positions in which they can no longer produce is a bad idea?
As you may have noticed, it’s been 3 weeks since I last posted an update on my dissertation. I had submitted a draft of the first 50 pages of my dissertation and was waiting for a response. However, if I wait any longer for a response to this draft before proceeding, I am going to jeopardize my timeline. Therefore, I am going to resume work, first by reconciling the disparity between one of my formulas and the results returned by the tensor toolbox, then by performing my own experiments.
I just hope I’m not first told I need to revise everything when I submit the completed work and prepare to defend!
To be honest, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to write 100 pages of methodology on this topic. I’m still not sure I get the point. Our collaborators are supposed to be filling me in on this, but they seem to have disappeared; I haven’t heard from them in over a month.
I’m going to split the rambling that this is leading me down off into another post.
These are a few thoughts I was puzzling over, unsure of whether to state them because of their unconventionality. I suppose if I were trying to be conventional, however, I’m far too late. Here are three of the least conventional:
“Imposing forgiveness or forgetfulness on the people allows any atrocity to be perpetrated with impunity. There is a time and place to forgive. It cannot be blind.”
Flying in the face of the “forgive and forget” doctrine (which probably exists for precisely this reason, as most other doctrines that attempt to limit the moral behavior of the individual), this is the result of recognizing that anger and other strong emotions can indeed motivate great works (through the process of “sublimation”). It is also the recognition that your forgiveness very often does not cause others to rectify the wrong that they caused. By unconditionally forgiving, you are writing others a blank check to step all over you because they know there will be no consequences for doing so. Finally, forgiveness of this sort bars improvement. If an injustice causes you to recognize the flaws in a system, forgiving it prevents optimization of the system, affirming that the status quo is acceptable when it should not be!
Here’s another in a similar fashion:
“Above all, the consistency of memory is sacrosanct. Lacking this, one lacks
purpose – even orientation in time. As for society, a censorship of the past
prevents all change in the future – no one is left to cry out against
atrocity.”
1984 illustrates exactly why this is important pretty well.
And then there’s this:
“Never be the first to come up with a new idea. It won’t be accepted.”
I think Friendster (and MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, its main successors) probably made me realize this. My “Let’s Compose!” idea confirmed it. If you’re the first to come up with a sufficiently different paradigm, you will meet with failure. The first ones that copy your idea will probably be the ones to meet with wild success if anyone does at all. It’s pretty common.