Current Events — HabitableZone

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re: So essentially
TB — (archived)

Essentially what you are doing is saying that the academic process, which (hmmm, interestingly) has worked all these many decades to advance science, research and education is just in this 'special' case the sign of some non-scientifically motivated special conspiracy to 'put down' your little tin heroes?

Not at all. The same process has screwed up a lot of areas of academic study. I used to work at a university myself. Thank God I wasn't actually inside the system, and that was in a technical area, not one of the famed "fuzzy subjects," but I heard a lot from people who weren't that lucky. Academia is, particularly in some fields, a deeply inbred society where rational analysis sometimes takes second place, and which side of the bed someone got up on in the morning can have as much to do with how your work is received as anything else. Especially in categories where there's no objective standards in the first place.

Like politics, science sometimes moves forward in spite of the establishment, not because of it. It's no coincidence that a lot of the real progress in our society comes from people who worked "outside the system."

If you are trying to tell me that publishing, influence, tenure and things like that are always matters of objective standards, you're farther back in the mushroom closet than I thought you were.

I notice nobody's touching my comparison of United Nations influence with energy company influence with a ten-foot pole. Apparently, only one of these situations creates instant suspicion.

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