Simmering

Denyse discusses censorship in academia, and gets the facts right as always. She worries that too much censorship ruins the chances for fresh ideas.

I arrived at a different conclusion a few years ago. Secrecy is the default. Secrecy is the PURPOSE of language. We talk and write for the benefit of our family or our culture or our subdiscipline or our corporate team. We optimize our words and grammar to exclude outsiders.

This is how nature does it, so nature must have a reason. The reason is equally simple. REAL innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and real innovation is not sudden. Real development comes from slow simmering in a sheltered and stable situation where a team works for years on the same range of subjects for the same purpose. Real development is lost when the steam is allowed to escape. Most leaks are sabotage.

Move fast and break things is the EXACT opposite of real development. The tech tyrants haven’t come up with any new ideas. They’re using and abusing the products of long internal development by Bell Labs and IBM and many other old companies and labs, mostly extinct now (like Bell Labs) after being LBOd by the tech tyrants.