Tag: Tenure
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Authorship?
Another day, another point-miss. = = = = = START QUOTE: It’s estimated that 500,000 to 1 million books are published each year, and that’s excluding self-published material. The publishing market has become saturated, with the average book selling less than 200 copies. But suppose one person could “generate” not just a few books in…
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Finally gets it
Finally a conservative writer understands the real purpose of tenure. He still mentions the “deadwood” crap, which is at best a side effect. The real effect of tenure is to select HARD-WORKING and ORTHODOX researchers. Lazy inquisitors wouldn’t be nearly as harmful as industrious inquisitors. He adds a historical fact that I didn’t know: Tenure…
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Why they fail
Small Christian colleges are collapsing. The NAZI TORTURE CAMP was the final blow, but most were already unsalvageable. Returning to the sieve theme. A few college courses are genuine training. The vast majority are selection devices to guarantee that only the most orthodox students get into top status positions. Christians no longer occupy top status…
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Agent, not spirit
EvolutionNews notes that a new NASA director chose to be sworn in on a copy of Carl Sagan’s book instead of the Bible or Torah or Koran. In the good old days when I was young, people viewed oaths as particularly dangerous. If you violated an oath, you didn’t just come under the wrath of…
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Easier solution
Elon is proposing ‘TruthGPT’, an AI trained to understand how the universe works. This would be ideal, but I don’t think you can get there with a language-predictive model. Understanding how the universe works is a muscle-sense problem, derived from long experience stored in genes and epigenes and cultures and cerebellums. The quick and dirty…
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Two graphy Californians
I’ve been reading Steve Sailer and Wolf Richter for many years. Both are longtime Californians, both are keen observers who know how to look beyond the partisan crap, and both use a lot of data and graphs. Recently Sailer has been losing his sharpness and Wolf has been gaining. Today’s articles are a good example.…
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Right about problem, wrong about solution
This discussion of college loans gets one big point right. Major universities are hedge funds with an apprentice program for future hedgies attached. That’s all. Demons training demons. The discussion misses the PERMANENCE of this situation. Colleges were FOUNDED for this sole purpose. Nothing has changed for 1000 fucking years. At one time the A&M…
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Pearson refuses to correlate
Continuing to read the 1905 Literary Digest… Karl Pearson, the master of stats, has a strangely familiar complaint. “At least 50 per cent of the observations made and the data collected are worthless, and no man, however able, could deduce any result from them at all. In engineer’s language we need to scrap about 50…
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Input
In two of today’s brief items I made the same point without trying. Input matters more than output. This isn’t true of everything, but it’s a view we tend to skip when analyzing social, economic, and physical quantities. When we discuss “freedom” and “rights”, we concentrate on what people are saying. We neglect the equally…
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We know where the goddamn philosophers are.
I’ve often asked WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN PHILOSOPHERS? Well, it’s a dumb question. Philosophers are spokesmen for psychopaths. That’s where they are. Unsurprising: Sammy was always a criminal. Professional criminals are born, not made. More salient: When Sammy set up his criminal empire in 2018, he brought along Philosopher MacAskill to provide Gangster Ethics. MacAskill…
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The power of a name
Reading a brief biography of Lavoisier in the 1901 volume of La Nature. The biography emphasizes the role of his wife Marie-Anne. Both were born rich, both were educated early and strongly to favor their own peculiar talents. Antoine’s father recognized that the family name would be best honored by letting Antoine serve science instead…
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Impressed
I sat down and listened to this long interview with Nikki Haley. I’m glad I did. She is unquestionably an imperialist neocon, but she’s ALSO an experienced problem-solver who did the right things as governor of SC. Right things = bringing in more real physical business, not sending real business to China. She’s ALSO a…
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Milk comes from cartons
MindMatters is belatedly grasping the tenure problem. People who work inside academia have known and recognized this for many decades. My father saw it when he started work as a prof in 1957, and warned me about it. Everyone knows it, but outsiders, even outsiders who attend college for four years, don’t hear about it.…
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Why does this myth persist?
One of the fact-gatherers is coming to terms with reality, but not quite there yet. As citizens, concerned citizens, we engage in debate not to hear ourselves talk, but to convince others of the truth of what we claim. What is supposed to happen, in a debate, ideally speaking, is that the person who makes…
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Science and sausage
As usual I was reading some article by some “independent” who naively assumes that science actually proceeds by questioning. First thought: As usual I was thinking about the peculiar disconnect between the public myth of science and the reality of science. Anyone who has worked in research for a while realizes that self-censorship is automatic…
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