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[mv]

[steveL]

[mv]

I will not proceed this irrational phantom discussion driven by your ego problems.

[Dr.Willy]

You two could star in a reality-tv show.

[steveL]

[steveL]

[mv]

[steveL]

[mv]

[steveL]

[mv]

[steveL]

[mv]

[steveL]

[mv]

[steveL]

I came back online to apologise, so let me do that; the "blinkered and enjoying the view" quip was shameful.

I was reacting to what I perceived as denigration of IRC, by proceeding to denigrate academia, which as I stated earlier, I am not trying to deny altogether.

I am sorry for that.

In effect I have been decrying the same "commercialisation" or more accurately imo, selling-out, of its principles that you have described.
But I'll come back to this tomorrow, when I'm not feeling quite so chagrined.

[steveL]

What I should have said wrt Kuhn, was simply explain what I found so crappy about his synthesis.

His analysis, briefly, is about how "society" (by which he ofc means white landowning men) focusses on one overarching idea or metaphor to explain how things work, to the exclusion of others. Including to the extent of ignoring evidence which does not conform to expectation (or "fit the theory".)
An example would be the "elements" Earth, Air Fire and Water, or in medicine, the notion of "humours" which only leeches can remove from the body, both of which were considered "science" for many centuries in the West.

This is the "paradigm" so beloved of "modern" executives, who really do not understand what it means.

Kuhn outlines how the paradigm is explored, until it breaks down, due to evidence that can no longer be ignored: it no longer fits the facts, or explains everything, so a new theory must be devised. This would be the "paradigm shift" that sounds so funky; if only people knew what it meant..
OFC this is down to the great theorists in his write-up, and not down to the people exploring the field.

The problem is that he then drops in a complete non-sequitur in his synthesis, in effect: "that's all right, then."
Like so many "seminal" books I have read, the author is actually seeking to endorse the status quo, however nonsensical.

He does this on the basis that this is "how things have always worked" (in the last few thousand years of patriarchy), and using as justification the fact that the theory is eventually overturned: so the fact that we've been ignoring evidence that doesn't fit our model, is not as one might think, bad science, but in fact good science.

AFAIC this is simply horse-shit. Yet this has formed the pretext for making everyone explore solely one area, and in modern times to encourage doctoral students with "Don't worry: just find one tiny result, so we can say you've added to the sum of human knowledge," and then you'll have your PhD, and be "one of us"; YAF waste of space.

It is a criminal waste of talent, imo, to set the bar so low, and essentially to involve your students in a fraud.
Mostly though it is terrible science.

So nowadays we occasionally hear of a "multi-paradigm" approach if someone is feeling terribly clever, or more commonly "multi-disciplinary" which is not the same thing, although it does at least bring different perspectives to bear.

Nonetheless, the underlying basis of Western Science, as practised over the last 3-400 years, is simply untenable.
And this is where academia derives its pretext from, since it is no longer about cloistering away the autistic sons of privilege, along with the child-abusers, so that the psychopaths and sociopaths can get on with beating up on the serfs, and making sure no-one remembers that the Communal Weald ever existed, even though it still does.
(The cloister comes from the monastery, so before you take exception to the above, consider the history of the Western Church, the basis of the Establishment, which was the sole Power for the majority of the last 2000 years, and more in other cultures.)

We see a similar thing in computing, with the drive for One True Way, which was debunked 50 years ago, but still rears its ugly head.
Monocultures do not work. They always fall down, because they are trying to pretend that reality can be handled with just the one, usually dumbass, mode of thought.

Law Zero of Modelling is: The Model is NOT the reality. One reality, with many aspects, and infinite perceptions thereof.

Similarly, computing is an ecosystem, and experience has shown we are best served when we allow for multiple modes of thought; it is in fact far better to use several languages, than solely one, however much we want to feel "on top" of everything, and thus push for inturgration. Often switching language allows you to approach the problem in a fundamentally different manner, as you focus on a different aspect encouraged by the mode of thought implicit.

I can't find the precise Kernighan quote I want on this, atm, just several others; but I will at some point, and stick it in the bot. ;-)

You say this is all Social Sciences; what you're missing is that this "social" science is precisely the basis for academia.

Further Natural Philosophers never confined themselves to one, narrow frame of reference. Neither should you and I, when discussing things like academia and Science, as opposed to a specific computing problem.

Thanks for the link on Lucio Russo. He seemed to be getting at the same thing, really: explore everything, and don't pretend you can understand it all.
Though the notion that science was "born" in 300BC is ofc complete twaddle. It may be convenient to forget the billions of years of evolution before hand, or the fact that there have been civilisations long before, going back hundreds of thousands of years, and indeed the burning of Constantinople was very useful in terms of burying history.
Nonetheless it remains a lie. Science is simply a common-sense approach to the world: if it works, use it. If it doesn't, then no amount of self-rationalisation will make it work.
While people like to talk about sciento (if they dig into the basis), in fact the underlying idea of Science, is that we do not know.
You'd never guess that from the pontificating and chest-puffing that goes on around it, though.

Please don't take my critique of the basis to imply an attack on everyone and everything. It is not.
It is solely a critique of the hegemony, which is without fail full of crap, ime.

[mv]

Thanks for your explanations. It makes clear that what you mean by "academia" is a much wider definition than what I meant: I was mainly focussing on mathematical academia (with certain large parts of computer science as a subfield - though officially usually independent); e.g. I would perhaps not even consider modelling as part of this field. And in this field "paradigm shift" is really not a topic: The field has the advantage that you can decide about correctness in an objective way. Only what you consider "interesting" is subjective and might be different in a few decades (if science should survive that long...)
My experience is that good students are not "wasted" by letting them improve only tiny steps. Good students and teachers change subject if they realize that they run into the danger of obtaining not more. Of course, not all students are brilliant, and somehow one has to deal with this fact, too (e.g. throw them out or let them learn with simple things, first).

Concerning Russo, I think there are some misunderstandings; he is mainly a historian (though also mathematician and physicist). Perhaps you should read his book (AFAIK, it is translated into English). First, it is very important to understand what Russo means by "science": He gives a very precise definition of it. (A very brief and not precise summary: The crucial part is the abstraction process into some theory and to proceed with a systematic study of this theory. In contrast to "empirics" which consists in measuring and "observing" certain rules, only. For instance, the process of determining the radius of the earth by having a certain model of earth and sun, which was developed at around 300BC, is an example of "science", while calculating a table for tides by extrapolating previously observed periodicities is "empirics". The crucial difference is that the former requires a theory which can lead to results far outside of the scope of the original measurement)
Russo argues with many reasonable references that at ~300BC science in the sense of this definition did evolve (he does not claim that it evolved out of nothing; in fact, he describes also the earlier history of many ideas in detail). He does not go back much longer in history (I guess due to lack of available sources which hint reliably to the scientific level), but his crucial point is not the raise of science, but more the question which level has been reached and what was after this:
After science has reached a tremendously high level within a few hundred years (some things being reinvented - even partially with the help of some original sources - in 20th century, only), it rapidly decayed and has practically completely vanished for many hundred years: Even the basic understanding, what a theory is and why it is important, was lost. All serious scientific books of the high time of science were lost, because they could no longer be understood und thus were not considered valuable. Only very few books survived or were copied for random (non-scientific) reasons. For instance, Russo explains very reasonable that Euclid's "Elements" are comparable with nowaday's text books in calculus: Just teaching of some very basic technical skills, but not comparable in level with scientific texts of the same time.
Russo gives also historical reasons for this tremendous loss of knowledge and of practically the complete destryoing of scientific achievement. Many parallels to today are frightening

[ulenrich]

[mv]