I wrote:
> This sort of thing only happens in academia. > I mean, compared to programming. There are politics, backbiting, betrayal, dirty tactics and so on everywhere, in every line of work. But some industries are more prone to these things than others. Show business and academic science have gutter-level ethics. I do not know why. Happenstance? Perhaps Woodrow Wilson understood since he was the president of Princeton U. He said, "academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." He also complained about the "personal intensity" of academic fights. Academic scientists themselves have the notion that they are high-minded and above politics, and that they are especially fair and open-minded to new ideas. In fact, it is just the opposite. This is not surprising. You see the same pattern of delusion in other institutions. For example, samurai ethics in Edo-period Japan emphasized the need for loyalty and obedience to the clan and the feudal lord (daimyo). They obsessed about this because samurai were constantly plotting against one another and trying to undermine or overthrow whoever was in charge. There were practically no rules. There were no elections or procedures that guaranteed an orderly transition from one leader to another. It was a free-for-all every time someone died or was pushed out, similar to what happens in a Mafia gang when a Godfather dies. If loyalty had actually been commonplace no one would have noticed it, any more than fish notice water. Many scientists have described an incident that supposedly took place when a powerful, middle-aged researcher stood up after presentation and said, "I have long believed X to be true, but this presentation by our young PhD colleague has convinced me I am wrong." He was met with a storm of applause. This is held up as typical noble scientific behavior. In point of fact, the reason why this is so often quoted and the reason why there was such applause is because you do not see this happen but once in a lifetime. In any other line of work, when someone produces an improved product, everyone in the industry follows whether they like it or not. In recent years, hundreds of fast food executives must have stood up in meetings and said, "Chiptole has hot marketing and popular products, so we better follow their lead." No one applauds these executives or thinks this is extraordinary. On the contrary, if they did not say that they would be fired -- and rightfully so. Peter Hagelstein masterfully described the true nature of modern science and the contrast to what I would call the Walt Disney version: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Hagelsteinontheoryan.pdf In "The Origins of Scientific Thought" Giorgio de Santillana described another reason why institutions sometimes depart from their own ethical foundations, and yet when they do this they trumpet those same ethics all the more vociferously: . . . The failure of imagination explains, among other things, why men became so reactionary-minded, even when they thought they were entertaining the most lofty and liberal ideals. Something like that was to occur again in the American South. When Aristotle, the great master of ethics, said that slavery is a fact of nature, and that we shall need slaves so long as the shuttle will not run in the loom by itself, he had registered one of those great mental blocks which foretell the end of a cycle. And this leads us to what is obviously crucial, the lack of an applied science [in ancient Greece]. Pure science is always a hazardous and unfinished affair, stretching out its structures in perilous balance over the unknown. It does not suit men’s whims or comfort their fears. In order to be accepted by a tough-minded society, it must produce unquestionable and stunning results, as happened with Newton’s laws. Otherwise, it will be told to lay off and not disturb people’s minds unnecessarily. Men like Galileo, when they dare to speak openly, will be reproved. It happened at the freest moment of Greek thought with Anaxagoras; it happened again in a different context with Aristarchus and his Copernican suggestion. Much has been said of a “loss of nerve” in Greek speculation after 300 b.c. The expression may not be accurate, but it circumscribes something that certainly took place: an inflection away from certain lines of research, a lack of aggressiveness, a kind of settling down. - Jed
