Glen writes: "But then some of them did show that extra spark. I remember one girl who almost never talked at all. But when she did, to whomever it was, she seemed to always talk directly about the core of the topic ... without clouding it with other, arbitrary, garbage she might happen to know. I never could come up with a satisfying classifier for the two types."
My hypothesis is that, as they mature, the gregarious ones like to accumulate and use arbitrary garbage and use it to advance socially and professionally. In the latter case, some do so in higher education, or administration of higher education. This, in turn, contributes their host universities acting as a gravity wells, indoctrinating rather than discovering and falsifying. And it is amplified at lesser universities where assistant profs can't find funding for research and end- up teaching, forever, even though they'd rather not. As they become more and more stuck, teaching to their customers that just want a stamp of employability, authoritarian incentives and instincts are the ones that make these young professional's lives `better' day-to-day, and that also further reinforces the gravity well. At such an organization, would you expect skeptics to be welcome? No, they just make people mad, or sad. So conform. Marcus -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com - Microsoft® Exchange solutions from a leading provider - http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
