Jochen,
When I joined the academic world, it was in the last days of the ill-paid, odd-ball, professor, entangled in ivy, cloaked in moth-eaten tweeds, harboring dreams of making The Great Discovery. That’s the life I bought into. The deal I accepted was that I would not be paid much money, and, in return, I could think about pretty much whatever I wanted to think about. Slow summers in some shack in the Appalachians, pondering the great unknowns. First there was Sputnik, which made professors think of themselves as celebrities. And then there was Academic Reaganism, that enforced a production metaphor on us. I mourn the loss of the Jimmy Stewart professor. Nick Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Tuesday, June 2, 2020 9:51 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Science Commits Suicide In a sense globalism is a Ponzi scheme for exploitation of workers which has now started to reache its limits. Companies outsource the production to eastern European countries which outsource it to China which outsource it to the Uighurs and North Korea and so on and so forth. But the number of countries is finite, and for the Uighurs in the concentration camps it is hell. The Jeffrey Epstein system was a kind of sex offender Ponzi scheme from all I have heard so far (which involved Mar-a-Lago too as recruiting pool). Maybe science is sometimes a kind of Ponzi scheme for academics? A professor needs staff to make publications, and all of the junior academics in this staff need staff as well to become a professor. But you can only discover America or Quantum Mechanics once. What happens then as an unintended consequence is that people start to learn how to play the game. They produce scientific papers that look like papers and feel like papers but which do not contain real scientific insights. I believe we all know these papers well. People produce them because they have to it if they want to keep their job. -J. -------- Original message -------- From: Jon Zingale <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > Date: 6/2/20 16:43 (GMT+01:00) To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Science Commits Suicide Jochen, I tend to agree with your analysis of Eric, Bret, and the DISC. The hat of Roger Penrose that I am most interested in, and that I am thankful to Eric for accessing, is Penrose as Geometer. It is a take and a history that doesn't get the same air time that more pop-science oriented ideas get. Sometimes I feel that this is how the DISC, or perhaps a an economic variant, operates in the public sphere of youtube and social media. There are these very interesting minds, capable of offering very rich historical insight, doing the pop-intellectual circuit lecturing on something else altogether. I am thankful for this interview because it shows that the commons need not be tragic. Jon
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