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Spark wrote:

And ftr pure science for its own sake >>> "directed" science, in terms of outcomes, any day. You can see the latter more easily, but the gold the former turns up is without par.

Sure, applied science has a base of abstract science - mostly, there's a lot of supposedly abstract science which is claimed by the purists but never really was - but what real outcomes have University pure literature departments produced?

A maths academic, and most 'theoretical' science academics, are closer to a philosophy don than an engineer.

I don't agree with that statement at all.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-09-09 04:52:27)

I am aware of what maths geeks do, and theoretical science academics, there's no connection or similarity with philosophy whatever.
They're all abstract, but that doesn't make them 'close' in any shape or form, philosophy and physics couldn't be any more utterly different.

integration, geometry and trig

Clearly you did a very lightweight engineering course.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2012-09-09 05:14:27)

Thats cute, I did all that at school.

Dilbert_X wrote:

I am aware of what maths geeks do, and theoretical science academics, there's no connection or similarity with philosophy whatever.
They're all abstract, but that doesn't make them 'close' in any shape or form, philosophy and physics couldn't be any more utterly different.

integration, geometry and trig

Clearly you did a very lightweight engineering course.

So you don't agree with the humanities graduate student or the science graduate student, who both say more or less the same thing about academia (and both who celebrate and love that fact of academia most, which you seem to revile)? Seems like you're being rather stubborn about something you evidently know very little about. You did engineering at university, so what makes you think you know more about graduate-level research and the 'abstraction' involved (or, to phrase it as your more pedestrian complaint, the 'removedness' of research from the 'real world') than Spark? High level math and abstract science crosses over into philosophy all the time: think modal logic, fatalism, post-Godelian thinking re: infinity and its relation to the postmodern episteme. There are plenty of grey areas where a philosophy don tackles the same question, in just as abstracted and removed a fashion, as a maths savant. Both spend their entire academic day buried in arcane papers and scribbling frantically on notepads of paper, with no care whatsoever about its real-world benefit or 'payoff'. Your lofty phrase that science and maths research is all about unlocking the secrets of the universe and bequeathing tangible benefits to us all is complete rhetoric... and complete bullshit, too, for that matter. You are now basically telling the two people on D&ST with the most experience of academia that they are wrong, countering with your engineer-based impressions of science, and your experience of undergrad+applied postgrad what... 25 years ago? Well done. You are arguing with all of the tact and foundational strength of Jay.

Btw here's an article from today that is quite germane to this debate. This reflects the sentiment I expressed when I said that you (as well as many other people) are drunk with the ideology of science and scientific rationalism and technicism and all of these other -isms and ideologies that have risen to the fore of public consciousness in a post-religion, secular age. It's the Grauniad, I know, but whether or not you agree with its politics, I don't think you're going to find many other mass-circulation papers that care about this debate: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ … nce-krauss ... my own view on that article is that the scientist sounds equally stubborn, reductionist, and like he has a rather blinkered view of reality. Resolving everything down to empiricism, 'facts', and 'tangibles' is pretty much exactly how you sound, Dilbert.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-09 07:39:26)

aynrandroolz wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

I am aware of what maths geeks do, and theoretical science academics, there's no connection or similarity with philosophy whatever.
They're all abstract, but that doesn't make them 'close' in any shape or form, philosophy and physics couldn't be any more utterly different.

integration, geometry and trig

Clearly you did a very lightweight engineering course.

So you don't agree with the humanities graduate student or the science graduate student, who both say more or less the same thing about academia (and both who celebrate and love that fact of academia most, which you seem to revile)? Seems like you're being rather stubborn about something you evidently know very little about. You did engineering at university, so what makes you think you know more about graduate-level research and the 'abstraction' involved (or, to phrase it as your more pedestrian complaint, the 'removedness' of research from the 'real world') than Spark? High level math and abstract science crosses over into philosophy all the time: think modal logic, fatalism, post-Godelian thinking re: infinity and its relation to the postmodern episteme. There are plenty of grey areas where a philosophy don tackles the same question, in just as abstracted and removed a fashion, as a maths savant. Both spend their entire academic day buried in arcane papers and scribbling frantically on notepads of paper, with no care whatsoever about its real-world benefit or 'payoff'. Your lofty phrase that science and maths research is all about unlocking the secrets of the universe and bequeating tangible benefits to us all is complete rhetoric... and complete bullshit, too, for that matter. You are now basically telling the two people on D&ST with the most experience of academia that they are wrong, countering with your engineer-based impressions of science, and your experience of undergrad+applied postgrad what... 25 years ago? Well done. You are arguing with all of the tact and foundational strength of Jay.

Btw here's an article from today that is quite germane to this debate. This reflects the sentiment I expressed when I said that you (as well as many other people) are drunk with the ideology of science and scientific rationalism and technicism and all of these other -isms and ideologies that have risen to the fore of public consciousness in a post-religion, secular age. It's the Grauniad, I know, but whether or not you agree with its politics, I don't think you're going to find many other mass-circulation papers that care about this debate: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ … nce-krauss ...

Not a graduate student yet, tbf, even if the stuff I study is exclusively reserved for grad school at any place that isn't the ANU, it seems (and, if you consider this insane QFT reading course, way beyond). But I have done some proper research as part of my degree. And ofc I know a lot of research academics  in both maths and physics well enough to know what goes on. Whilst there are a few who disregard metaphysical concerns in lieu of "shut up and calculate", they're rare and these sorts of questions do constantly bother most physicists and many mathematicians. Quantum mechanics and its successors have ensured that. There are a whole range of deeply philosophical questions that physical or mathematical theories have thrown up that many people feel that we simply don't have satisfactory answers for at this stage. Like, for example, what the fuck the Dirac equation is doing buried in the middle of deep geometric theories in pure mathematics.

Even the great man, Feynman, who was as strident as an empiricist as they came and whose model of science I absolutely subscribe to, worried about these sort of things from time to time. Could a theory really describe the universe yet be so mathematically, and hence logically, sketchy?

I digress, though - you're absolutely correct that many science academics don't care all that much about whether they're advancing the cause of humanity or all that (with the obvious exception of medical-related fields, which counts out much of modern chem, and some subfields of condensed matter physics that worry about making stuff to solve a particular real world problem).

They do it because they love their work and they dgaf about the rest. And so do I. Couldn't pay me enough to become a doctor.

RE: The Krauss/philosophy thing, I read a bit on that a few months ago. There were strawmen flying left/right/centre back then, hope that's changed now. Big egos on both sides, tbh.

Last edited by Spark (2012-09-09 07:45:59)

That such a thing called category theory exists and is useful should be proof that mathematics can be very removed from solving equations on a spreadsheet. There's a reason it's actually called general abstract nonsense.

EDIT: Having said all this it is kind of important that physicists in particular keep some kind of empirical grounding. The question about renormalization I mentioned before has led a lot of smart people to spend a lot of decades working on something which thus far has given us no useful or even testable result whatsoever. By which I mean string theory.

To put it into context, in the time string theory has done not very much at all in way of useful predictions, quantum mechanics had gone from non-existent to fully developed in its first form, fully tested and with major applications coming out all over the place.

Last edited by Spark (2012-09-09 08:23:01)

Shocking wrote:

Well, as Neil Degrasse Tyson says though the good thing about string theorists is that they don't really impact the budget. All they need are a library, a pen and paper. Much like 95% of the humanities research.

Dilbert has an issue with us funding academics... I guess he has no issue with the £100 billions we throw away on other stuff with no immediate payback or 'result'.

just what is he doing

troll is not happy

The 'humanities' are just a huge black pit, I'm doubtful anything will ever come out of it, if it ever has.

I don't measure the value of research by how much money or makes, and I would hazard that very, very few scientists do.

More reading:

http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/06/13/23031/
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/09/0 … -the-arts/

The one downside of all the differences in taste is that some denizens of the art world think that since the arts have no or only weak objective standards, science cannot have any either. This leads to nonsense like the claim that science is purely cultural. Conversely, there is the equally ridiculous perception that the arts should have objective standards like science. Salt herring is an acquired taste (shudder).

So let us recognize that science and the arts are indeed very different in how they make judgments and celebrate the diversity permitted by the subjectivity in the arts. After all, life would be very boring if all we had to read was Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) or Farley Mowat, (b. 1921).

Worth reading. Quantum Diaries, ftr, is probably the best source of compiled on-the-ground HEP chatter (so LHC, Fermilab etc) that I know.

Even quantifiability is a bridge too far. People doing things because they can drives a staggering portion of scientific research.

Dilbert the simple and enduring problem is that you only have one rubric for 'results' and only one definition of 'progress'.

The humanities are not about producing technological advancement, or material gain. They are about pushing forward and evolving purely intellectual discourses that go towards the sum total of our 'cultural' knowledge, as opposed to our 'material' knowledge (or 'technicism', for a better way of saying it), which applied sciences manage to make out of some limited parts of theoretical research (though emphasis on a limited 'some', as the goal of science and math research is also knowledge in the abstract; it is never done purposively for the bullshit reasons you earlier mentioned, incl. "creating cures"). What humanities research produces is by way of mentality, by way of cultural education and capital, by way of more books and more culture. This is a thought and a standard of success that shocks and appalls you, I know. But that doesn't mean it is categorically 'wrong' or 'bad'. As I said earlier, that is YOUR value judgement. Other people think a world without cultural progression and philosophic discourse would be a dead one. You need more than just technology, surging forward. In fact, all of the 'high arts' - be it literature, music, the visual and plastic arts, philosophy, etc. - are all informed by academic research (or in some cases codified and canonised a posteriori). The funny thing is that you plainly regard 'high art' and art that partakes in the high-cultural discourse as a closed geeky game of Dungeons and Dragons. Which fair enough, that's like your opinion, man, and you're personally entitled to it (although it is not an Entitled Opinion). Put simply, obscenely educated people in the humanities go forward with all of the historical and theoretical knowledge they have to invent the new, to push culture forward, to produce new books and objects that partake in the rich history of art and intellection and create something for today. This is the ambitious part of 'high culture' that you are plainly not interested in, so it's pointless dwelling on (let alone trying to celebrate; I would consider it a loss to the world if we didn't have literary and philosophic thinkers such as Joyce and Eliot, or Nietzsche, or Beckett - I doubt you'd care). The best fiction written today, that which will be considered a 'classic' in 50 years time (and which will then, inevitably, be picked up as a Penguin paperback by the likes of you, confused and grumbling), is fiction written by people with a deep reading and knowledge of the humanities. It is called 'literary fiction' for a reason. It partakes in the intellectual and artistic history that properly defines our 'formal', high-culture (in the Kantian sense, as I know you're familiar). Even your beloved fringe sci-fi authors were well versed in this, though I'm sure that makes you uncomfortable. I know, though, that appealing to the reason and justification of high-culture is going to be lost on someone whose cultural horizons are about as large and wide as Lady Gaga's hairy ballsack. But that knowledge also lets me know that you're mostly just capital-W Wrong on this point - and hella stubborn about it, too.

I'm happy that the humanities do not produce 'quantifiable' results. Good! Every attempt to quantify and performatize and business-ify academia has been disastrous and has marked a small Dark Age to coincide with that political period. New Labour have been the worst for this: a singular focus on measurable results and 'performance' indices that has seen everyone go to university for the sake of improving the numbers, everyone pass a 2:1 degree for the sake of a university's good reputation, and everyone become obsessed with myopic one-year league tables. How tragic! This has leaked into the humanities, where research is now allocated according to 'objective' and 'relevancy-based' criteria that are nothing short of capricious and near Masonic in transparency. The beautiful little irony here is that your comparison to the "global warming" gravytrain is exactly the kind of fad that gets promoted when you try to 'quantify' the 'usefulness' of academic research. When you only agree to fund PhD-level research on topics that are 'relevant' to 'modern interests', there is a huge question of authority and just who defines these "interests" - which often simply ends up being the current political party and its agenda. When you moan about people on the global-warming gravytrain, the exact same thing happens to a 'quantified' field of research: you get a bunch of humanities PhD's written about 'ecological concerns in Austen', 'the Vietnam War and green non-ethics', 'Moby Dick: an allegory for over-farming?' and all that awful contrived bullshit (which really is the worst kind of research: cynical, proposed just for research-funding, soulless and not even interesting to the person forced to write it). Even worse, and even more disastrously, you get a bunch of 'approved' research (approved by the government funding bodies) that compliments and suits their political and economic agenda. Do you really want all of your academic output, high-cultural debate and thus formal culture itself to be pro-free-market? Pro-neoliberalism? Pro-expansionism? etc. This is what happens when you let external bodies and authorities try to 'quantify' and 'evaluate' the usefulness of research: they realise that the universities wield great power and influence in intellectual debates, campuses historically being places of dissent and subversive opinion, and they end up trying to fund and push through their own agendas, much like a handpicked Supreme Court. No thanks. I like the fact that academic research is completely uncaring of the outside world of money and realpolitik and 'results'. It fosters good research, and it allows academic and cultural discourse and argumentation and debate to be free-flowing and genuinely inquisitive. What is knowledge without the freely inquiring mind? What sort of knowledge would we possess as a race if we were only concerned with 'facts' and 'results'? The heat death of the intellect.

It is not good to try and channel the evolution of cultural knowledge towards empirical (least of all economic or technologic) ends. Technology leaps forwards in stages, with breakthroughs and inventions and exciting ruptures th at change the whole game; culture accretes slowly, laterally, in all directions at once. You're looking for the wrong sort of 'results' from a humanities department. If an esoteric piece of work on the communitarian ethos and socialist ethics of medieval society sheds light on the tenets of modern socialism today, or even what it is to be a human individual within a community... then good, it has helped towards the Greater Good in more ways than one. But humanities justify their cultural research because it believes that culture itself is intrinsically part of the Common Good. This is a view you do not share, I know. But thankfully your view is not the majority view. We are not all phillistines concerned only with profits, measurable results, the insidious reign of the 'fact', or technological progress. If humanities stopped receiving funding tomorrow, all of our high-art and culture would suffer for it - they have a symbiotic relationship - and our democratic spirit, amongst other high-falutin' things that a broad liberal-humanist education aims to instill, would also suffer. You clearly have already suffered as an individual. I think you'd be hellish company at a wine and cheese evening.

Last edited by aynrandroolz (2012-09-10 09:00:25)