In contrast...........................

 

-Murry Davis, as literally cut-and-pasted from here

Wow, here's a great idea................

I think conservative intellectuals should not try to build an ideological scaffolding around the Trump presidency. Just focus on trying to bring rigor back into academia.

-Arnold Kling

Nuttiness..........................

Two wee excerpts from this post at the National Review:  Professor:  Learning Math Can Cause 'Collateral Damage' to Society

“Reasoning without meanings provides a training in ethics-free thought,” Paul Ernest writes in “The Ethics of Mathematics: Is Mathematics Harmful?” — a chapter of his book The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Today.

“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he writes. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”

If academics were as interested in the creation of wealth as they are in the distribution of wealth, the world could be a much nicer place.   Talk of wealth distribution without talk of wealth creation always reminds me of this line from my favorite Ten Years After song:

Tax the rich, feed the poor, till there are no rich no more

Then what?

Deeper clearer pools of thought..............

A new architectural language is being brokenly, variously, and often falsely spoken by youths with perspicacity and some breadth of view, but with too little depth of knowledge that can only come from continued experience.  Unfortunately, academic training and current criticism have no penetration to this inner world.  The old academic order is bulging with its own important impotence.   Society is cracking under the strain of a sterility education imposes far beyond capacity;  exaggerated capitalism has left all this as academic heritage to its own youth.  General cultural sterility, the cause of the unrest of this uncreative moment that now stalls the world, might be saved and fructified by this ideal of an organic architecture, led from shallow troubled muddy water into deeper clearer pools of thought.  Life needs this deeper fresher pools into which youth may plunge to come out refreshed.

-Frank Lloyd Wright,  The Natural House

image via

A twofer..................................

..........................................................from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

"Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful."

"The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it."

An assault on (intellectual) diversity........

The burning desire to paint a scarlet letter on the breast of those who fail to observe the officially sanctioned view of things has taken possession of many ostensibly liberal people in academe, which has tended more and more in recent years to resemble what the Yale English professor David Bromwich calls "a church held together by the hunt for heresies."

-Robert Boyers, as culled from this essay

via

Eye of the beholder...............

With fake new lurking everywhere, these have been some trying times for journalists who actually care about having a reputation for objectivity - "Just the facts, maam."

Academia, fortunately, has rushed in to help sort it all out.  Messing around in the Intertunnel can end you up in some strange places.  For instance, this paper "Social Media And Fake News In The 2016 Election."

To save you from having to read the whole paper, here is their conclusion:

In summary, our data suggest that social media were not the most important source of election news, and even the most widely circulated fake news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans. 

I stopped paying attention when the authors reported that their sources for determining fake news were Snopes, PolitiFact, and BuzzFeed.  Really?

If you Google "is Snopes.com biased?" you will be led here.  What a hoot.  You can look up the others your ownself.

My suggestion is that you talk with and listen  - talk and listen, not argue - to many different people with different perspectives and persuasions.  Its okay to watch both CNN and Fox News, just don't believe either one of them without doing your own thinking.   This suggestion applies to both news purveyors and news consumers.   Just saying.

On balkanizing reality.............

     Of course, when I urge a multidisciplinary approach - that you've got to have the main models from a broad array of disciplines and you've got to use them all - I'm really asking you to ignore jurisdictional boundaries.
     And the world isn't organized that way.  It discourages the jumping of jurisdictional boundaries.  Big bureaucratic businesses discourage it.  And, of course, academia itself discourages it.  All I can say there is that, in that respect, academia is horribly wrong and dysfunctional.
     And some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments with territoriality and turf protection and so forth.  So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.
     You don't have to know it all.  Just take the best big ideas from all these disciplines.  And it's not that hard to do.

-Charlie Munger,  Poor Charlie's Almanack,  the Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

"isms" are hard on people.........................

Fredrik deBoer wants a walk on the wild side......

But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.

The Intertunnel is a fabulous place...............

This essay contains this line:  "The dispute recalls the comment of another Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low."  It's a cute quote.  I have used it in conversations myself.  Reading it this time, however, the questions arose:  "Given the successful march of stultifying political correctness from academia to the mainstream, were the stakes really all that low?" and  "What would Kissinger think now?"  Not having the ability to ask him, the next best thing, The Oracle Google, was consulted.  Among other things this year-old post from the Quote Investigator was found.  It includes these fun quotes:

In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote this

"It is not easy to discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance; they involve neither property nor liberty; nor favour the interest of sect or party. The various readings of copies, and different interpretations of a passage, seem to be questions that might exercise the wit, without engaging the passions."

"But whether it be, that small things make mean men proud, and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired to defame."

In 1970, Dwight Waldo wrote this:

We can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large.

For the record, Wikiquote seems to believe that the subject quote was "misattributed" to Kissinger.  This whole process of "discovery" took about two minutes.   Isn't the Intertunnel is a fabulous place?