Brian Leiter points to a short essay by John Perry about his colleagues in philosophy, and excerpts this scene:
[A] thought about this wonderful and interesting group of people, my philosophical colleagues. I have a very distinct memory of arriving at the Eastern Meetings of the American Philosophical Association some years back, when they were held at a hotel in Baltimore. The meetings began just after a National Football League playoff game had been played in that city, and the previous occupants of the hotel seemed to be mainly people connected with this game. Since I was flying from the west coast, and had to attend some meeting or other in the early afternoon of the first day, I arrived the night before most of the other participants. I was able to watch the amazing transformation that took place as the football crowd checked out and the philosophy crowd checked in. The NFL people were large, some very large, most quite good-looking, confident, well-dressed, big-tipping, successful-looking folk; the epitome of what Americans should be, I suppose, according to the dominant ethos. We philosophers were mostly average-sized, mostly clearly identifiable as shabby pedagogues, clutching our luggage to avoid falling into unnecessary tipping situations. We included many bearded men— some elegant, some scruffy— all sorts of interesting intellectual looking women; none of the philosophers, not even the big ones and the beautiful ones, were likely to be mistaken for the football players, cheerleaders, sportscasters and others who were checking out. The looks from the hotel staff members, who clearly sensed that they were in for a few days of less expansive tipping and more modest bar-tabs, were a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The talk, as philosophers recognized each other and struck up conversations, was unlike anything that ever had been or would be heard in that hotel lobby: whether there are alternative concrete possible worlds; whether there is anything in Heidegger not better said already by Husserl; whether animals should be eaten; not to mention topics that aroused truly deep passions, mostly related to proper names.
What a wonderful group of people, I thought, and how wonderful, and lucky, that the world has managed to find a niche for us. Even if philosophy had no real intellectual content at all — was as silly as astrology or numerology certainly are, or as I suspect, in dark moments, that certain other parts of the university are— it would still be wonderful that it existed, simply to keep these people occupied. Especially me. What would I be doing without this wonderful institution? Helping people in some small town in Nebraska with their taxes and small legal problems, I suppose, and probably not doing it very well.
It would take very little to apply this to physicists (or scientists, or academics more generally) as well as philosophers. We tend not to bring up Heidegger, but we do argue about alternative possible worlds all the time.
More importantly, it’s the second paragraph that hits home. How fortunate we are to live in a time and place where society is sufficiently robust and diverse as to put aside a bit of its resources in order to foster a tiny group of people whose professional duty it is to think deeply about the secrets of the universe. I am reminded of the dedication page in the most poetic general relativity textbook ever written, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler:
We dedicate this book
To our fellow citizens
Who, for love of truth,
Take from their own wants
By taxes and gifts,
And now and then send forth
One of themselves
As dedicated servant,
To forward the search
Into the mysteries and marvelous simplicities
Of this strange and beautiful Universe,
Our home.
Thanks JoAnne, as you can see I had some problems with my own calculations, and no convincing excuse I’m afraid…
If one doesn’t like where one’s government spends its money, either write to one’s senator (convenient if they are on the appropriations commitee), or practice tax resistance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance
Just don’t forget to send a small donation to the NSF 🙂
Jacques: who said you should foot the entire bill yourself? Of course you can pool your resources with likeminded individuals who share your interests. That’s called voluntary collaboration. It is something very different from appropriating the resources of others who do NOT share your interests and would have none of it. That’s called theft.
JoAnne: so if you steal just a little compared to all the really big theft going on all around you, then it’s OK?
Elliot: yes, there is legitimate government spending. At the core, government is just a monopoly on the use of force. The legitimate use of that monopoly is to prevent individuals and groups from using (or threatening the us of) force against each other. That requires police and courts, for a cost O(1%) of GNP (and probably falling as the economy grows).
Dissident,
Given that I think government spending is too LOW at this point we are clearly on divergent paths. I believe that cradle to grave health care, social support and education should be fully funded by the U. S. government (read my lips:NEW TAXES) Of course I am not for government fraud/waste and would drastically cut DOD spending. I would increase funding for scientific research across the physical and life sciences.
Cheers,
Elliot
Elliot, your recipe has been tried over and over and over again. It has always, always, always failed.
It’s remarkable to see such inability to learn a simple lesson: if you socialize something, it will eventually collaps. Socialize all of society, and all of society will collapse – even the most autistic among us should have gotten that from the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Socialize part of it, and that part will eventually collapse – witness Western European “welfare” states turning into farewell states, as correctly predicted and wittily put by Benford many years ago.
We all seem to get that state-managed car production results in ridiculous Trabants. So why don’t we get that state-managed “cradle to grave health care, social support and education” will get you exactly the ridiculous results which we are seeing and constantly bemoaning? What kind of absurd mental block is this?
The fact that there have been problems with the model does not imply that it is wrong. Give me a sucessful example of a society where your approach has been tried and is sucessful.
Larger societies clearly have harder scaling problems.
Thats our challenge.
Elliot
Dissident–Norway has a GDP per capita essentially identical to the US’s, while maintaining a much smaller proportion of the population in poverty. Sweden is doing better than the UK. Iceland also makes the top 10 in GDP per capita. Scandinavia has a better economy than the rest of Western Europe, not worse.
Instantly comparing things to the USSR is absurdly ingenuine, as the violent political oppression and one-party rule are the two things that one first thinks of when thinking of the USSR, and neither of these things have anything to do with what we’re talking about. And yes, we’ve all read John Locke before.
Elliot, you said: “I believe that cradle to grave health care, social support and education should be fully funded by the U. S. government.”
The taxpayer funds the U.S government. I am a taxpayer. I don’t want to fund your policies. I want to distribute my wealth as I see fit. What are you going to do with me?
Elliot: the fact that a model fails every time it’s tried, and that the mechanisms causing the failure are elementary and quite well understood, does that also not imply that it’s wrong?
bittergradstudent: regarding Norway, aren’t you forgetting a little detail there? Namely North Sea oil? Sure a small portion of Norwegians is poor – the Norwegian state is flush with petrodollars and using them to plug all holes. You’d have to try really, really hard to be poor in Norway. Needless to say, that’s not a normal situation. Sit down and watch what will happen with the country in a few decades, when the wells will have stopped pumping anything but salt water.
Iceland? That’s a tribe with fewer people than a small continental city and an economy based on fishing, volcanos and tourism. that’s your statistical base?
Cause it sure can’t be the socialist disaster known as the Kingdom of Sweden. If you’ll believe that it’s doing better than the UK, you’ll believe anything.
You vote.
If your side loses the vote, well, that’s democracy.
I understand there are some nice ungoverned areas in Africa. Perhaps you could move there?
Are you presenting a Law of Nature there, Aaron? The only way to run things is collectively, by majority rule, and those who dislike the result can leave?
Interesting.
Democracy’s not so bad. There’s a set of rights that are based on supermajoritarian principles, and pretty much everything else is left to the voters.
I certainly haven’t come across anything better. I know that libertarianism would be much, much worse.
Democracy may be the best way to organize a collective decision process. The intersting question is why the decision process should be collective. You seem to be taking that as a given. Why?
Did you guys skip the classes on “ignoring the troll” in your Internet 101 courses, or what?
The problem with libertarians is that they generally aren’t trolls; they actually believe this stuff.
Take #38 — it completely misses the point.
That’s just the point — the force of reason isn’t going to work here.
David,
You can work for the election of people who reflect your views and I can do the same.
We’ll see how things turn out.
Elliot
Aaron, #38 does not miss the point. It asks the simple question at the core of this discussion. I note that you either can’t or won’t answer it.
Sean: so, in your view of the world everybody who doesn’t like collectivism is a “troll” and somebody beyond “the force of reason”?
Wow.
I never said anything about “should”. “Should” is hard. I am talking pragmatics.
This reminds me of the time I tried to have a rational discussion with an objectivist. Oh, what fun that was not.
Ahem, Dissident, if *you* believe that the UK is doing better than Sweden in keeping people out of poverty, then *you* will obviously believe anything. I think that just tells us everything about how much we need listen to your rants.
Richard, I don’t “believe” that, I know it. May I suggest that you add some independent sources to your diet of official government statistics? Try this for a start:
http://www.timbro.com/index.asp?page=publications
Among the interesting things you will learn is that real unemployment in Sweden (not the socialist government’s cooked figures) currently runs at about 25%. And if you think that’s something made up by some vast right-wing conspiracy, you may want to check the story on economist Jan Edling and why he quit his job with socialist trade union LO after 18 years.
I’ll grant you this: they didn’t have him committed to a mental hospital for making public the figures which had been known and used internally all along, as would have been done in the old Unmentionable bloc, or declare him “beyond reason”. For that I guess one has to come here and draw the ire of Kommisar Sean.
This reminds me of a political discussion with my Dad….goodness but it’s going to be a looooonnnng week “at home” over Christmas.
Yes, Timbro is a very reliable objective source. It’s like asking the Discovery Institute for facts about evolution. (OK, I just wanted to feed the troll a bit more. I will stop now.)
“Did you guys skip the classes on “ignoring the troll” in your Internet 101 courses, or what? ” – Sean
Sean, Jesus was crucified for being a troll, was he not? Where’s the proof that someone who says something the mainstream don’t want to hear is a troll? Surely the trolls, in a sense, are the sycophantics who kick someone just because that’s what the mob is doing.
What is the probability of a mix up, like Pilate and the Chief Priests, and accidentally crucify someone innocent without bothering to check the basic facts? It it zero?