John Jay

I share too much with the world in my blog posts, as it is.

Why We Need Jackasses in the Academy

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 Ginny pointed out something very important in the comments to this post:

One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch’s “In Defense of Prejudice,” is another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. “Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists,” says Hull, “it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science,” which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this most ostensibly rational of enterprises depends on the most irrational of motivesambition, narcissism, animus, even revenge. “Scientists acknowledge that among their motivations are natural curiosity, the love of truth, and the desire to help humanity, but other inducements exist as well, and one of them is to ‘get that son of a bitch,’” says Hull. “Time and again, scientists whom I interviewed described the powerful spur that ‘showing that son of a bitch’ supplied to their own research.” Shortly after I taught that essay we went to a family celebration, where one of my husband’s cousins, a geology ph.d. who worked for Exxon, explained to me that he was grateful Exxon had let him work for ten years before he showed he was right and he had found something useful. (I’m no scientist, if he explained it, I didn’t understand it.) But he phrased his explanation in just that manner: Those guys thought I was crazy and wrong; I was determined to show them I was right. In other words, what kept him going was his desire to show those sons of bitches. Of course, there are happier attitudes to have for ten years, but, then, the rest of us can be happy that some of those guys figured out better ways to find oil and to get it out of the ground.

The scientific method is a mechanism for the evolution of thought.  Evolution  depends on conflict and stuggle as its motive engine. Conflict requires competitive personalities. Those personalities are not always the easiest to deal with. QED, most good scientists are jackasses.

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Pathological Personalities

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Continuing with my re-posting from my old blog: in case anyone thought I was being a little harsh on Academics in that last post, go read the Mobius Stripper’s description of her interactions with her first advisor, the Eccentric Genius. Here, I’ll excerpt a little from the comments:

Jess – ah, the dread of meeting with the advisor. I don’t think mine bad-mouthed me behind my back – my EG was a man of few words, whose MO was to stare at me for long periods of time whenever I asked a question. He might have been thinking that I was an idiot; he might have been thinking about his (unrelated) research. Hell, he might have been thinking about what he was going to have for dinner. Who knows? I sure didn’t.

Just who taught that jerk that this was a way for one human being to communicate with another, especially a subordinate? I’ll tell you who. Every teacher or peer who ever excused his rudeness because he was brilliant. Every administrator and department head who excused poor behavior because they didn’t want him to go somewhere else. A grad school colleague of mine (a former Marine) used to be fond of saying, “if you can’t be smart, be nice”, but in Industry, smart is necessary but not sufficient if you want to get ahead. In the Academy, it’s necessary and sufficient. Hence we get Eccentric Geniuses who could have also grown a real human personality, but missed the opportunity because of the special environment in which they operate. And lest you think that MS’s experience rare, I’d say that this kind of interpersonal interaction is well within one standard deviation from the mean that I have observed in the Academy. Well within.

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Picking Your Poison

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I said something a little (actually more than a little) harsh about Humanities grad students in the comments of one of Ginny’s posts.   That reminded my of how I began to see myself as a misanthrope in grad school. Upon leaving the Academy, I discovered that I was not misanthropic, I merely didn’t like Academics – either profs or larval profs, all that much. While I have much less patience with people in the Humanities (and they tended to try my patience with educated stupidity much more than techies), scientists are not easy lot to deal with, either. Early in my blogging career I came up with the taxonomy of scientific graduate advisors below. I had always planned to come back and do the grad students, so spurred on by Ginny’s post, I’m going to do both Humanities and Science / Engineering grad students in a future post.   But for those of you uninitiated into the arcane world of gradute work in technical fields, and especially for those of you about to enter that world, I’m reposting this:

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Why There?

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I have had my attention* directed to the recent publication of some rather interesting predictions about global warming and tropical storm activity in the Philosophical Transactions   of the Royal Society A (Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences). My first reaction was: why Philosophical Transactions A? Especially for two researchers from Georgia? Then I looked at the journal’s internet masthead:

Philosophical Transactions A is expanding and most journal issues will be dedicated to the publication of Theme Issues in four subject clusters:

                             

  • Nano-science nanoengineering and quantum computing
  • Environmental change and renewable energy
  • Dynamical systems and complexity
  • Biophysics, biological mathematics and medical engineering

The reason that the choice of journal raised my hackles is that the Royal Society’s Transactions is not the first choice for a meteorological article of such startling significance. It has a middling-low Impact Factor, and most scientists** strive to get their research published in as prestigious a journal as possible in order to win the publish-or-perish games that are the lifeblood of Academy politics.

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Tales That Should Not Be Told

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In one of the comments to my post Telling Stories, Veryretired said something very wise:

There are myths so entrenched in our national psyche that facts are simply insufficient to change the story that “everyone knows”.

As H. Beam Piper said in “Cosmic Computer“: “Well, always take a second look at these
things everybody knows. Ten to one they’re not so. ”

Over time that damage to the collective mental model of how the world works can be repaired, but in the short and intermediate timeframes, myths are dangerous. One of the great boons bequeathed to mankind by the scientific method is the creation of a class of people who question received wisdom all the time. One of the recurrent complaints on my blog is that many scientists don’t lead the way in this regard. Oh, sure, we question each other deeply about matters in our own fields, but we don’t carry this over to other areas in our own lives, to say nothing of trying to spread the method to laymen.

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