[FRIAM] Book publishing advice needed

[David Eric Smith]

I wonder If some part of this is a wish for methods that allowed one to put things to rest, so that a subject can “build”.

When people I run across talk about how they wish their work were more like the work they think goes on in physics, they often invoke work that has been settled for so long that we take it as very reliable, but that was still unknown recently enough that we can remember the difference.  That is the subset selected by survival.  But I never hear them saying they wish their work were more like string theory.  I imagine that, if they knew what the endless churning around string theory were like for the people involved (the string theorists, and against them people like Peter Woit (sp?), Smolin (though less seriously), Sabine Hossenfelder, or other critics who try to address substance), they would say that their work is already much too much the same as all that, and they wish it were less so.

I am also aware of this from the reputation of linguistics, or the various communities of it I saw in action over the decade+ that it was active at SFI.  The less reliable the methods are, the more scope there is for just ugly power competitions, and the kinds of ugly people who succeed in those games.  You wind up with fields distorted by cults, as linguistics was in large measure by Chomsky for decades.  That too is probably something many academics didn’t mean to sign up for, and find disappointing when they find that it is responsible for a large part of their daily situation.

??

What I just wrote above sounds like I didn’t hear (or totally missed) Glen’s point, but I actually did hear, and I agree with it.  There are also the people who _like_ the power competitions, and just wish they had some kind of magic wand that enabled them to win more of those competitions.  The styles of presentation Gen describes sound to me more like that second kind of people.  I also imagine they contribute to irritating DaveW out of proportion to their significance in other respects.

Eric



> On Jul 8, 2020, at 11:49 AM, ∄ uǝlƃ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, "physics envy" is VERY far off. 1) As I tried to claim before, physicists don't speak with authority in that way. The way these people speak is very different from the way physicists speak. 2) While Firestein knows some physics, my graphic artist friend has NO idea what quantum mechanics actually is, probably doesn't even know classical mechanics. So, even if they're envious of something, it's neither physicists' ways of being, nor the physics that physicists do.
> 
> But I'd go even further that they're not *envious* of anything. What they want is something, anything, to justify their rhetoric, which is basically that there's stuff we don't know (explicitly in Firestein's book on "Ignorance" and implicitly in my friend's claim that a good attitude mysteriously helps one recover from cancer). That's not envy. It's justificationism.
> 
> Now, when Nick and Frank talk about psychologists having physics envy (neither Firestein nor my friend fit that bill), *envy* does seem to come close. But I'd argue the same way with (1) and (2) above. They're not envious of physicists or physics. But they might be envious of ready access to plentiful DATA. And you can get that from some types of biology. In any case, that's not what I was talking about when I complained about everyone pulling woowoo quantum mechanics out of their hat everytime they want to say something about stuff we don't know.
> 
> Many people accused Penrose of the same thing, conflating quantum theory with consciousness merely BECAUSE they're both mysterious. And I sincerely doubt Penrose has "physics envy".
> 
> 
> On 7/7/20 7:00 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>> "Envy" might not be the exact right word, but it isn't far off, is it? There is an inferiority complex of some sort, and a wish that you had whatever thing those specific other people /seem /to have. 
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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