[FRIAM] NOW IS: Oh, Woe, Academia! WAS: gene complex for homosexuality

[David Eric Smith]

What Marcus says below feels right to me, and feels like the point:

> On Jan 14, 2022, at 1:13 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> Maybe it is just me, but the world of investor-fueled Theranos type companies don't seem like a sustainable way to do research.   The investors are often ignoramuses for one thing.   Maybe when they have a lot of money, and maybe if you are on the winning side of such an investment it is great for long enough to become independently wealthy.   But it seems psychologically damaging too, even to the winners.  Yeah, I like to rail on academics and SFI-type academics especially, but there is something about the greedy search algorithms inherent in the startup world that just doesn't get to the bottom of things, or even try​ to start from the bottom.   It is opportunistic.  And indeed "big science" is great for some types of questions with their particle accelerators, neutron imaging, and so on, but someone needs to fret over the basic questions on a longer horizon.  I don't think they should probably be The Elites as they sometimes fancy themselves, but they are needed.  

I was told a story recently about Gerard t’Hooft, by someone from that circle who has known him and that whole cohort on the scales of their lifetimes.

When t’Hooft recently won the Nobel, he was commenting on a very specific thing that seemed surprising to him, and disappointing.  The description, not verbatim but as it was put to me, was:

“So I’m not surprised if my neighbors or people at the store thought this was a big deal.  They didn’t know anything about what I do, and had no reason to care.  But now I’m famous for something and so it is briefly a big deal to them.  But what bothers me is why my department colleagues would be any different.  They have known for decades what I do, and have had the ability to understand it, and to whatever level they want, do understand it.  So why to them is anything different today than yesterday?”

The people who know him say this is who t’Hooft really is.  I have only met him once, but I can buy it, from the things he works on and the abandon about whether they are elegant and timely or perverse and obstinate..  He really doesn’t care.  He finds it strange and disappointing that other people would, who he thought were in the same work as him for something like the same reasons.

Eric


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