I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
I don't understand: how are economics professors a legally protected guild?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by "legally protected guild"?
ReplyDeleteLook at the tie-ins between accreditation, federal loans, and federal research money.
ReplyDeleteI can go out tomorrow and say I am openeing a "university," but I won't be able to get a penny of federal research money or my students a penny in federal student loan money until the "guild" of existing accredited universities allows me in, and they won't do that unless the vast majority of my faculty have gone through a guild apprenticeship (aka "PhD program").
Maybe "legally privileged" would be a bit more accurate here, but a "privilege" is a form of "protection," isn't it?
"Once men sang together round a table in chorus. Now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest." -Chesterton
ReplyDeleteGoes to show things can always get worse. Now only one country makes anything for the absurd reason that they can do it more cheaply.