Sunday, January 18, 2009

Those who have eyes ...

... and use them, see: Missing the Obvious; the Current Crisis, etc. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"My experience of scholars is that they usually have less of a clue about my ideas than the general population ..."

That is because they translate everything into what I shall call the academic vernacular and place it within a theoretical framework that they feel comfortable with. Something is understood if it can be expressed in terms of certain presuppositions and cannot be understood otherwise. This is essentialism at it most quintessential.

2 comments:

  1. That may be (I don't think one can generalise) but one thing is for sure - they (the scholars) are not responsible for "the current crisis" - that is down to the greedy bankers and silly politicians, etc.
    Mr Taleb is somewhat smug, methinks (though I have not read the article at the link I've read others involving him since the crisis.)

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  2. I think Taleb is more than little cocky. And while I would never be one to underestimate the power of greed - and I don't know what the mechanics were outside this country (and not all that much about what they were in this one), I do know that banks were threatened with penalties if they did not lend to certain classes of people who would otherwise have been deemed credit risks and that Congress resisted all attempts to impose some restraint. The greed, by the way, is often rather widespread. The wealthy people who trusted their funds to Bernard Madoff did so because he was promising unrealistically high returns on their investment. These were people who already had plenty and who wanted plenty more. As for the scholars, what I said about academics was not meant to apply to true scholars, who I think are a minority in the academy. Again, I don't know what it is like elsewhere, but there is an awful lot of group-think in evidence in academic circles in these parts. It is not much different from the sort you encounter in the fine-art world, and the literary world.

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