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| Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE ! |
Showing posts with label genius. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genius. Show all posts
Friday, August 31, 2012
Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Professionalization is the ANTIDOTE to "Untutored Genius"
Romanticism's finest rebuttal to the hubris of the Enlightenment Project was its counter-claim that 'there will always be dark mysterious unknowable regions, outside in Nature and inside the human brain'.
This was best illustrated by The Age of Romanticism's most original idea: untutored, unfettered, un-peer-reviewed, genius. The genius, as it were, of genius.
Genius's biggest, darkest, deepest mystery, to a world raised for centuries on the belief that one excelled only by learning the rules of one's elders and predecessors, was how exactly did they get all that caramel genius into that little chocolate-dark head, without 25 years of highly expensive schooling ?
Genius's overwhelming superiority to both the ordinary and the highly educated individual posed the gravest threat yet to the ideology of Classical Enlightenment.
Because beneath all of Classical Enlightenment's brave talk of 'the democracy of thought' was its belief in a natural (aka Nature-authorized) aristocracy.
Pre-Darwin social darwinism as it were.
It was based ,ultimately,upon superior force and violence: might makes right, survival of the most violent and the biggest.
Because beneath all of Classical Enlightenment's brave talk of 'the democracy of thought' was its belief in a natural (aka Nature-authorized) aristocracy.
Pre-Darwin social darwinism as it were.
It was based ,ultimately,upon superior force and violence: might makes right, survival of the most violent and the biggest.
The aristocracy, already in decline as its land-seized-through-violence-wealth dimmed in comparison to the new wealth obtainable through new ideas and new inventions, had to quickly reinvent itself, if its children and their children's children were to remain at the wealthy top of society.
Hyper-professionalization, based on Scientism, would be the answer.
Now to get to the top of the world of professionals - the tenured professor of basic research in a top-ranked university - would first require 25 years of the best formal and informal schooling that money could buy.
Only the wealthiest and best connected of society could hope to easily enter into such any expensive conversion of present day wealth and power into future wealth and power.
So let the rare genius slip into popular prominence, virtually untutored - they could only do so as entrepreneurs.
Because ultimate knowledge (public/aka formally peer-reviewed and published in a top-cited journal) would have been successfully re-defined as only something someone with a superior university position could present to the world.
Academic genius failing to pass through this secular eye of the needle could and would be simply ignored.
Hear them sing today : "If what he claims is true (Russia was at least as much as Germany to blame for WWI) why isn't Sean McMeekin a tenured full professor at some university we have at least heard of like, Oxford or Columbia, eh ?"
Steve Jobs can be a genius then - like Satchmo - as long as he agrees to go no nearer to a university than to write it an endowment cheque.
Professionalization is an attempt to erect a filmy gauze of order and rules and proper procedures, over a Reality that knows of no such thing.
Mental floss for those psychologies unable to handle uncertainty and loss of total control....
Saturday, April 28, 2012
PEER-reviewed in the heyday of the EDINBURGH REVIEW
In the 1830s, the heyday of the dreaded QUARTERLY REVIEWS, before the removal of Stamp Taxes on printed matter and before the Reform Acts, any new ideas - ideas of any sort, not just scientific ideas - were first peer-reviewed before reaching the reading public.
No, make that PEER-reviewed. As in reviewed by members of the Peerage, members of the House of Lords.
Real Peers, lords and such, were the actual writers behind the semi-anonymous review-essays from all the powerful journals, such as the famous Edinburgh Review.
The Reviews were so powerful in forming opinion it was said they caused the deaths of poets and others they did not like.
This is true : it is well known from private letters and public comments that many of the educated people in Britain and its Empire placed these Reviews just behind the Word of God in the Bible for reliability.
The Reviews divided the world in half - Tory versus Liberal - and customers bought the review that supported their world view.
Bought them because while the reviews simply repeated their customers' existing opinions, they amplified them in such a witty and biting way that the reader got not just new ammunition and education out of them , but entertainment as well.
Bile mostly - but such amusing bile !
(Rather like ourselves entertaining and informing ourselves by reading just DENIER or DOOMER blogs.)
So in this shiny new democratic Age of Romanticism, Peers still told Commoners what to think and how to act, in the best approved manner of the Classical Age.
These Reviews were the start of the Counter Romantic Reaction.
This reaction was against the threat to 'the aristocracy of rules and norms ' of the untutored, un-peer-reviewed Genius, as thrown up by the Romantic theory.
The Counter/Contra reaction that we now like to think of as the Age of Modernity.
When it was actually the exact opposite : the 18th century in reprise, disguised in 20th century clothes .....
No, make that PEER-reviewed. As in reviewed by members of the Peerage, members of the House of Lords.
Real Peers, lords and such, were the actual writers behind the semi-anonymous review-essays from all the powerful journals, such as the famous Edinburgh Review.
The Reviews were so powerful in forming opinion it was said they caused the deaths of poets and others they did not like.
This is true : it is well known from private letters and public comments that many of the educated people in Britain and its Empire placed these Reviews just behind the Word of God in the Bible for reliability.
The Reviews divided the world in half - Tory versus Liberal - and customers bought the review that supported their world view.
Bought them because while the reviews simply repeated their customers' existing opinions, they amplified them in such a witty and biting way that the reader got not just new ammunition and education out of them , but entertainment as well.
Bile mostly - but such amusing bile !
(Rather like ourselves entertaining and informing ourselves by reading just DENIER or DOOMER blogs.)
So in this shiny new democratic Age of Romanticism, Peers still told Commoners what to think and how to act, in the best approved manner of the Classical Age.
These Reviews were the start of the Counter Romantic Reaction.
This reaction was against the threat to 'the aristocracy of rules and norms ' of the untutored, un-peer-reviewed Genius, as thrown up by the Romantic theory.
The Counter/Contra reaction that we now like to think of as the Age of Modernity.
When it was actually the exact opposite : the 18th century in reprise, disguised in 20th century clothes .....
Friday, April 27, 2012
(Houses of) PEER REVIEW
The House of Lords is a chamber of sober second thoughts, where men and women (Peers) (aged in visage and grey in hair) review proposed new ideas, from the vantage point of honored expertise and authority.
This sounds a lot like the National Academy of Science (America's NAS)
which is a perpetually self-appointing/self-anointing body of aged scientists, much honored for their expertise and authority, pronouncing upon the gravest scientific questions facing the nation.
Britain's Royal Society does much the same and most of the world's prominent scientific nations employ a similar model.
"Peer" is such an ambiguous word.
One is judged by a jury of one's peers, for example : bog-ordinary citizens like yourself, with no occupational or professional interest in crime or justice.
But the aristocracy are Peers, peers with a capital "P" , and they are presumed to be anything but ordinary, in fact the very antithesis of ordinary.
A scientist's proposed journal article, grant request or application for tenure is judged by "peer-review".
In theory, it is via a jury of people very much like the scientist. In practice the jury is often made up of Peers - scientists much superior in ranking to the supplicant scientist.
Top scientists, and the world's top professionals, are not just the aristocracy of their world.
They are the aristocracy of our world : the aristocracy of the world's successful response to the trauma of the 1832 Reform Act and similar legislation.
And to the rise of the Romantic Era, with its threat of the untutored,un-peer-reviewed, Genius and un-peer-reviewed self-made entrepreneur/celebrity....
This sounds a lot like the National Academy of Science (America's NAS)
which is a perpetually self-appointing/self-anointing body of aged scientists, much honored for their expertise and authority, pronouncing upon the gravest scientific questions facing the nation.
Britain's Royal Society does much the same and most of the world's prominent scientific nations employ a similar model.
"Peer" is such an ambiguous word.
One is judged by a jury of one's peers, for example : bog-ordinary citizens like yourself, with no occupational or professional interest in crime or justice.
But the aristocracy are Peers, peers with a capital "P" , and they are presumed to be anything but ordinary, in fact the very antithesis of ordinary.
A scientist's proposed journal article, grant request or application for tenure is judged by "peer-review".
In theory, it is via a jury of people very much like the scientist. In practice the jury is often made up of Peers - scientists much superior in ranking to the supplicant scientist.
Top scientists, and the world's top professionals, are not just the aristocracy of their world.
They are the aristocracy of our world : the aristocracy of the world's successful response to the trauma of the 1832 Reform Act and similar legislation.
And to the rise of the Romantic Era, with its threat of the untutored,un-peer-reviewed, Genius and un-peer-reviewed self-made entrepreneur/celebrity....
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