Comments on: Caution towards innovation

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:34:52 +0000

Beautiful. Thanks for this. It really nails it. I love Cat and Girl.

By: Ben

Ben — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:18:23 +0000

Because comments on your old On Authenticity post are closed, here is where I will leave you with today’s survey on what exactly authenticity means:

http://catandgirl.com/?p=2291

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:47:09 +0000

Ben:
To each his own of course but where society is concerned science is hardly a useful paradigm unless you view the Great Experiments and New Departures of the 20th. Century as successful in that they have failed utterly and are thus eliminated from the list of useful empirical investigations. More utopias will no doubt be devised requiring a new type of human being to bring them into existence. It’s all very expensive. Why not start with the simple and stupid like a rational electoral system for America. Perhaps the polarisation there is merely an artefact of majoritarianism. The beauty of that proposal is that it has been done in other countries and it has worked. What’s wrong with replication? Is it un-American?

Amod:
I don’t know much about curriculae in America but here (British Isles) it goes like Alice: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” The PhD will boldly go on from there dicing ever finer. How rare the really new is.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:45:38 +0000

Absolutely - today, academia in general prefers the new. You can't get by on faithfulness to the old in the humanities either. In the '60s and before, there were many professors, at small colleges and regional universities at least, who simply aimed (in their view) to pass on the greatness of the past to new generations. Anyone who took that approach today would not have a career; you must produce innovative research. "Publish or perish" can never mean "publish something old"; even if you're studying something old, you must produce a new interpretation, a new translation, a new edition. I suspect part of the reason for this is that the humanities and social sciences often have a severe case of science envy. Though now that I think about it in these terms, there's another parallel in that one isn't supposed to produce anything new in the act of learning science. In high-school or undergrad science class you may do the experiments yourself, but the result is a foregone conclusion; you do this in order to learn the old results. Scientific research must produce something new, but I suppose perhaps that may be little more than redundancy: the idea of research, as we understand it in the humanities or sciences, is that one is creating new knowledge. The thing I probably didn't say enough about in the post is that we, in the age of science and modernism, are weird. Most human beings have preferred the old; even great centres of higher learning were primarily devoted to reproducing old knowledge, through teaching, copying, chanting. The preference for the old is shared by most non-modern ones; and even in a society so influenced by science and modernism, we still have a strong tendency to share that preference. That's the phenomenon I intended the post to explain.

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:47:49 +0000

Touché! Scepticism is your epistemic duty and generally no one becomes converted to a religion on the basis of the quality and quantity of their leelas and mahimas. Nor indeed might it be for the total coherence of their doctrines. Would it be too banal to hold that there is a homey feeling to it even if that home is slightly dysfunctional.

Your final observation about tradition is astute.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:36:30 +0000

Your first paragraph reads quite amusingly to a scientist. In science, only the innovative is valuable; if you’ve just reproduced someone else’s work, then your work probably isn’t worth publishing. It’s sometimes good to have a pedigree of ideas -recent or historical ideas from which yours branched off- but there is more pride in the branching-off, in the expansion and alteration, than in the pedigree.

There is of course more detail and complexity; there are a lot of institutional conservatisms in science, despite the push for innovation in research. (Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 3 gigantic structural issues that everyone seems to be aware of yet nobody can change.) Still, when people self-select into a path that demands innovation, these cultural-level restraints can be eluded quite thoroughly.

By: Amod Lele

Amod Lele — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:19:26 +0000

I’m still skeptical about the supernatural, whether we really need it. I tend to think that rather than a bread recipe without flour, it’s a cake recipe without flour – the most delicious kind!

By: michael reidy

michael reidy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:16:49 +0000

In each generation the tradition needs to be reinterpreted and it has been said that the mark of a great tradition is the number of interpretations it can sustain. What are occasionally promoted as new departures or instaurations can be no more than a piggybacking on the name. A Buddhism without its characteristic doctrines is like a bread recipe that leave out flour, all accidents without substance. This is true of religion without the supernatural. Tradition is a collective noetic engram worn so deep that the moment you entertain its initial point of departure you are drawn into characteristic patterns of thought. It requires a special sort of fidelity for genuine renewal to occur.