The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff if you’re not a good enough programmer to write computer games for a living (Schulman et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering something new about the universe, but this is not really necessary. What is really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your application must state that the research will discover something incredibly fundamental. The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do this particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman 1994) and often (Schulman et al. 1993c).
✖ Via Annals of Improbable Research: “How To Write A Scientific Paper” by E. Robert Schulman, Vol. 2, Issue 5, Sep/Oct 1996

About Improbable Research:

>Improbable research is research that makes people laugh and then think. Improbable Research is the name of our organization. We collect (and sometimes conduct) improbable research. We publish a magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, and we administer the Ig Nobel Prizes.

First spotted via Neatorama.



↳Share Aug 26  link  notes science  communication  research  academia  paper  publication  humor  how-to  knowledge  grant 

Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.
✖ Via The Economist: “Fast forward. Fear of a fried future” book review for Nicholas Carr’s essay The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, Norton, 2010, 276 pages

An excerpt from this book was published in Wired magazine back in May:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. (Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24th, 2010)

About Nicholas Carr:

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. He is working on a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which will be published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Bio)

Three things: 1) It’s yet another good reason to try and differentiate between information and knowledge (one could say that information is to knowledge what grapes are to wine : its raw material); 2) It would be a mistake to think that gadgets or the Internet are changing our brain configuration. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s an incomplete statement. What then, should one ask, caused the gadgets to change? What caused the Internet? 3) The form of this post can be understand as an illustration of what the content of the post is about.



↳Share Aug 25  link  notes technology  communication  gadget  Internet  epistemology  order  medium  media  tool  McLuhan  apparatus  brain  knowledge  information  determinism  cause  effect  book  author 
academia phd knowledge epistemology self humor visualization guide big_picture boundaries
✖ Via Matt Might: “The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.”, slide no 10 [PDF, French version]
Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures. Read below for the illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (read on)

Matt Might is assistant professor at the University of Utah’s School of Computing.

First spotted via Stüff Stuff


↳Share Aug 14  link  notes academia  PhD  knowledge  epistemology  self  humor  visualization  guide  big picture  boundaries 

We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same think about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue.
✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 107

It reminds me of a line of dialogue in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) (I’ll quote from memory):

On croit savoir, et puis non, jamais.

Previously on Skandalon: Paul Auster’s Leviathan



↳Share Aug 02  link  notes art  novel  book  Auster  couple  life  knowledge  other  ignorance  understanding  stand 

We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds. Sometimes we stand in wonder before a chosen object; we build up hypotheses and reveries; in this way we form convictions which have all the appearance of true knowledge. But the initial source is impure: the first impression is not fundamental truth. In point of fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has broken first with the immediate object, if one has refused to yield to seduction of the initial choice, if one has checked and contradicted the thoughts which arise from one’s first observation.
✖ Via Psychanlyse of Fire by Gaston Bachelard, tr. A. C. Ross, Beacon Press, [1938]1987, p. 1

Here’s the original French text:

Il suffit que nous parlions d’un objet pour nous croire objectifs. Mais par notre premier choix, l’objet nous désigne plus que nous le désignons et ce que nous croyons nos pensées fondamentales sur le monde sont souvent des confidences sur la jeunesse de notre esprit. Parfois nous nous émerveillons devant un objet élu; nous accumulons les hypothèses et les rêveries; nous formons ainsi des convictions qui ont l’apparence du savoir. Mais la source initiale est l’impure: l’évidence première n’est pas une vérité fondamentale. En fait, l’objectivité scientifique n’est possible que si l’on a d’abord rompu avec l’objet immédiat, si l’on a refusé la séduction du premier choix, si l’on a arrêté et contredit les pensées qui naissent de la première observation. (éd. Gallimard, coll. Idées, Paris, [1938]1949, p. 9)

Gaston Bachelard was a French epistemologist. Learn more on Wikipedia.



↳Share Jul 26  link  notes communication  epistemology  objectivity  knowledge  separation  relation  perception  idea  world  reality  Bachelard  understand  stand  object  subject  impression  truth  science  philosophy  poetry  psychoanalysis  fire  Prometheus  mediation  media  immediate  observation  contradiction 

Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ».
✖ Via Le Monde: “Me Metzner: “Qui a fabriqué Jérôme Kerviel”?”, Chroniques Judiciaires, by Pascale Robert Diard, June 25th, 2010

↳Share Jul 21  link  notes art  novel  author  pathology  fantasy  knowledge  reality  economy  lost  loser  representation  anxiety  critic  desire  Kerviel  destruction  money  bank  capitalism 

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair.
✖ Via Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8:

As quoted in the third installment of Errol Morris’ essay on anosognosia (published in The New York Times). Part 3 is all about the debilitating stroke President Woodrow Wilson suffered on October 1919 and his subsequent refusal to acknowledge that there was something wrong with him. Morris tells the story:

For Levin, Wilson’s inability to perceive his own incapacity had truly devastating consequences for the nation and world he helped to lead. Perhaps even more troublingly, the reaction to Wilson’s anosognosia on the part of his close associates raises the possibility of an even more problematic impairment — a social anosognosia. Can a group of people, perhaps even society at large, devolve into a state of destructive cluelessness?

Wilson expressed it best of all. On hearing the news of the Senate vote — essentially, the end of the League fight — Wilson asked Grayson to read a verse from the Bible, 2 Corinthians 4:8:
We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed but not in despair.
Wilson then said, “If I were not a Christian, I think I should go mad, but my faith in God holds me to the belief that He is in some way working out his plan through human perversity and mistakes.”[52]

Amen. (more)


↳Share Jun 28  link  notes communication  cognitive bias  cognition  anosognosia  knowledge  consciousness  society  critic  despair  anxiety  history  self  pathology  incapacity  representation  collective  social  community 

An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us
✖ Via The New York Times: “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1), David Dunning interviewd by Errol Morris, June 20th, 2010

Errol Morris’ essay on the Dunning-Kruger effect.



↳Share Jun 22  link  notes Dunning-Kruger  anasognosia  anxiety  blind spot  cognitive bias  confusion  epistemology  ignorance  information  knowledge  science  unknown  Errol Morris 

I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint-Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.
✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 189

The reference is Saint-Augustine’s Confessions, book X, chap. 33 (§50) :

“But do you hear me, O Lord, my God: look upon me and see, have mercy and heal me, for in your eyes I have become an enigma to myself, and herein lies my sickness.” (google books preview)

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo



↳Share Jun 13  link  notes art,n  ovel  book  author  DeLillo  Cosmopolis  enigma  confusion  anxiety  identity  knowledge  self  becoming  Saint-Augustine 

For the epistemologist, the notion of ‘application’ in an expression such as ‘applied psychoanalysis’ is simply flabby. It would seem to imply that a body of theory, more or less rigorously formulated, can be applied without modification to a set of data or to a field of study (in this case, works of art) different from that for which it was constructed (the set of psycho-neurotic symptoms and abnormal psychic phenomena). If this were so, the two domains would be indistinguishable; if they are not, then the attempt at application requires modifications that, however trivial, make that body of theory different from what it was in its first ‘state’.
✖ Via “Beyond Representation” by Jean-François Lyotard, tr. by Jonathan Culler, reproduced in The Lyotard Reader, edited by Andrew E. Benjamin, Wiley-Blackwell, 1989, p. 155

About The Lyotard Reader:

“Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend.The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as wide-ranging as film, painting (Adami, Francken, Newman), psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard’s work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise.A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard’s work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy.” (more)


↳Share May 27  link  notes art  representation  application  epistemology  domain  knowledge  world  data  theory  model  word  thing  Lyotard 

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