One more holiday to withstand and then this interminable expansion of solstice will be over! I have to restate that I mightily dislike monday holidays. They rather shatter the spokes of the wheels of life’s processes. And no, not the biological ones so much as the social ones. Although this continual closing of the gym on holidays, regardless of their speciousness, tends to disrupt my metabolic processes by depriving me of much needed exertion.
On which azimuth, I make note of an article [Link] that has been languishing in tabs for quite a while mostly because I kept searching for some pony amongst the poo. The article, dealing with work done jointly by Duke and Princeton Us, has to do with our perception of others. Simply put, the whole thing is rather one of those things that is known by the sentient and intelligent and all this work does is put official academia’s urine on it. Humans, it is known by those who have dealt with other humans and/or read history, tend to persecute those who they perceive as not being human, usually due to differences. Like most of my age cohort I was introduced to this idea as a childby all the Great Patriotic War information in our domicile. Subsequent residence in the old confederacy cemented and matured the idea.
It follows from the nature of this that it has to be wired into us, probably as the alternate of altruism. So part of being human is dehumanizing others so they may be safely treated as something that can be destroyed or abused. The only merit I can see to getting the academics involved is that they will at least talk about it which is probably a good thing since the chief propagators of the practice are governments and religion organizations.
On which note, I came across an article [Link] about some work at Emory U that indicates that academics, the artsy ones at least, are doing a lot of talking (publishing) but aren’t listening (reading.) This also is hardly a surprise. At least when one interacts with technical academics there is almost always some useful signal amidst the noise. But the artsy ones? They don’t seem to even be useful or relevant even to themselves.
This brings me once more to my own experiences. I had to take twelve semester hours of ‘english’ during my career as student. This was supposed to be equally divided between syntax and literature. On both accounts the grade earned by the institution and the instructors was “F”. The most valuable syntax courses I had were in the ‘real’ world. Yes, I went back and picked up some of the rules but what was missed by these courses was not that learning how to compose was important, but that the subject of the composition had to be important to the writer not the instructor.
Put another way, I learned more about composition and syntax writing undergraduate laboratory reports than I did writing essays and term papers. Of course, the real classroom was writing article for refereed journals where no only must the content be adequate but it must be adequately composed to satisfy two or three levels of review. And writing different things – letters through reports – on the job. Money and retention are better teachers than grades.
And as for literature I can only say that what I was exposed to went rather quickly to the do-not-read list. In most case it was five pages of information crammed into five hundred. And most of the noise surrounding the signal failed to pass the so-what test. Incidentally, this is one of the best reasons I know to learn foreign languages. Somehow translation is a strong synonym for butchery.
